This recovery journey sucks
Let's face it, this journey sucks. Big time.
It is so hard.
It is excruciatingly slow.
It is horribly frustrating.
My blog is about hope and positivity.
I mostly talk about what helped, what worked, what gave me the strength to keep going. And it is important to focus on that during recovery.
But I want to be completely honest with you:
I wanted to give up so many times.
I tried a ridiculous amount of stuff that didn't work at all.
And I was disappointed every single time.
I would have given anything for the suffering to stop.
At my worst last year, every second of every day was unbearable.
I would listen to recovery stories and hear things like:
"I am so grateful for this journey" or "Recovery is a life-long process, because you can always grow more".
And I would be so mad.
I would think:
"That's easy to say! You're on the other side.
You forgot what it's like to be in the trenches.
I'm not grateful.
I hate every part of this.
I want to hear that I can recover and forget about all of this forever."
Sometimes, I would doubt. A lot.
Am I on the right path?
Am I doing too much?
Am I doing enough?
Am I doing it right?
Am I stupid to believe that I can recover?
Should I just give up?
All of that at once.
When you hear people talk about their story, it often sounds like it was easy and linear. That they were resilient, and brave, and focused the whole time. That the symptoms were not that bad. At least, not nearly as bad as ours.
But it's not true.
This illness is ugly, for all of us.
This healing work is brutal.
It's probably one of the most difficult journey a human being can go through.
It will take every single bit of strength and faith we have.
Healing "work" can also become a trap.
I know it was for me at some point.
Telling people that they can help themselves to heal, when the medical world doesn't have answers for us yet, is great.
But it can turn into a huge pressure.
Obsessing over "doing the work" (practicing techniques, and meditation, and breathing exercises...) can become the new kryptonite of perfectionist and high-achieving patterns.
What ended up working for me was the most counter intuitive thing of it all:
Letting go of trying.
Trusting the Universe.
Believing that I was on the right path, and that somehow, things would become clear when it's time.
That was the craziest bet I took in my entire life.
Time in healing doesn't flow the same way anymore.
It's slow ("how am I going to go through one more day like this...?").
And it's fast at the same time ("how is it already October 2025?!").
Healing requires time.
My therapist once told me: "The nervous system's language of love is slowness".
And I hated it so much.
I hate waiting.
I hate slowing down.
I hate trusting the unknown.
I had to learn, the hard way. And I had to let go of timelines.
It's insanely hard to accept that you can't know how long it will take.
To respect your body's rhythm.
To be okay with the fact that there is absolutely nothing we can do to make things go faster.
For some people it only takes a few weeks, or a few months. Those are the miracle stories, the most visible ones. We all want to believe that it will be the same for us.
But those stories are the exception. Healing takes time. Healing your whole being, from the inside out, takes time.
Mind body healing works.
It is worth it.
But damn, it's hard. And it's okay to hate it sometimes.
