Chatting not so long ago with a friend who is struggling to overcome the twin addictions of self-loathing and alcoholism, she announced that she had resigned herself to never being able to fully recover. To which I blurted, “But why would you wish to recover in the first place? What is it that you want to return to?” In other words, to ‘recover’ is to make every effort to get ourselves back to that place from which we first spiraled,…