On Resolutions and Recovery…

What is it to fully resolve something for yourself?

Resolution is a word we use a lot, and I’ve never thought about it much I must admit. There are lots of ways we speak about that process, which is a largely unconscious one for most people, I think. We talk about getting through something, working it out, turning over a new leaf, coming to grips with it, getting a handle on it, recovering, healing, exploring, grounding. These are all words/phrases about focus and endings that lead forward.

To resolve is to comprehend to the best of your ability, and to release through that same understanding. It’s a very personal thing, this business of closing one chapter and starting another. It smells a little of our own mortality, and the process of it can seem bleak at times. It can require a time of hibernation, of introspection that takes place on a few levels, that runs deeper and alters our course more completely than we may always like or have expected.

In the world of mental health there’s a lot of emphasis on recovery talk. Recovery can mean a lot of different things, and it depends on your situation as to how you’re going to define it exactly. The general idea is usually a sense of stability in life, mixed in with feeling like you’re achieving whatever you count as your important goals. They can be really simple things or broad, long range things that might not come to fruition for many years.

So if recovery is the goal then resolution is the process. I’m a bit more likely to focus on the journey itself over the end goal when it comes to these sorts of things so I thought that having a bit of a look at what takes place in that between time, that sometimes dreamtime I might be able to frame the outline a bit better.

With a mood disorder resolution takes on a bit of a different meaning, or it can if you’re really focused on the end game. It helps me to come back to things, and realise that I have made a lot of progress, closed some chapters of my depression that I wouldn’t have thought I’d have been able to. That’s resolution, not that everything gets settled but a significant chunk of something. Significant enough for me to move up the ladder a little. I mean, coming out of a Depressive episode is about working your way up, bit by careful bit and checking each rung above and below out along the way. If that doesn’t spell resolution I don’t know what does.

To recover you need a great deal of faith in yourself, in your particular process, a feeling of purpose that is secure so that you can trust that what you’re doing is working. And so we talk about baby steps a lot, about getting passed the small hurdles first and then tackling something different or bigger. This applies to many things in life, not just mood disorders.

To resolve any one issue we have we normally go back to the beginning, and retrace our mental path. We try to discover where the origins of the difficulty lie so that we can come up with a plan of action, and a few options. Resolving something often requires the ability to find and use a few different possible paths. There’s a great Sandra Bullock movie on addiction/recovery that goes into these ideas quite a bit, called 28 Days. One of the funniest scenes in the movie is this young, queer bloke ranting. It’s apt and so quirky/hilarious that I think I’ll leave you with it to think about:

There’s a time when you can share and you hold hands and be on the same path. But there’s always a fork in the road… at some point. And sometimes you have to go on one part of the fork and they gotta go on the other part of the fork. [Sigh] Or just down the back part of the fork while you go forward. And they’re like [Sigh]

Or they got a salad fork and you have one of the big dinner forks and you have longer to go but they’re like done because that’s it, they’re stuck on a piece of food, that they [Sigh]. Their dessert fork or like one of those, you know small little shrimp forks or crab forks and you’re trying to get out a crab. They’re like that and you’re over here jumping to the huge serving fork or something like that, or a ladle, you know. [Sigh]

(Btw, apologies for any typos/spelling mistakes. I’ll correct them later as I’m dashing off to a meeting just now.)