17/01/2026
Recovery is a journey!
Recovery is a road we travel, sometimes windy sometimes we hit a gravelled edge but still we are travelling on our recovery journey. Sometimes it might feel like we have crashed the car but we make some repairs and get back on that road.
Recovery for me is a way of life, a journey and not a destination. There is no if I get to that one place I will be fine, all is good and there is no more work to do for me or on myself. It is all the small and big things I do to be myself. The best version of myself I can be, learning and growing every step of the way. I am without a doubt more myself now than I was when I first walked in to this place. A me that i later learnt was stuck in survival mode filled with trauma responses and coping mechanisms as my way of life.
Today I was in Magill. A suburb I had not been in for a very long time. So I decided to make a stop at a place that changed my life in many ways. A moment for some self reflection on the journey since I arrived as an outpatient back in 2014.
Kahlyn hospital as it was then was the place I had been told to go. It was in a rather peaceful location. I remembered today the feeling of parking down the street under the shade, the servo I'd stop at and what it felt like both when i arrived and the day i left. I was referred by my Psychiatrist. I had given myself to the process by this time. I had been walking life in what felt like a living hell for almost 3 years since my breakdown. Everything hurt. I was just barely surviving. Gripping to life with every finger nail.
So this is where I completed 40 weeks of Dialectical behavioural therapy, 10 weeks of balancing Bipolar, 6 weeks of self esteem building and maybe 8 weeks of cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety. Anyone who has followed that path will know it was HARD!! It was probably the hardest 18 months of my life. Having to get up and drive myself to therapy week in and week out all while still seeing my Psychiatrist, Psychologist and GP regularly. It was a time where I walked in as one person and walked out someone different. Definitely battered and bruised emotionally but different. It took a long time to practice the things I had learnt and work out how I would adapt my life, who I was and who I wanted to be.
I sat here today thinking about some of the conversations I had here, I sat in that gazebo every week. I cried in that gazebo and made some friends in that gazebo. It was a time where I learnt that I was not alone on this journey of life with a suitcase full of pain, suffering, struggle and trauma. The moments where I heard me too and that my pain was also hard for others to hear. It was a time where I showed up for myself every week to help myself, to learn about my diagnoses my brain, my failures and my successes. It was the first time at 39 ish I think, that i knew no one was able to save me from my pain as much as I had cried for that or gotten angry about that for a very long time. It was me. I have me! I need to heal and work on being the best version of myself so I can move forward with life and live it the way the universe intended me to. It was not that long into it that I knew I wanted to work in mental health and by the end I had founded SA Bushfire Garden Revival and became a volunteer in mental and emotional wellbeing.
Therapy is hard. Showing up for ourselves is hard. What is harder is not showing up, doing the work and living with regret. Well for me anyway.
A huge shoutout and thanks to the amazing women I met there that I still think of today. I would not have been able to get through all of that without seeing faces of people who were happy to see me, especially when i felt like no one was happy to see me in my own life apart from my kids. Love you always from afar 💙
Kristy
