The problem is simple. After abuse from the very age that I can remember, into adolescence and then the vicious cycle of adulthood, I was never once nurtured.

I know how to nurture. I have brought up eight children with love and acceptance without condition. They have been given the freedom to be themselves. To become themselves. I know how to give another person safety, reassurance and love. I know how to place worth into another human being.

But I can’t find worth in self-nurture. I can’t love myself. I can’t find value in doing things for myself. I simply do not value myself enough to believe I deserve nurturing. And whilst this remains the problem, the cycle of addiction will continue to sit upon my shoulder.

Today I threw myself into recovery. Meeting, meeting, therapy. I did everything I am supposed to do. Everything that should somehow make this easier. Yet still I feel hollow. Alone. Deeply helpless against pain that is as rigid as it is malleable. It bends and winds itself into the very parts of me that were once impenetrable with alcohol.

Willpower and resilience are never enough. Structure is never enough. I don’t know what will ever be enough.

I’m hurting in ways that are raw and weeping. I want the pain to stop. Just for a moment. I want it to end. Just for a moment.

And perhaps this is the part of recovery I never truly understood.

Recovery isn’t an anaesthetic. Alcohol was.

To heal is to hurt. And to sit with the hurt again and again and again.

Recovery is asking me to remain present for the things alcohol once silenced, while gradually building other ways of surviving them. And perhaps that is why this hurts so much. I am not simply learning how not to drink. I am learning how to feel what drinking allowed me not to feel. I am learning how to remain present in a body I spent years trying to escape.

There is no bottle now to blur the edges. No instant escape hatch. No way of pressing mute when the memories become too loud or the loneliness becomes unbearable.

There is just me.

And maybe that is where the real work begins. Because I spent a lifetime learning how to nurture everybody except myself. I know how to comfort a frightened child. I know how to reassure someone who believes they are not enough. I know how to sit beside another human being in their pain and tell them they deserve kindness, patience and another chance.

Yet when that frightened person is me, I don’t know what to do with her.

Maybe I don’t have to love myself yet. Maybe that is asking too much from someone who was never taught how. Perhaps, for now, I just have to stop abandoning myself.

To stay.

To sit beside myself in the hurt, even when every part of me wants to escape it. To learn, slowly, that nurturing myself does not have to begin with believing I deserve it.

Perhaps the belief comes later. For now, maybe I just have to do it anyway.

Recovery isn’t an anaesthetic.

Sobriety took away the anaesthetic.

Recovery is teaching me how to survive without it.