This stuff is hard. The work is hard. There are ups and downs and steps forward and what sometimes feels like endless steps backward. There are moment of triumph and moments of despair and hopelessness. The recovery journey can easily be seen as some kind of hero’s quest. It’s quite clear that we tend to romanticize it in social media circles with words like warrior, war and fighter being used day in and day out. We talk about anxiety as our enemy and swear an oath to vanquish it forever.
Pretty dramatic, eh?
But in reality, when push comes to shove, recovery usually goes out quietly, through the back door, in the middle of the night. It ends not with a flourish and a blast of trumpets as you re-enter the city and are greeted by the adoring masses, but with a barely a sound at all and nobody really noticing—including you. In our romanticized visions of our triumph over anxiety, panic, and irrational fear we imagine a moment where we overcome our final challenge and dance triumphantly in the bright sun while our loved ones cheer us on and celebrate our rebirth. But it rarely if ever works like that. This thing that dominates your life and controls EVERYTHING for so long just kinda shrinks away into nothing while we’re not looking.
This is really so damn anti-climactic. We deserve our moment in the sun! Who can we complain to about this?
Jokes aside, there’s actually a good reason why recovery goes out like a lamb with little to no fanfare. See two sentences ago when I said “we’re not looking’? That’s the clue. That’s why your anxiety will just kinda run out of gas and fall into irrelevancy rather than exploding like the Death Star while Luke and Han ride out through the blast wave. Over time, as we learn that we’re always OK and always safe. We stop looking. We stop checking. We stop scanning. We stop focusing on how we feel. It just becomes largely unimportant to us. That might seem somewhat drab and uninspiring, but that’s what we’re working toward, and that’s exactly what happens.
When you run out of orange juice, is it an event? When the bottle is empty and you toss it into the recycling bin, is there some ceremony that marks the occasion? Does your family stand around, lock hands, and sing songs of triumph and thanks? No. Of course you don’t. You don’t, because orange juice is just not that important in your life. You may be having a hard time believing this because you’re still in the thick of it, but over time how you feel and being anxious become only marginally more important than the last gulp of liquid sunshine. I know it’s really important to you NOW, but over time that is going to change. You’ll stop caring so damn much as you learn that just don’t have to care so damn much. As the importance of anxiety diminishes, it takes the big emotional payoff of recovery with it. Crazy, right?
When people ask how long it took me to recover, I can’t really answer with any degree of accuracy because I’m not really sure when I actually did recover. When people ask how I knew I was recovered, I often say that I knew when I stopped wondering if I was recovered. These sound like silly answers, but they are authentic and they seem to accurately represent the experience of end-stage recovery as described by a large number of people.
At some point, you will stop and notice that you’re no longer noticing. There will be some moment at which you take one last look around the old apartment, then turn out the lights and close the door. There will be no ceremony. No parade. No blinding flash of light that signals the death of your enemy in dramatic fashion. Just a contented slow walk off into the sunset where you continue to live your life like a regular person does.
In that moment, you’ll smile to yourself and know that you did it. And really, that’s all you’ll need.
Hey it’s Monday and that means that today at 2 PM Eastern I’ll do my “Recovery Monday” livestream on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Come join in!
199. Out Like A Lamb