Healing is always a messy process no matter what you`re healing from. Recovery isn`t ever perfectly linear even though that`s what we all want it to be. Recovering isn`t always filled with soft blankets and bubble baths, although those certainly don`t exactly hurt the process. But it can be painful and confusing and sometimes it feels like you take two steps forward and three steps back. The important thing to remember though, is that even on those days, you are still recovering. There are going to be good days, bad days, and days that fall somewhere in the middle. On all of those days, on every day that you wake up and keep fighting, you continue to recover.
Recovering from mental illness can be a tricky concept sometimes, because there are instances where you won`t really wake up one day and be fully recovered and “done with it” so to speak. Recovery in a lot of cases is a life-long process. People get to point in their lives where they haven`t had bad days in months but it`s because they`re working on making themselves and their lives better and healthier every day, not because they just woke up one morning and their mental illness had run its course. Mental illness isn`t the same as a cold in that it phases itself out and one day you wake up without the sniffles anymore. And because of that, it`s important to remember that sometimes you`ll have a bad day, or even a bad week or two, but that doesn`t mean that you`ve undone the progress you`ve already made. You haven`t stopped recovering just because your symptoms are acting up again.
It can be difficult to remember when for the umpteenth day in a row you wake up and can feel the weight of the world on you for no reason, but even when that is happening you are getting better. If you can feel that change it means that you had moved upward and onward before, and that you can do it again. There might be days when it all starts to feel like too much, and those days are going to tempt you to think that you haven`t made as much progress as you thought you had, or that you haven`t made any progress at all, but that isn`t the case. No matter what your brain might be trying to tell you, you are getting better. Sometimes the payoff takes a little while and a lot of work, but it will come.
I know that for me, personally, these past few weeks have been rough. It hasn`t been for any reason in particular, either, which is the most frustrating thing on the planet. There`s nothing more annoying than feeling depressed, anxious, etc. for no concrete reason. But there doesn`t have to be something going wrong in order for symptoms to act up, which people tend to forget. But it`s important that we remember that, and that on top of that, we remember even when things are tough, we`re getting stronger and better. No matter what`s going on inside our heads, as long as we remember that our end-goal is to keep getting better, we will.