Capturing Recovery
As a child, I recall the competitive nature of mastering the monkey bars in the playground that all of us congregated at during our recesses. I stood in awe at the sheer mastery of my peers who clung onto the bars for dear life, doing flips and hanging like bats did in accustomed caves. They boasted of all their blisters, using them as clear indications of their dedication at pursuing their dream of crowd-surfing in the currents of popularity. I had always wondered of why they were harming themselves for the sake of attaining a goal that was leading them nowhere in life. Every mar on their fingers held the potential to let go of what was destroying them, to leave and instead play with the peers who were alone on the bleachers, to lift peers up into the air with the motions of a see-saw; the choice was in their hands so why did they not act on it. They were in an imbalanced state of mental health, with inferiority complexes that crippled them from maximizing their potential of growth as human beings with self-derived worth. They needed to recover by letting go of the monkey bars and leave the playground, metamorphosed.
Personally, recovery involves bravery abandoning toxicity despite the struggle of change, persistence through all the ebbs and flows, to emerge in a rebirth, effervescent with reaped rewards.
Recovery is a decision you uphold to abandon toxicity with neutralizing antacids of bravery to defy old habits. Stemming from that main idea, this specifically encompasses recurring acts of courageous rebellion against the demons that repeatedly send hostile reminders of self-doubt in your mind. Despite the ill thoughts egging you to revert to your old ways of coping, it is choosing to bravely purge the negativity and unhelpfulness out of your soul continually even when you want to binge on triggers and relapse. In regards to external toxicity, recovery means neutering the throws and ploughs and exiting the breeding ground of misery. For instance, in my recovery from depression and an eating disorder, I zoned out all that was sabotaging any chance of me attaining my goal of freedom from mental imprisonment. Abundant toxicity pelted me like a swirl of hurtful words, such as, “I hope you’re happy when you’re dead. At the rate you’re going, you’re going end up as shriveled up as your grandma and dead grandpa.” In order to attain what recovery truly meant, I deactivated my ASKfm, freeing my mind of unnecessary cyber and verbal abuse. Additionally, I had a whole online community bashing and ridiculing my pseudo recovery previously. I made the choice to stay my ground as part of recovery and not cut my wrists in response anymore, flushing away old temptations to seek refuge in a bathroom stall to purge all the pain or in a pitiful shard of a razor. Actualizing recovery meant distancing myself from external loci that would jeopardize my freedom. I tore away at the weeds planted by others to infest my garden with nastiness, and replaced them with healthy budding substitutes to pave the way for a fertile land of possibilities to flourish.
Additionally, this aspect of recovery accentuates tossing these aside to avert the self-perpetuating cycle. Abandoning toxicity internally is the active choice to do so even when you are number 10 on the distress scale, internalizing that you want to be a spear-header of your future to thrust away your history in imprisonment. There will be days when pamphlets of cynicism about a better life are slipped under your door, you may want to cave to the urges with emotional eating or starving for days on end just to re-experience the superficial sense of pride of being skinny. However, recovery is living through all that toxicity and crushing it away at the end of the day because you dare – you dare to let go of the monkey bars and leave the playground. Following that line of logic, is the understanding that recovery is the opposite of linear, rather is the persistence along the zig-zag line fraught with immense highs and lows. While the ideal image of recovery posits a rosy landscape of laughter and stock images of survivors munching on pummeling mountains of food euphorically, reality is far from that. There are undeniable spurs of motivation and loving life and all the metaphors of hope they present. However, recovery is accepting that you are a work in progress and rising every time you decline on your charted projection to freedom. I was blessed to be inspired by witnessing the growth of numerous the friends I had made in the psychiatric ward I was in, who epitomized this aspect of recovery. I had witnessed moments when we would paint t-shirts with sayings like “healthy is the new skinny”, chugging calorific supplement milkshakes likening them to shots of vodka and we basked in uncontrollable laughter as a nurse had facilitated his innovative take on monopoly. Punctuating these pleasantly memorable times, would undeniably be nights of social withdrawal, lashing at nurses who made us eat when we could not stomach any more food, screaming when feeding tubes were ordered or even hostile competition when a new emaciated patient entered. Eventually, the ones who became models of recovery showcased the ability to recognize their weak moments as part of the fight, and no matter how many times they were hacked to the ground, they picked up the fork to eat relentlessly. This characteristic of recovery discourages condemning yourself to defeatism when those bad slips hit. Instead, it is persisting to seek out the beauty in the pain, harness on that and increase more of those lovely moments of victory with fellow fighters to attain the end goal of freedom. Lastly, although recovery is excruciatingly hard, it is an immensely rewarding rebirth. Alluding to the former points of features of bravery and persistence, there is certainty in the intensity of difficulty constituent of recovery. However, the overarching idea that is omnipotent would be that recovery is the best decision you could ever make with all the benefits it reaps. Firstly, silencing and defying the paralyzing battering from within and externally delivered me out of the playground where I danced with the devil of death on an everyday basis. Just recently, I managed to tone down the thoughts of self-punishment after receiving a prong of hate online while balancing overwhelming tugging from my divorcing parents - just minutes before embarking on my Mid-Term Essay for ESL408. The ability recovery equipped me with after all the pain, instigated a wildfire of resistance internally against my past to obliterate my old habits. Secondly, the allowance to continue eating without compensation, and not starve for days on end to deprive and punish myself feels surreal, but that is what recovery fleshes out for the brave and persistent ones who stayed the course. It is enjoying the freedom to eat without restricting myself to eat only when I am about to have a gastric attack and to lie in bed with a bowl of cereal at midnight. Thirdly, and most importantly, recovery allowed me to leave the playground for good to venture to higher peaks to spread hope in the hopeless. This comprised of me volunteering for mental health awareness organizations such as Uninhibited Space, writing encouragements to sufferers, speaking up at support groups in hospitals and simply sharing my story of hope on platforms such as Instagram, UNSAID, Institute of Mental Health and so on. Additionally, I engaged in social activism such as volunteering to equip Foreign Domestic Workers with financial literacy and English skills to enable them to make ripples in their homeland. Recovery granted me the opportunity to touch the lives of others and realize my purpose and love for life, the rewarding aspect of recovery opened my eyes to see that every fracture and hack at my tissues were all part of my survival story from the silent war, where I would shout to the heavens whenever I reign victorious. This meant basking in the glory in the Colosseum and reverberating from all columns and blocks, unshaken to awaken my friends who were still in desperate struggle to the epiphany that recovery sets in stone. Recess is over and it is time to loosen your grip of the monkey bars that provided supposed social stability and acceptance. Recovery means it is your turn to pack up and leave the playground with that air of bravery - to ignore the jeering popular kids and pick the loner kid who always gets left last for dodgeball. Recovery refers to the time to realize that we persist till the last bell rings no matter how many times we get slammed by the opponents. Lastly, recovery is the victory you bask in as you get carried by the team that you built from nothing. Recovery is in your hands and you make the choice to replace blisters with a renewed surface ready to grace the world with the reclamation of all you can be.
Here's my journey of recovery in pictures:
2012
2013
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2015
2016
2017
