We are driving along the freeway when my husband asks me—with the afternoon light crisscrossing our faces—the difference between recovered and recovering.
had just recalled reading Glennon Doyle’s bio (from her original Momastery days) and the total freedom and honesty of Glennon’s first sentence: “I am a recovered bulimic and addict.”I pause, welling with the sensation of joy at his curiosity, how he doesn’t realize the gravity of asking me a question like that, the sweet remembering I have a husband who will occasionally, with only minor encouragement, listen to We Can Do Hard Things with me. I am also welling with the lovely realization that I’ve never contemplated this question before—when does recovering become recovered—and how serendipitous a time it is to hear my own answer.
Option A: At what point does the process of finding yourself become an arrival? If defined this way, I will be recovering until the day I die. We all will. I like this answer; I embrace this unknown.
Option B: At what point does “I can’t/ I shouldn’t/ I won’t” become “I choose”?
If defined this way, maybe the gap between the present sense of recovering flows into the past tense of recovered at the moment your hands completely unfurl from the thing you’ve chosen to recover from.
The thoughts might never entirely disappear, but the deafening roar has eased into quiet, surprising whispers—there is a choice now.
I am recovering when the white-knuckle sensation of pulling myself back from the edge subsides.
I am recovered when I step away from the edge altogether, not when the edge disappears.
Because the edge may always be there.
Option C: Or is the process of quitting the recovering, and the day I stop the day I am recovered? Is recovering and recovery an iterative process that stops and starts, shuttering along the stream of life’s tide? The ebbing is recovering, and the flowing is recovered.
It is early March—I still don’t know the exact day—in 2022. I am drunk and swirly and moody as I consistently become with alcohol. (Reason #23 I’ve recovered from it.) We were at a B.Y.O.T Mexican restaurant where you Bring Your Own Tequila, and they supply the margarita mix, assumingly to avoid navigating the landscape of liquor licensing.
A thought crosses my mind that I could come back here for this exact reason until I remember, I am not drinking anymore. But I am drinking tonight. I moved unceremoniously quickly from drinking margaritas to taking shots straight from the bottle to overcome the resistance of buzziness and get right to drunk. This is Reason #5 I am recovering from alcohol: once I begin, I do not want to stop.
I’d been ‘sober’ for a handful of days. The pulling, rising, clawing call rose.
Another. Another. Another.
“Life’s about fucking things up and then unfucking the things you fucked up. That’s what makes you less of a fuck up, not lying about it.”
I measure my recovered in forgetting; I am recovered in it.
I have never been (and likely will never be) a “Today is the day” kind of person. I only discover that I crossed the threshold of recovering to recovered in the remembering, not the choosing.
That is how it worked for my bulimia, anorexia, drugging, drinking, and smoking.
(Even when I quit smoking, I kept the psychic door open; I am someone who must always know there is a choice; I am someone who always wants to know where the edge lies.)
There was a final day, but not a day I chose. All the days I chose as ceremonious grand finales turned out to be only interludes. They bled into another drunken night or hungover morning or bleary-eyed binge. I’ve learned to surrender to my final day and accept that my soul—or whatever you might want to call it—will simply decide.
And I don’t mean this in a flippant, passive way of, “Oh, let’s just go for it; my soul will decide eventually.
I mean it in the keep going, keep going, keep going, keep discovering until it finally lands from your head into your heart and body kind of way.
Integration is not formulaic; embodiment can’t be thought into your being.
I let go of the when. I focus on the what. The how arises within me and unfolds. The why is my North Star. The last day I got high simply was, so was the last day I got drunk or purged or restricted.
I hadn’t had a drink in several hours to let the biting hunger for drugs ease away. I’d stepped past my drunken limit and knew I needed to let myself come back.
(My awareness that I could come back and my ability to do so, in themselves, were a kind of recovering. I knew exactly what would happen if I’d kept going. Instead, I’d stopped.)
Thinking back on it, something inside me rearranged itself. Call it soul or higher power or will or just my ego finally sick of its own bullshit. Call it whatever you want … this was it.
But I am only seeing in the remembering. I can only see clearly from the rearview mirror. Even blurrier in that mirror is my last bulimic episode. I was working at a restaurant as a busser when the creeping urge lit up. I can only describe it as a light switch. I was on, and then I was off.
I’d had enough distance between episodes to recognize the switching overcoming me in my body and mind. The light went out, and the ritual took over. I watched myself go through the motions of a pattern of a person I no longer wanted to be but was not quite yet ready to stop living as.
There is grief in this as much as there is celebration.
All of us have rituals—anger, resentment, self-hatred, scrolling, spending, creating, writing, dancing, laughing, connecting—maybe it’s when we choose which rituals to embody that we bridge the gap between recovered and recovery.
So why am I writing this? I am writing this to remind myself that between “I can’t” and “I choose” is a distance worth traversing. A distance I’ll journey across inch by stunning inch and day by wonderful day. I will not get to decide when I have arrived; I will only get to decide what I want to go toward. I will not have a profound final ___ because that is not the kind of person I am.
I am writing this in case you’re not that kind of person either.
You might pass from recovering to recovered without noticing until days or months later. I am not just speaking of the tangible things like alcohol and food. I am speaking of grief, transformation, loss, and life itself.
It was one random day—weeks or even months later—when I realized I’d eaten past the point of discomfort and felt no urging. I didn’t have to fight to keep the lights on anymore; the light switch was gone. I’d stopped living near the edge.
But in this moment, with my pants tight around my belly, sleepiness in my eyes, and the earth-shattering realization that there were no thoughts anymore. There were no maybes or 3rd doors.
“One is the door where I’m drinking. The other is the door where I can drink, but I refuse to believe that there is not a third door.”
The 3rd door is the world where you can have the thing you are clinging to and still be yourself. The 3rd door does not exist.
I have no idea what day it was when I realized it had been weeks since my last binge, drunk, or high. I have no idea what day it was when I stepped through the Option B and C versions of recovering to recovered.
And that is when I know I am recovered.
So, I am writing this to remind you that you are recovering and you are recovered. You are both at once; we all are. If there is something clawing at your heart right now, and you are in the liminal space of wanting to change but not quite being ready to—keep going. Know that you might be one of those who does not see it coming.
You might be someone who only finds yourself in the rearview mirror.
I am currently recovering from my addiction to negative comparison. I am conscious of my habit and still stuck in its mindlessness. I compare all the things to all the other things to lose myself in the equation. Only in hindsight can I see how my eating disorder and my addictions were the masks for this deeper recovering.
I recovered from my eating disorder to get my body back.
I recovered from drugs and alcohol to get my mind back.
I am recovering from this obsession with comparing myself to others to get my life back.
I know there will be a day when I wake up and can’t remember the last time I ___. I know there will be a day for you, too.
So all this is to say.
Stay focused on your what and your why. The how and the when will come.
Yes, it sucks. You are slowly closing the gap between who you want to be and who you currently are.
Let go of being recovered.
Accept your recovering.
You know what you need. Give it to yourself.