recovery in action

Recovery is not a passive endeavor. It requires an act of the will. Recovery doesn’t just happen. It springs from hope, it springs from desire and it requires purposeful movement to occur.

But how? How does one put the desire to be well, to live in wellness into action? There are many paths to recovery and they all need a strategy. To move forward into wellness an individual must have a goal, a vision for their life. This goal must be to move from position A to position B. Position A is a place of dissatisfaction. We’re not comfortable in position A, like square peg in a circle groove. Position B is our vision of wellness; of wholeness. In position A we must ask ourselves what we want our lives to look like. We must ask what our day to day existence will be like when we are living in wellness. The answer to these questions become our roadmap back to the land of the living.

The answer to these questions for me always came back to my desire to work full time after living in my illness. I was dissatisfied with living as a “permanently disabled” person and wanted to move into purposeful, gainful employment. If I had based this possible shift on the circumstances of my life at that time, I would have been paralyzed by hopelessness. Not even those who loved me dearly thought it was possible. Everything in my life pointed towards spending the rest of my life depending on social security disability checks to survive.

To move from position A to position B I had to recognize that full time employment, despite its challenges, was my goal. And I needed to know why. It wasn’t enough to know that I wanted change; I needed to back it up with a justification. The answer was self-sufficiency and a sense of purpose. At my core I had always been a do-gooder and a worker bee. That was who I was, who I wanted again to be and employment was how I expressed it.

The next step in my journey was to identify what had already been done to manifest this goal. At that time, it seemed I that I had done very little, when in fact I had laid the foundation for success. That foundation was a quiet commitment I had made to myself and my son. I didn’t yet know how I was going to do this thing, but I was committed to trying. I didn’t yet know what success would look like either. I had simply planted a seed of possibility.

To move forward I needed to visualize what success in achieving this goal would look like for me. I needed to be specific too. I asked myself “how many hours a week would I work?” and “how money would I need to live comfortably?” etc. Once I had this new vision for my life, I started brainstorming specific actions I would need to do to get to my vision. These too were specific and had time frames that held me accountable. I gave myself hard deadlines and shared them with my supporters who also held me accountable for meeting those deadlines.

The next step was to figure out what I would need to complete these actions. I had to figure out what resources I would need to access and who I should enlist to help me. I was realistic though, so I also brainstormed possible barriers to success and a strategy to overcome those barriers. So, all this soul searching became my game plan for thriving in this life. It was a turn by turn map to reach my final destination of wellness. The road was not always straight or well-lit and there were many times when I feared I had lost my way. When that occurred I went back to my plan and began again.

There is no cookie cutter formula for recovery. Every journey is unique. We all don’t get there at the same pace or at the same time. But the awesome truth is, recovery is not only possible, its real.