" Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull
with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and
better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better
and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking
instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There's serious pain in being sober,
though, you find out, after time. Then now that you're clean and don't even much want
Substances and feeling like you want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain,
these Boston AAs start in on telling you you're right where you're supposed to be and telling
you to remember the pointless pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober
pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you're going somewhere, they say, instead of
the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain.
They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you've been
Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you'll begin to start to 'Get In Touch' with why it
was that you used Substances in the first place. You'll start to feel why it was you got
dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. 'Getting In Touch With
Your Feelings' is another quilted-sampler-type cliche that ends up masking something ghastly
deep and real, it turns out. [178: A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes change this to goes something like: 'Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.’]
It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it
covers. "

― David Foster Wallace , Infinite Jest