If the illness is severe enough it can take away much more than it gives. I’m in my sixteenth year of an incurable and extremely rare disease – expect this is my last summer. The high level of intractable pain and need to adjust my physical postion at intervals of several seconds at a time to keep it bearable has made deep levels of meditation no longer possible, although I do still meditate and it’s still very helpful.
Certainly I’ve learned things from the last sixteen years, but it has been at the expense of physical devastation that’s going to kill me. Since I was in normal health until age 37 and was learning a great deal from the increasing joy of my life until then, I find that both great joy and great pain have a lot to teach – and that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing when it comes to pain.

(stolen back from the BB social networking group …)
When I joined Beliefnet in early 2007, I had spent my whole life with depression (well over a decade) asking, “Why? WHY? Why? WHY?”
Naturally, I hoped I could learn the answer on Beliefnet and Beyond Blue.
With masterful Zen irony (even more ironic, since I met my girlfriend on Beliefnet — who is Buddhist), I learned instead to stop asking the question.
The problem is not that there is an answer. The problem is that there are too many answers.
Medically speaking, it’s a chemical imbalance in the brain. Psychologically speaking, it could be exascerbated by traumas from childhood and early adulthood. From a Puritan perspective (and one might argue Job’s story), it is a curse from G-d from our sins. From a more conventional Christian perspective, we are glorifying G-d by persisting in our weakness (the story of Paul’s thorn).
From a more conventionally Jewish/Old Testament perspective (Ecclesiastes), the rain falls on the just and the unjust — a perspective shared to a certain extent by the Eastern tradition as well. That is, depression just IS — it’s how we deal with it (and addiction as well, in your case) that defines us, and not the fact of having depression (and/or addiction) in and of itself.
I’ve had great improvements in my quality of life (despite some bad external setbacks) since I began to make this radical shift in my perspective. Make of that what you will.

Larry, One of my favorite quotes of all time is from the young poet Nikki Giovanni (Substitute “illness” for mistakes” and I think it’s applicable here as well: Mistakes are a fact of life. It’s the response to the mistake that matters.”Such isdom fom such a young professional! As I was reading your post, I was afraid you were going to come out with that tired(to ME, anyway)response “Why NOT me? I guess that’s a bit too martyr-like for my own comfort level, since in my experience few of us mere humand=s can really embrace and LIVE that degree of selflessness. I like your solution of no longer asking the question a lot better!