Even ex-junkies get the blues

And darkness collects its dues.

Sometimes, you just know when joy is going to break.

My mom could feel it just the other day. It’s subtle. An emotional downturn. Not to be explained. Only to be endured.

All the same, I tried to reassure her. “Just think of all the blessings we’ve known in this last year.”

It’s true. We’ve covered ourselves in glory.

Still, what hope did I have to stop the tide? When I’m feeling off — like something’s wrong or missing, that feeling runs its course. Maybe it’ll last an hour, or a day or a week.

I know a thing or two about ups and downs. Recovery is a lot about managing them. When I was just a couple of months clean, a clinic doctor asked me how I was doing.

“Great!” I gushed. “I went to six meetings last week. I washed my mom’s car today and cleaned the whole house and I’m going to the gym every day and swimm—

“Are you feeling overly happy?” the doctor interrupted.

I knew what he was getting at. I did sound a little manic.

For future visits, I tried to be a little more measured. You never want to feel too high when you’re in recovery. Falling from such a great height, as we inevitably must, just begs for a relapse. It’s why the doctor’s first prescription is often an antidepressant — to keep one’s spirits within safe parameters.

Still, there’s plenty of room for variance in those early days — mood swings that strain the limits of even those formidable pills. Eventually, you settle into the kind of short, elliptical swings that more closely resemble those of normal people. You know, the general malaise that none of us can actually put our finger on, but can usually be treated — at least, temporarily — by watching a movie, eating ice cream, copulating, or buying something off the internet.

All the same, no one can outswim the blues forever. I tried to explain that to my mom when she wasn’t feeling quite right. It was probably just her time. Ride it out. Drink vermouth. Write bad poetry.

Harness that depression energy!

Mom’s downs don’t linger, anyway. She can usually mop them up with a little bit of exercise or a new squirrel feeder from Temu — then she’s back to her unhinged, terrible joke-telling self. Her down time is nothing compared to the dark, crippling bouts of misery that hung over much of my early recovery.

Just give me some fucking crack, already.

Still, I hated to see my mom even briefly blue. And I just happened to have a little advice that I picked up from my own experience.

I suggested she go to that thing she was going to skip that day. She volunteers at a charity thrift shop. She wasn’t feeling it that day. Maybe she’d stay home.

“Do you think you’ll feel better for not leaving the house?” I asked.

No, if the day has anything good at all in store for her, she’d have to go outside and find it.

That’s what I learned from recovery meetings. They can be real snorefests — rituals for robots. But there’s always possibility. Someone might say something — something that inspires, uplifts, or even warns. At worst, I’ll be so bored, I’ll get ideas of my own — especially since we’re not allowed to play with our phones. You should see some of the doodles I’ve etched into my notebook.

It’s not often that I’m able to give my mother advice that’s actually helpful. But, indeed, she did go to work that day. Maybe it was the music. Or the lovely people she works with. Or something she couldn’t even put her finger on. She came home radiating fresh energy. Imagine how differently she might have felt if she had stayed home that day.

Make no mistake. Laughter lives here. My mother is always inspiring and encouraging me. But we also reflect each other — a risky proposition when one of us feels a downturn. Sadness is especially contagious in close quarters.

My mom has a few ideas for staving off sadness. She thinks we eat and drink our moods. It’s all about our diet. She has a gift for intuiting something that turns out to be backed by science.

“It makes sense that the inner workings of your digestive system don’t just help you digest food, but also guide your emotions,” Harvard researchers explain.

It all comes down to serotonin — a neurotransmitter that helps us sleep better, eat more responsibly, deal with pain and — surprise, surprise — regulate our moods. And guess where 95 percent of it is produced. In the underrated genius that is the gut.

“Trust your mother. She’s always right,” says the underrated genius that is my mom. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

It’s true. My candy habit outlasted my drug addiction. All those Skittles, gummy bears and worms and peanut butter cups weren’t doing my mood any favors. In fact, it probably made that first 30 days a lot rougher, considering I was already enduring the hellscape of withdrawal.

But there’s something else that occasionally darkens my doorstep. It’s when I feel the absence of possibility. Everyone learns, grows and changes. But sometimes, even in the aftermath of addiction, it doesn’t feel like it — like even these words are just wheels spinning. What exactly am I doing with my life?

You know, the whole grown-up ex-junkie living with mom thing.

I don’t have an easy cure for that feeling. But recovery has given me a lot of tools that make it easier to get out of an emotional jam.

Most importantly, maybe, is that I think about possibility. What will today bring? When I was an addict, the answer was simple: Absolutely fucking nothing. I lived in darkness, literally, for 20 years. Imagine that. Feeling hopeless for that long. Unable to inspire yourself, to see a glimmer of potential in anyone or anything.

As my habit grew more entrenched, my perception of possibility — what I thought I could do in this life — shrank to a pinhole. It reached the point where change seemed impossible. Surely, I would die an addict.

That’s probably the cruelest consequence of addiction. It robs us of hope.

With recovery comes a renewed sense of possibility. Sometimes, I can just feel the percolating potential of every moment. Who knows what will inspire me today?

And sometimes, I can only see a darkness. But when those walls feel like they’re closing in — and mom’s potions, pills and medicines aren’t cutting it — I’ll open wide the front door.

Because in the light, anything is possible.