Everyone I know (including me) hates to fail. There is always a sense of defeat, inadequacy and well… failure! I personally can’t recall a time that I failed and was okay with it. If you have one of these moments, I would love to hear how it worked. Failure can feel so devastating that it makes trying again seem impossible. And I’ll just say it… sometimes trying again is impossible… if we try to succeed on our own. Recovery is this type of failure. We can try again and again to recover from any given situation and just fail over and over and over. Part of resilience in recovery is recognizing when that resilience comes from outside of ourselves. Reaching out to those who have walked the path before us can be the greatest key to our success. Relying on the resilience of others to succeed not only grows our resilience but it creates community for future challenges. Those challenges may not even be ones we personally face but something another is failing at again and again and we are their road to success.

Resilience in recovery looks like failing alone so we can succeed together.

Sarah Deats

Sarah Deats is the Hope Inc. Stories Inspiration Engineer. Her goals are to make a connection with everyone that she can while building community, spreading hope, and sparking change. She believes that while life may not be easy, it is never lived alone.