the ritual that no longer needs the drug
Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked to clean.
Context
Recovery's quietest redemption stated in two sentences: the compulsion that used to require the high has quietly detached from it and become just the thing she likes, a meditation for people too new in sobriety to hold still. The disease's own machinery — the ritualized, anxious ordering — is not destroyed but repurposed, the same hands doing the same work with the drug subtracted from underneath it.