The Miracle Will Happen If We Don't Quit

When you’re hiking off-path, you must negotiate your route one step at a time, solving each problem as it emerges. Loose rocks, steep cliffs, and white water will block your path, and each solution is unique to your strengths. Maybe you can climb. If you can’t, your solution to the problem must account for that. Maybe you need to take the long path. Maybe you’re a strong swimmer. Maybe you can abseil. If so, your solution will be different from those who can't.

That’s the way recovery works. Your weaknesses are not mine, and mine are not yours. We must find the resources that can overcome our illness, and in the end, we will reach the top.

If recovering from depression and PTSD were easy, we’d all find peace. The truth is not so forgiving, and nobody hands out a list of steps for healing. We have to hack our way through the underbrush as though nobody’s ever done it before. Every journey is different, but we all need to be stubborn enough to keep trying when our current solutions don’t work.

It’s difficult to find a psychiatrist who’s willing to work with you to find medication that doesn’t annihilate your quality of life. Many doctors are didactic. They want to write a script and then go play golf. That’s not good enough. You are the authority on what you can live with. You decide what qualifies as an unacceptable side effect. To find the right drug, you must keep climbing.

My body hates medication, and it will produce the most ridiculous side effects possible. On the way to finding the right drug, I had cerebral oedema, hypernatremia, a nightmarish allergy, and ultimately, drug toxicity. My body was a war zone, and I wanted to give up a hundred times. That’s hardly a unique experience—anyone who must take drastic and chronic medications has been there at least once.

Finding the right psychologist isn’t a one-step process, either. Once you’ve found that person, you must expose the beliefs that are keeping you ill. My first therapist taught me plenty, but we ran out of steam. I became static, but I didn’t quit before the miracle happened. I found a new therapist who knocked me out of stasis. We’ve been working together for seven years, and I’m a very different person today because of him.

The relevant question is, “are you going to give up?” I did not, and in the end, it paid off. Today, my side effects add up to precisely zero. I live a normal life because I saw the search for medication through until the end. On the way here, my therapist repeated the same line to me over and over:

> Don’t quit before the miracle happens.

The miracle happened for me.

I got it by banging on until I found the right doctors and drugs. It’s worth it. I promise. Sometimes it was exhausting. Sometimes I didn’t want to continue. Sometimes, I just needed a goddamned break, so I took it. Then I got back to climbing.

This is what recovery requires of us. You must find the next-best resource. If you don’t give up, though, and if you ask for the help you need, you will unleash that miracle. The miracle will happen if we don’t quit.