Quotes About Recovery

This was my way of life for 21 years: Highs so high I was a human F-16, and lows so low I didn't need a funeral because I'd already buried myself.

I was the kid who always thought I was chickenshit, and I had been terrified for most of my life. In treatment, people were suddenly loving me for me. Unconditionally. I had told them the goriest, most horrible stuff about myself … and they hugged me for it. This was what I had been looking for forever— a place to fit in.

Rock bottom is good solid ground, and a dead end street is just a place to turn around.

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there.

Somehow, I have the feeling my voice may come back one day if I study the letters imprinted on the used ribbon.

Only the wounded healer can truly heal.

You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.

There's nothing like a good, long sleep to allow unpleasantness to recede into the past.

There is no panacea for this kind of loss. Just know that every day it gets the tiniest bit better-- suddenly one day you can put it in a different perspective.

My skull connects with a hard, flat thing I think is the wet asphalt pavement of the parking lot, but turns out to be a bolt of greasy lightning that knocks me off a high wall into a deep, wet place that covers me up tight under a blue-black blanket of blankness…

Despite the fact that our failed developmental history was our parents' "fault," each of us has the ultimate responsibility for our own life. Those of us who have been victimized by indifference, neglect, or abuse are responsible for the rest of our lives. We must work to understand our histories, to separate as best as we can from those who have hurt us, and to pursue gratifying relationships in the future.

You wake up and for those few seconds, minutes, you forget; forget you are injured; forget you are finished.

So you have density, infectivity, mortality, and recovery—four factors interrelated as fundamentally as heat, tinder, spark, and fuel. Brought together in the critical measure of each, the critical balance, they produce fire: epidemic.

One of the most important problems in epidemiology is to ascertain whether this termination occurs only when no susceptible individuals are left, or whether the interplay of the various factors of infectivity, recovery and mortality, may result in termination, whilst many susceptible individuals are still present in the unaffected population.

A great hope fell You heard no noise The ruin was within Oh cunning wreck that told no tale And let no witness in…. A not admitting of the wound Until it grew so wide That all my life had entered it And there was room beside…

The test accident almost bankrupted Boeing,

An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?

Fortunately I have a son, my beautiful boy Unfortunately he is a drug addict. Fortunately he is in recovery. Unfortunately he relapses. Fortunately he is in recovery again. Unfortunately he relapses. Fortunately he is not dead.

I didn't cause it. I can't control it. I can't cure it.

Caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

I would miss having Nic in my life. I would miss his funny phone messages and his humor, the stories, our talks, our walks, watching movies with him, dinners together, and the transcendent feeling between us that is love. I would miss all of it. I miss it now. And here it sinks in: I don't have it now. I have not had it whenever Nic has been on drugs. Nic is absent, only his shell remains. I have been afraid - terrified - to lose Nic, but I have lost him.

But here's the rub of addiction. By its nature, people afflicted are unable to do what, from the outside, appears to be a simple solution—don't drink. Don't use drugs. In exchange for that one small sacrifice, you will be given a gift that other terminally ill people would give anything for: life.