When recovery feels impossible.

There are days in recovery that you don't feel strong or motivated at all. There are days that make you feel like there isn't any progress. They just feel heavy those days. There will be days where your thoughts are louder than usual, where everything feels harder than it should and where you start questioning if things are actually going to change. When even the smallest things feel hard.

I've had so many of those days, days that turned into weeks and weeks that turned into months. Where everything just felt the same, like i was stuck in my own head, going over the same thoughts again and again, feeling like nothing was really changing and that's the part people don't always see.

How something that feels like 'just a bad day' can actually feel constant, it's like you can't switch it off, no matter how much you want to...

Days where I felt stuck in my own head.

Days where food felt overwhelming.

Days where I physically hated myself.

Days where I genuinely believed I would never get out of that place.

I think one of the hardest parts is that recovery isn't linear.

It's not a straight line where things just keep getting better, recovery doesn't work like that and trust me I wish that It did because my recovery was not a straight line.

There are some days you feel okay, some days you feel like you've gone backwards with all the progress you had made. This feeling is so frustrating because it makes you question everything. It makes you wonder if you're actually getting better at all or if you've just been pretending to yourself and others that you are. On those days, it's so easy to forget how far you've actually come. It feels like all the progress disappears, like one bad day just cancels everything else out. But it doesn't. Progress doesn't just disappear because you're having a hard day, it is still there even if you can't feel it right now.

Recovery isn't about never struggling again, it's about still having those hard days and finding a way through them.

Something I've learned throughout my recovery is this:

Just because it feels impossible right now... doesn't mean it always will.

One relapse does not erase all the progress you have made... I relapsed a lot along the way until those relapses got less frequent then stopped happening all together. I had to tell myself every time I feed into what my eating disorder wants me to believe I am letting it win.

Recovery isn't about suddenly feeling 'fixed' one day, it's about the small steps which create big steps along the way. The times you challenge a eating disorder thought, the times you keep going even when it's hard and the times you show up, even when you don't feel ready. All of those moments matter more than you think.

Even on the days where it feels like nothing is changing, something will be changing it's just most of the time you don't notice the small steps that are helping you through recovery.

You're still here!

You're still trying!

This counts for so much.

You truly don't need to have everything figured out, you don't need to feel strong all the time. You just have to take it one step at a time.

If today feels like one of those impossible days... just focus on getting through it. That is enough.

With love, Niomi🤎