Recovery in a from of denial
I’m drawn back to this sunset with the feeling that every time I look at it, it just gets better. If my serotonin had a form, then this would be it. I breathe deeply and let go of all the weight I’ve been carrying as I step outside.
During my recovery process, I began to dissociate—to take a step aside and question what I could risk by letting go. I began by leaving my abusive lover. I stopped working on a contract that demanded eighty hours a week. I stopped rescuing a friend who needed to save himself. I remember meeting all my relatives in dreams. I stopped running and talking about migraine.
Perhaps, to get to this point, I needed a tantrum—a kriya, a kind of surrender, action, and turmoil.
Stop thinking and talking about it, and there is nothing you will not be able to know. You are fulfilling your own reason and purpose, not carrying them for others.
Sunsets in late August are so mesmerizing and bright that it is hard to look away. And I try. I look toward the group of people on the left. It’s a wedding ceremony. A bride and groom are being photographed in the fading light at this very moment.
For a moment, I feel a strange sense of promise toward myself, as if this were my wedding.
The bride’s long white dress is elegant and almost weightless. I watch her standing there, surrounded by light, and suddenly my existential sunbathing spot has become something else—a place of faith, of promise, of love.
I realize that perhaps this is what it means to encounter yourself: to suddenly see your own life reflected somewhere you weren’t looking—to search for the truth outside yourself, only to realize it has been yours all along.
It lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth, and we meet ourselves in our self-expression. We become original through specific actions that change our behavior and discard the old narratives. The price can be high when we allow that shift in perception—to look at ourselves from a different origin, in a different light.
When this impulse seizes you, the crosscurrents are at work—the grief and the growth. As with any rupture, there is both tension and relief.
Long-seated depression breaks up like an ice floe. Long-frozen feelings thaw, melt, cascade, flood, and overrun you. You may find yourself volatile and changeable.
You are.
Think of yourself as an accident victim walking away from a car crash: your old life has crashed and burned; your new life isn’t apparent yet. You may feel temporarily without a vehicle. Just keep walking.
Your changes may be more like cloud movements. Migraine comes as a thunderstorm, then blurs into overcast, then partly cloudy, until its next burst out.
It is important to know that no matter what form your growth takes, and how tragic or desperate it feels, you are still moving through it—even through fear, uncertainty, and chronic pain.
There is another kind of change—slower, more subtle, accumulating daily, whether you sense its presence or not.
Once we engage in the process of writing—the migraine diary, our thoughts, how we’re feeling—we begin to move at such velocity that we don’t even realize the pace.
This is a form of denial that tempts us to avoid the recovery process, to believe that it “isn’t happening to us.”
Oh yes, it is.
Recovery is a pathway into a new world, at a high speed and through turbulence.