Learning to Live Life All Over Again

A guide to the mental health recovery process

“Being on meds and regaining control of myself is like learning to deal with the emotional upheaval…when I was a teen.”

No kidding. I don’t know what your experience was with your diagnosis, but for me, it was a relief. I had a name for my experiences and an ability to look back on them with new eyes. I also made the decision to do everything within my power to feel better and to live a better life. I wanted real relationships, real community, and I especially wanted them to stick around for more than a six-month stretch.

I was ready to do the work.

There is a lot to find frustrating about the road to recovery. Taking a pill every day can be a hassle, and some medications come with less-than-pleasurable side effects — and that’s assuming that we are able to find an effective medication (or medication combination) quickly in the recovery process. Additionally, relief often doesn’t come overnight and even when we do everything right, we stumble. We relapse. We struggle.

One thing no one told me to prepare for, though, was that I would have to relearn everything I knew about life. How to interact with people in a healthy way. How to care for myself with nutrition and self-care. How to join and participate in a community. The shortcuts and coping mechanisms I relied on needed to be undone and relearned so I would have better (read: healthier) responses. “It’s about being effective,” as I heard more than once from my support group leaders.

It’s a brutal process.

The reality is that recovery — true recovery — means starting from scratch. Wait — that’s not true. It means unlearning old behaviors and learning new behaviors, which I think is even harder than starting from scratch.

Instagram may not tell you the same thing. It’s full of beautiful memes and inspirational quotes that tell us how easy it is to be healthy. “Happiness is a choice,” one meme may tell us while another…

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