I applied for a job a while back that I actually wanted, not just needed, and I let myself believe I had it. The interview had gone well. The man across the table had a son in recovery too, and something in how he looked at me made me think he saw a person, not just a résumé with a gap in it. I drove home rehearsing how I would tell my wife. Three days later the email came, polite and brief, letting me know they had gone another direction. I read it three times, as if the fourth reading might change the words. Disappointment has a cruelty other pain does not carry, because it requires hope to exist first. You cannot be disappointed by something you never expected. I had spent years numbing myself so I would not have to want something and watch it slip past me again. Getting sober meant getting my hope back, and I did not understand until that email arrived that hoping again also meant reopening myself to this exact ache. Solomon named it with more precision than I expected from a...