I know that everyone around me acts like wanting getting better is a universal experience but it's not
I know this feeling and I think this is actually the hardest part of my recovery.
A lot of people tell me to just "wait and see," and to be grateful for the small things so that over time I can develop an appreciation for life in general. Another thing I hear often is to "let go," to go with the flow of things and accept that things won't always be good or great, to relinquish my desire for control over the happenings in my life.
Not exactly the same sentiment, but they all feel the same to me. I can appreciate when I hear it because I don't think that's bad advice— I suppose that's the only way to live when you choose to go on with life, anyway. But still, lol, how the
heck am I supposed to do that?? I literally don't know how. People tell me that like I can just turn the worry and mental illness off. I wish I could, but I know such a thing is impossible for everybody. I don't even know if I want to do that, if I really desire to get "better," because getting "better" is just sounding a lot more like ignoring some fundamental truth I've learned about the world by the day.
I'm starting to think that those ways of living, while beneficial, aren't really feasible for everybody. Maybe things won't get better in my mind no matter how much waiting or improving I do; maybe it's impossible for me to be better than I am now, or how I was ten years ago, even twenty years ago. I always remember being this sad, despite the good in my life. There's plenty of it, sure, but it doesn't make me feel happy or even okay. The hardest part of recovering is finding a way to be okay with being different like that and not letting it drive me to self-destructive or numbing behaviors all the time. I think recovering for me would just be learning to chill out with my demons while they're torturing me, instead of finding out how to get them to stop torturing me in the first place. Accepting that my reality, my "recovery" looks a lot different from everyone else's success story of finding a warm and fuzzy, heartfelt, happily-ever-after-esque reason to keep on keeping on is really difficult.