A Meditation on Recovery

Recovery, I have found, is quite a lot like Dr Kevin C. Snyder’s conception of success. It does not follow a straight diagonal line upwards to a particular zenith. Rather, the line is wiggly, convoluted, and ties itself up in knots along the way. You may take a fair few steps backwards for every step forward that you take; you may fall flat on your face (several times, and painfully) but the key is to – as clichéd as it sounds – keep getting back up. The scars may still be fresh, and you may well be picking at your scabs long after they have begun to heal. But the fact that those scabs have formed in the first place is the important thing.

My steepest fall on the path to recovery was the relapse in psychotic symptoms that I experienced around six months ago, during England’s first lockdown in response to COVID-19. Due to the fact that I had been ‘well’ for just over two years, my psychiatrist had proposed in April 2020 that I might embark on a trial period without antipsychotic medication. The conversation when this was agreed lasted no more than five minutes over the phone, which I find ridiculous in hindsight for such a momentous decision. Although I was briefly informed of the risk of relapse, the pros and cons of the change to my medication were not fully explained to me. This disastrous decision – combined with upheaval in my personal life and the effect of the pandemic, which was seismically shaking the world through restrictions in every area of life – led to the very outcome I had feared the most: being sectioned for a second time.

I’ll cover sectioning – which is when an individual is compulsorily detained in hospital for treatment under the Mental Health Act 1983 – another time. For now, I am still treading the path to recovery (both in relation to the trauma suffered through the psychotic relapse and my EUPD traits) with all the elegance of a giraffe masquerading as an amateur tightrope-artist. Gingerly, awkwardly and not at all with the poise and perfection that I would have hoped. But recovery is a process. I’ve come to terms with the possibility that it’s not necessarily true that one day I will wake up and think: yes! I’ve fully recovered, I’m cured and everything from here on out is going to be ok. Life is always going to throw crap at you when you least expect it.

But along the way, if you learn to get a bit quicker – a bit better – at putting yourself back together again each time you fall, that’s something to be proud of. And that’s what I’m starting to learn.