The Quiet Work of Recovery
There is a story we tell about recovery.
It begins with collapse, followed by courage, and ends in triumph. The music swells, the curtain lifts, and we stand in the light…stronger, wiser, somehow transformed.
But real recovery rarely follows that arc. It isn’t cinematic. It’s quiet, repetitive, and often invisible. It’s the space between public strength and private fatigue, where the real work happens: the slow re-stitching of body and mind.
Recovery asks for a kind of patience that modern life doesn’t reward. The world moves quickly; we heal slowly. Progress is measured not in milestones but in small mercies: a morning without dread, a walk that doesn’t leave us trembling, an evening out with friends without looking over our shoulder repeatedly. These moments are rarely celebrated – they are not profound enough for social media, yet they are the foundation of everything that follows.
There is also the fatigue that hides behind apparent resilience. The face we wear to the world. The expression we wear that says competent, composed, “fine” but is often balanced on a scaffolding of exhaustion. Strength, when performed too long, becomes another kind of strain. Sometimes the bravest act is not pushing through, but pausing. Allowing stillness. Admitting: I’m not quite there yet.
For many women, recovery carries an extra demand. We are expected to recover beautifully, efficiently, quietly. To turn pain into power, trauma into purpose. But healing is not a performance; it’s a practice. Some days it is as mundane as eating well, keeping appointments, finally making time to have that chipped tooth looked at, the one that got damaged when…
Some days it is remembering that being gentle with yourself is not weakness, but your superpower.
For survivors who work in the domestic and sexual violence sectors, this tension runs even deeper. We are the helpers, the advocates, the ones who are meant to be healed enough to hold others. The public face must look steady, professional, empathic, endlessly resilient, while the private self may still be learning to breathe again. The work demands presence, composure, boundaries, yet it can reawaken echoes of our own pasts. We speak of trauma-informed practice, but rarely of the quiet toll it takes to inhabit both sides of that story. How do we become both the lighthouse and the ship still weathering storms?
And then there is the body, the archive that never forgets.
Long after we believe we have recovered, it sends reminders in new and unwelcome languages: illness, fatigue, sudden frailty. Years of living in fight or flight, surviving rather than living, leave their imprint. Just as I felt my life was finally on track for the first time, I had a small stroke. Not long after came the crushing onset of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), conditions that have reshaped my days and my mobility. It felt like my body was telling the story my mind had tried to move past: that survival has a cost, and the debt can take years to call in.
The body remembers what the mind forgets. It whispers reminders in skipped beats, in aches, in sudden floods of tiredness. Recovery, then, becomes a conversation: between what we want to do and what the body will allow. Between the past that shaped us and the present that is still learning to breathe.
Over time, the rhythm changes.
There are still setbacks, but they don’t feel like endings anymore. The quiet work, the unremarkable acts of care, begins to build its own strength. We learn to live inside the ebb and flow, to trust that rest is not regression.
Recovery isn’t a finish line, it’s a slow cultivation of trust in one’s own capacity to survive. A private faith that, even without applause, even without transformation, healing is still happening in the silence, in the softness, in the steady return of light.