The other day I was scrolling through my Instagram feed and this image popped up on one of the accounts I follow:

"A relapse doesn't diminish your worth."

Like a ton of bricks it hit me. This is what it was. This is what I am currently enduring. While I have before equated my illness akin to an addiction or substance recovery - I guess I forgot to include the aspect of a relapse into my recovery model. The thing about relapsing is it's not something dramatic, nor intense. It can be something simple, small or big and complex; however it usually arrives without a song, a moment or even an awareness that it's happening. At least in my experience, it's not. 

Relapse for me comes in a wave. Eerily it creeps out to sea, accumulating energy and force, and then all a sudden, before you know it, it's crashing down on you with every intent of destroying everything you are. 

I've gotten better over the years in learning what that looks like, as well as how I can best endure it when it arrives. Like anyone in recovery will tell you: it's one day at a time. It's one day, by one day - even one hour by one hour, or less. Everything about healing and recovery is lined with landmines and scars and fresh wounds - it moves backwards and forwards and then to the side; creating the most frustratingly imperfect momentum of progress that one could find imaginable. 

I haven't yet come to terms with it - I don't think. I thing rather than my ego calling the shots, it's really more like my soul and my spirit are so desperate to feel joy again that any move in the right direction feels like magic; boosting my range of possibility and positivity that I will endure this just yet. That being said, anything moving backwards; relapsing behaviours, triggers, stress; anything derailing my energy or force - that pulls me under so far that sometimes it feels pointless to fight back. 

I think that, really, is where I need to pick my fights. Knowing when to fight, and when to know that today will not be a "great" day, but that I can do the best that I can to survive it and try again tomorrow. 

So I will try again tomorrow. My relapse does not define me.