On Staying Sick

My life is falling apart all around me. Some days I have hope and want things to get better but other days I do not. I have been in pain so long the very idea of getting rid of it terrify s the living fuck out of me. A lot of the time I really do feel crazy. Why else would I want to stay sick? I try and analyze that and ask myself what do I get out of being sick that I wont get from being healthy? And the honest rational answer is nothing. I will still have my boyfriend's love and support even when I am healthy. I can still go to him and say I am sad I need some love. Yet for some reason it doesn’t feel the same. Which makes me think I like seeing people worried and fretting that I will kill myself I must like the constant attention and validation that comes from that. I can say why that is but we all have our fucking sob stories and I feel like I should be able to bury the past in the past. Yet here I am still self destructing. Has anyone else ever felt like this? Felt so selfish.

I have. When I like seeing people worry, I feel manipulative (not saying you are, but I view myself like this when I do it). I used to only trust negative reactions, like people in fear that they’ll lose me, as the only indications they truly cared. It was a lonely place to be and I get where you’re coming from.

My therapist described “wanting to stay sick” as walking through a crop field and having been going down one direction where the path is already traveled. You will always want to choose that way first. There’s no struggle, each step is practically second nature. 

You logically know you want to get better (go the other path), but it’ll take so much work to bustle around and see where you’re going. That's what getting healthy feels like right now -a mysterious path untraveled that will take a lot more energy to walk through. Feeling challenged is no reason to be hard on yourself, it’s no reason to minimize the things you’ve gone through. Don’t admit defeat yet. You’re trying to change your behavior, which is incredibly fucking hard.

This is a fact: You’ve had years and years of going down a familiar path, years and years on top of the smaller amount of time you spent trying to get healthy.

Look at it from that perspective, and it’s perfectly normal you’d react this way to recovery.