"It starts as a light shower, foggy, misty, enough to make you realise you are probably going to need that umbrella. As the rain gets heavier, you expand your umbrella, you find some shelter and you hope that with these protective measures in place, you’ll be able to avoid the storm that may well follow. Sometimes you’re lucky, and the storm never comes. The umbrella, and the shelter, have saved you from the wrath of a storm you’ll never fully understand.
Sometimes though, it’s not that simple. And no matter how big the umbrella is, even if you’re in a storm shelter, the lightning, the wind, and the thunder crashing around you, destroys everything in its path, taking away your sense of hope, strength, and courage, leaving you to wonder whether it will ever pass. Will the sun ever shine again? Because right now, you really can’t be sure.
And as you pull yourself out from the rubble around you, waiting, hoping for that damn rainbow to appear and prove to you that this storm, no matter how severe, will pass, and you will survive, just as you have with every other storm you’ve encountered so far."
The trouble with recovery is that, for most of us, it's a journey, not a destination. It's easy in those moments where the road to recovery becomes bumpy, winding, and unfamiliar to feel as though you've slipped back to exactly where you started. It becomes easy to forget that you're not the same person you were in the beginning, you're braver, you're stronger and you've proven that you've overcome these bumps before. The trouble with recovery is that there will be bumps in the road, the road will continue winding, you will lose sight of the road ahead at times, and each time, despite the logic that you're still trying after all this time, you still feel like a failure at recovery.
This week has been the most emotional week I remember having in forever, and in each of these emotional moments, I've questioned myself as to whether I'm really on "the road to recovery"... The truth is recovery is a journey, not a destination, and in the confusion of the two, we forget that sometimes we might take two steps forward, and one step back, and that's perfectly okay. The trouble with recovery is there are no rules, there is no definite path. We all have our own journey to travel, some going in completely different directions than others. The trouble with recovery is... keeping the faith that I can do this, I am worth it, and that I am enough.
