That is what I’m taking.

This week so far has been hard to endure. But it’s not endurance. It’s suffering. Pain hidden within parameters I’d never once imagined could exist is ever present.

What a hold your existence has on you in those quiet moments when you’re alone in your head. Alone in a room. Alone in your suffering.

I knew my body was hungry, but the desire to feed it, to fuel it, to give it sustenance was overcome by hatred for my body. A desire to starve it and punish it for feeling so worthless as I lay there.

And then I did the unthinkable.

I got up.

I went to the kitchen and found some leftover salad in the fridge that I’d made the previous evening for my kids.

In a bowl I made my favourite dressing. One spoon of olive oil, half a spoon of white wine vinegar and half a spoon of lemon juice. I seasoned it. Then I took a large handful of salad, mixed it all together and ate it.

The taste was beautiful.

I enjoyed each mouthful.

And that is recovery.

That is teaching myself that I need to eat. And that I am allowed to enjoy it.

As small as grabbing some food might sound to most of us, when you are in those moments of paralysed angst and fear and self loathing, a bowl of freshly dressed salad gave me a moment of progression. A small foot forward. A distraction. Call it what you will.

But it was something.

Small. Petite. Different.

And this is what most of us need to remember. That one tiny detail we change will eventually become something slightly less small. And then perhaps something a little bigger again.

Recovery does not always announce itself.

Sometimes it is simply getting up from where you are lying, walking into the kitchen and deciding, for one small moment, not to punish yourself.

Sometimes recovery is a bowl of salad.

And through all those tiny moments, all those seemingly insignificant choices, perhaps a journey becomes possible.

Small steps.

That is what I’m taking.