Understanding Recovery
When the partner I shared a life with for years unexpectedly broke up with me in the Fall of 2018, I was emotionally shattered. Just getting out of bed in the morning was a chore, let alone being productive at work.
It took months for me to recover; most of that time was spent depressed, in stagnation. My pain didn’t “fade” with time, like I anticipated, it bit at me each day until I eventually did something about it. The graph of my mental state over time looked something like this:
So what happened? Why did it take so long to start the recovery process, why did recovery happen so quickly, and why does it matter?
What I experienced was a small disaster — this is when I discovered that every disaster throws you into a new reality you didn’t expect. Disasters leave you reeling, desperately trying to find your bearings in a new and unfamiliar world, while everyone around you seems to carry on as if everything is normal.
When responding to disaster, you also want to carry on as if everything is normal — everything is mostly normal, right? Why should this affect the rest of my life? It’s just one aspect of my life, shouldn’t I be able to cry at home and then go into work like everything is normal; talk to my friends like everything is normal; buy groceries …alone …like everything is…?
Eventually you realize things aren’t normal. Things are different. And boy do you want them to be normal. There’s nothing you want more — you spend all day thinking about normal. How would I feel if things were normal? How productive would I be if things were normal? Where would I be if things were normal?
You stare at where you used to be on the graph — drawing an imaginary line forward to where you should be on the graph. It’s the only thing you can focus on — how you should feel, where you should be.
This is depression. A desperate feeling that you aren’t where you should be — and hopelessness, as every day “where you should be” gets further and further away.
My name for the divide between where you think you should be and where you actually are is the expectation gap.
The expectation gap is the enemy of recovery. It keeps you paralyzed, thinking about how terrible things are — how you are so far from where you should be. It is always top of mind, and your persistent goal is to eliminate it: to jump the gap and escape this new, disastrous reality in favor of the old, better, normal one.
But you can’t. No matter how hard you try, there is no going back. The only way out is through.
Reconciling with your new reality is the first step of recovery.
To reconcile means to make consistent, to accept as truth, to come to terms with. You don’t live in the old reality, and you never will. That reality stopped existing the moment you diverged from your expected path. The expectation gap can’t be crossed, it can only be accepted. Accept that things are different than they used to be, that you need to start growing again from where you are now, and you can take the first step forward.
If this is a big disaster, the first step is hard — the soul-crushing, reality-defining sort of hard. The type of hard that makes your body ache with anxiety and shake with sadness. To take the first step forward means admitting everything you’ve lost. You’re not okay, you’re not going to go back to normal, and you’re not going to pretend otherwise. It means accepting and living in a new, worse reality.
But the second step is easy. It’s the only reasonable course of action — the only way forward now that you’ve given up on hopes of teleportation. The expectation gap is gone; there’s nowhere you should be anymore — might as well move forward.
The third step is even easier. By the fourth or fifth, you forget what it feels like to stand still. Walking forward is the new normal, or is it jogging? Soon, you might find yourself sprinting, flying forward faster than ever before — armed with new wisdom, earned the hard way. One day, you’ll pass by where you used to be; not that it matters, you forgot about that reality a long time ago.
Surprisingly, the hardest part of the breakup was going to Disneyland after it ended. What a first world problem, I know — I have to fly a state away and spend a few days vacationing with my family, what a tragedy. But she was supposed to be there. I was at “the happiest place on Earth” with people I loved; I was supposed to be having fun, I was supposed to be happy…
I was supposed to marry her one day.
The expectation gap was immense. I wanted to smile, to enjoy spending time with my family, and I resented myself for being unable to do so. It had been more than a month since the break up, why wasn’t I feeling better yet? Why wasn’t I back to normal?
That trip probably would have helped me recover if I had accepted that I was terribly depressed, if I had made my goal to do a little better each day, if I had stopped struggling against my emotions and cried — deeply, painfully, truthfully.
I don’t mention this story because it’s a particularly special or unique disaster, it’s just my disaster. It’s what taught me that I couldn’t go back to how things used to be, that recovery starts at acceptance. But recovery doesn’t only apply to big disasters — it isn’t even limited to disasters at all. Maybe you expected to go on a second date this Friday, but then your date cancelled last minute. Maybe you expected to finish your book by the end of the month, but then you consistently missed deadlines and have barely written a word. Maybe you aren’t as productive as you want to be at work, so you try to make up for it by working late, but end up creating a negative cycle of bad recovery and unproductive work hours.
Anytime you feel an expectation gap, anytime there is discord between where you are and where you should be, you need to accept where you are. You need to accept that you can’t just jump back to where you should be. You need to take the painful first step. Only then can you recover.
The only way out is through.
