Recovery: More Than Just Saying No
Recovery isn’t what most people think it is. It's not just about quitting a substance or white-knuckling through life, trying to pretend you're fine while the world keeps hammering at your skull. That’s abstinence—a simple act of saying “no” over and over again until you either break or fool yourself into thinking you’re fixed. Spoiler alert: You’re not.
Recovery? Oh, that’s a whole different beast. It’s not about the what—it’s about the why. Why did you pick up that bottle? Light that pipe? Swallow that pill? It wasn’t because you liked the taste or the burn or the high. It was because, for a fleeting moment, it numbed something inside you. A pain, a memory, a fear, a hollow echo bouncing around your chest that you couldn’t silence on your own. Recovery is figuring out what that something is and looking it dead in the eye.
It’s not the substance we need to recover from—it’s ourselves. That’s the truth no one likes to say out loud because it’s messy, uncomfortable, and way harder to confront than simply checking a sobriety counter on an app.
When I work with people, I’m not sitting there handing out gold stars for staying clean another day. That’s good, sure, but staying clean isn’t the finish line—it’s just the starting gun. The real work begins when you start unpacking your life. What are you running from? What’s that demon whispering in your ear at 3 a.m. when the world’s asleep and it’s just you and your thoughts? Recovery is learning how to face that voice and not back down.
But here’s the kicker: You can’t do it alone. Whoever came up with the idea that recovery is some lone-wolf hero’s journey? They were full of it. You need people—real people who get it. Not the ones who nod sympathetically while secretly judging you, but the ones who’ve been through their own fire and lived to tell the tale. People who will call you out when you’re full of shit and pick you up when you can’t get off the floor.
Recovery is messy. It’s tears in the shower, screaming in your car, and laughing your ass off at things that would’ve crushed you a year ago. It’s learning to sit with yourself without reaching for something to take the edge off. It’s forgiving yourself for the things you did to survive, even if they nearly destroyed you. It’s rebuilding your life brick by brick, knowing full well that the foundation is shaky but doing it anyway because what’s the alternative?
And yeah, some days it’s boring. Mundane. No fireworks, no revelations, just you trying to be a little better than you were yesterday. That’s part of it too.
So if you’re out there thinking recovery is just a fancy word for quitting, let me stop you right there. Recovery is raw. It’s relentless. It’s freedom, but it’s earned, not given. And trust me, when you get there—when you start living instead of just existing—it’s worth every damn step.
Welcome to the fight.