Quotes About Recovery

I can see that this hurts you. You should fix it. You can't make it unhappen, but you don't have to carry around what they did to you. Don't give them that power over you.

I grasped that it would take a while for the keep to grasp with all that had happened. But there was something there, a feeling almost of relief. I had seen that before in a man who had had his maimed foot removed, or the family that finally finds their drowned child's body. To finally confront the worst there is, to look at it squarely in the face and say, "I know you. You have hurt me, almost to death, but still, I live, and I will go on living.

Putting into the dragon had helped in the same way that cutting off an infected limb helped. Being rid of it was not the same as being healed of it.

There is nothing dishonerable about abondoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.

Once a man has been broken by pain, he remains forever a victim. He cannot ever forget that place he has visited, the moment when he decided that he would surrender everything rather than endure more pain. It is a shame no man ever completely recovers from. Some try to drown it by becoming the perpetrator of similar pain, and creating a new victim to bear for them that shame. Cruelty is a skill taught not only by example but by experience of it.

A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.

I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.

Make your own recovery the first priority in your life.

I'd like our therapy to be penicillin. And I know that it's insulin.

Things fall apart. But things don't just fall apart. People break them.

After all, Jack had gone into war five times and the only really bad injury he'd sustained was a pretty miserable shot in the ass. Not everyone who went to war came out crippled.

She would never be without support. Sierra was nine months sober.

but I'm still the child of an abusive alcoholic and we don't make great parent material.

found this man. I fell in love with his kindness, his patience. He saw me, all of me, and he didn't turn away. He let me in. He held back my hair while I puked my way through detox. He spoonfed me broth while I slowly fought my way back to living.

Paul accused me of remaining an addict even after I stopped drinking. I don't think he understood that's exactly how it works. I am my demons, and my demons are me. Some days I do all the talking and some days my monster does all the drinking, but every day it's all me.

my throat. A seeping warmth that made my restless limbs and racing brain slow, steady, quiet. Alcohol is my first love and most abusive relationship. All else has paled in comparison. Even my love for Paul.

Unfinished business. An addict's life is filled with such instances. The coulda, woulda, shouldas that will never happen again.

Hospital. "I

nobody was ever replaced in life, no hole completely filled or loss totally healed. You didn't need a medical degree to know that the human body really wasn't stronger in the broken places. Like any bone, the cracks would always show if you looked hard enough.

husband got pneumonia and

They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.

Shock is the stepsister of denial. It cushions the blow to your psyche when really fucked up things happen.

grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

There was something eternal about loss, something endless. You could always lose the things you had, but you couldn't always get back the things you lost.