Here is what I will say as a person with a similar situation. We're not dumb, there is just something in our way. Whether that be anxiety to look dumb or something else. My best advice is don't try to be quick, take your time, formulate a thought and own it. That will make you feel less bad about this perceived negative trait.
I will say a few things. When things like giving up alchohol happen your brain will do a lot of things to trick back into the drug. Like, for example, making the things you previously enjoyed seem not fun or fulfilling like they used to, all a ploy to get you back on the drink. I'm not an expert.
Speaking from experience the number one thing that gave me purpose in life is kids. There is nothing more purposeful that having something that you love more than yourself. I tell everyone this and I understand that you may not agree. Having kids is the greatest thing you will ever do. When you're 60 sitting at home you're going to wish you would have had them.
Non-kid suggestions would be start a project, that you can feel ownership over. You own it and make something of it. You are responsible for its success or failure. Again, I'm no expert.
I will say my energy levels have seriously increased in the last few years and I 100% think it is because I have stopped working out as much. When I worked out a lot I felt like I had a lot more energy and I have noticed similar things from other people.
It's not a data structure but a really cool algorithm. Locality Sensitive Hashing. It allows like items to be hashed to the same value. So instead of a typical hashing functions that wants to avoid collisions this algorithm tries to optimize for collisions.