Recovery is hard, and anyone who tells you it isn’t, well, I’m sorry but they’re lying to you.
There will be tears (lots of them) and arguments and times when you just feel like giving up, but it will be worth it in the end, and that’s a promise.
I have been in ‘real’ recovery for almost 6 months now, and so I have picked up some tips along the way that I thought might be useful to share to help anyone who is desperate to put their illness behind them, but is too scared to take the plunge.
If I could give you just one piece of advise regarding recovery, it would be this:
You need to have a desire for something greater than remaining poorly. Invent your reason to get better. Dream up a goal or reward. You need something greater than the illness to beat it. This reason to get better can be literally anything, from a holiday to going to university. It’s got to be personal to you- no one else can tell you what your reason is. For me, I have a few reasons to get better; family, university, health, happiness, LIFE (to name just a few.) What is your reason to recover?
It’s helpful to imagine what your life would be like without the presence of your illness. Think about how care-free you would feel, surely that’s a better feeling than the feeling you have now?
Finally, you need someone who can hold you accountable for your recovery. Of course YOU have to want to recover, no one else can make you, but what makes it 1000000x easier to maintain recovery is to have someone who can encourage you and remind you of all the reasons why you are doing this. This person can be anyone, as long as you trust them enough to be there for you, through the good times and the bad, because as cliché as it sounds and as many times as you will have heard this before, recovery is not linear. There will inevitably be ups and downs, and you need someone who you are confident will stick by your side to help you get through it all.
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