Your Life Fell Apart… Now what?

Recovery isn’t about getting back to who you were. It’s about rebuilding your capacity to live again.

Sometimes life knocks you down.

And sometimes it seems to look at you lying there and think, You know what? I’m not finished yet.

A marriage ends.

You lose someone you love.

Your health changes.

Your job disappears.

Your business takes a hit.

You make a mistake that costs you dearly.

Or several things pile on top of each other so quickly that you barely have time to process one before the next arrives.

You keep functioning because you have to.

You go to work. You pay the bills. You answer messages. You take care of whatever needs taking care of.

And when somebody asks how you’re doing, you probably say something along the lines of, “I’m hanging in there.”

Sometimes that means exactly what it sounds like.

You are hanging in there.

So what do you do when life really does hand you your ass?

I’ve had some experience with that.

The year life came at me from every direction

For me, one of those periods began in 2013.

In February of that year, while I was away on vacation with my son, my mother was hospitalized with a brain bleed. She had another episode after I returned home, followed by a third, much more serious bleed that required emergency brain surgery in Sudbury.

At about the same time, I managed to come down with bronchitis twice, once in February and again in March.

My mother died in June.

She was 74.

Two weeks later, on July 5, I crashed my motorcycle.

I was badly injured.

I spent months in physical therapy and rehabilitation. I couldn’t work for approximately two months, and when I returned to dentistry, I started with half days and lighter schedules because that was all I could physically manage.

There were significant financial consequences to the business, even with insurance.

And just when I thought surely life had run out of ideas, I found myself dealing with a professional complaint that eventually went to arbitration.

By then, my depression had become worse than it had ever been.

Eventually I reached a point where I was contemplating how I might end my life.

So yes, 2013 was rough.

Very rough.

But I’m not telling you this because I want this article to be about everything that went wrong in my life.

Quite the opposite.

I’m telling you because I learned something from what came afterward.

And what came afterward was not some dramatic comeback.

It was much more ordinary than that.

I didn’t bounce back

We use that phrase a lot.

Bounce back.

It makes recovery sound quick and tidy.

You get knocked down. You spring back up. Maybe you learn something profound along the way.

That wasn’t my experience.

My recovery took years.

There were periods when I was doing well and periods when I wasn’t. Some parts of my life improved faster than others. I could be functioning professionally while struggling emotionally. I could have a great week and then suddenly find myself having a lousy one.

Things I thought I had dealt with sometimes resurfaced later.

And life, of course, did not stop happening while I was recovering.

There were more losses. More changes. More occasions where I had to adjust again.

Looking back, that doesn’t seem unusual to me anymore.

It seems human.

The problem is that when we expect ourselves to “bounce back,” messy recovery can start to look like failed recovery.

I don’t think it is.

A different way of thinking about recovery

The idea for this article came to me while I was driving to work listening to a podcast about physical rehabilitation.

It immediately reminded me of the period after my motorcycle accident.

Nobody expected me to walk into physiotherapy, do a couple of exercises and be back to normal.

My body had been injured. I had lost some of my ability to do what I had previously been able to do, so the objective was to gradually rebuild that capacity.

When I returned to work, I didn’t go straight back to my old schedule.

I worked half days.

I carried a lighter load.

As I recovered, I gradually did more.

Nobody looked at me and said, “Come on, Tom. You used to work full days. What’s wrong with you?”

That would have been ridiculous.

I was rehabilitating.

And the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether we could extend some of that same understanding to the rest of our lives.

When I talk about rehabilitating your life, I don’t mean trying to return yourself perfectly to the person you were before everything happened.

I mean rebuilding your capacity to live again.

To function.

To handle responsibility.

To enjoy things.

To connect with people.

To make decisions.

To trust yourself.

And eventually to start thinking about what you actually want again.

That last one is important.

Because when you’ve been dealing with crisis for a long time, much of life becomes reactive.

You deal with whatever is directly in front of you.

The appointment.

The bill.

The problem at work.

The family situation.

Whatever crisis has decided to introduce itself that particular week.

There isn’t always much energy left over for asking, What do I actually want?

But eventually, if recovery continues, that question starts becoming available again.

Progress can be surprisingly hard to recognize

One of the frustrating things about recovering from a difficult period is that the progress can be almost invisible while it’s happening.

Physical rehabilitation gives you numbers.

Your range of motion improves.

You can lift more.

You can walk farther.

Life doesn’t always give you those measurements.

Sometimes improvement looks like realizing that you made it through an entire afternoon without thinking about the thing that had previously occupied your mind constantly.

Sometimes you notice you’re looking forward to the weekend again.

You laugh more easily.

You pick up your camera.

You go for a motorcycle ride.

You call somebody because you actually want to talk to them.

You start making plans that have nothing to do with solving a problem.

You find yourself curious about something.

That curiosity matters.

So does enjoyment.

So does wanting.

Those things can disappear when life has taken enough out of you, and when they start coming back, I think we should pay attention.

You may be doing better than you realize.

You don’t have to fix your whole life at once

This is another thing I wish I had understood earlier.

When several areas of life have gone sideways, the temptation is to look at the whole mess and think you have to straighten everything out immediately.

You probably don’t.

If you’re genuinely overwhelmed, deal with what needs dealing with most.

Your health may need attention first.

Or your finances.

Or your relationship.

Or your mental health.

There are times when simply getting stable is a very worthwhile objective.

Then, as you regain some capacity, you can ask more of yourself.

Maybe you exercise again.

Maybe you reconnect with someone.

Maybe you finally deal with something you’ve been avoiding.

Maybe you spend Saturday doing something that has absolutely no productive value whatsoever but makes you feel like yourself again.

That counts too.

I think we sometimes forget that enjoyment is part of being alive.

Recovery cannot consist entirely of fixing problems.

At some point, you need some reasons to enjoy the life you’re working so hard to rebuild.

And as you start carrying more again, you may discover that you’re stronger in some ways than you expected.

Not because whatever happened to you was secretly a gift.

I don’t believe that.

But because you have experience now.

You know something about yourself that you didn’t know before.

You know you can get knocked down.

And you also know that, given enough time and the right support, you can get moving again.

There’s confidence in that.

Eventually, you get to ask a much better question

For a long time, I think I assumed recovery meant getting back to normal.

Getting my old life back.

Getting the old me back.

But I never really did.

And sitting here now, I don’t particularly want to.

That doesn’t mean I’m grateful for everything that happened.

I would rather my mother hadn’t died.

I would rather I hadn’t crashed the motorcycle two weeks later.

I would rather I hadn’t gone through the professional, financial and emotional turmoil that followed.

Some things simply suck.

We don’t have to put a motivational poster around them.

But those experiences became part of my life.

And over time, they changed some of the questions I was asking.

I became less interested in trying to recreate exactly what had existed before.

I became more interested in what I wanted to create next.

That shift took years.

Eventually I got to a point where I felt worthy enough to demand the best that life had to offer.

Not entitled to it.

Worthy enough to go after it.

Worthy enough to invest in myself.

Worthy enough to take some chances.

Worthy enough to ask whether I was actually living the life I wanted—or simply continuing the one I already had.

That is a much more interesting place to be.

Because once you’re no longer using every ounce of energy just to stay afloat, you can finally look around.

And you can ask:

What matters to me now?

What do I want more of?

What do I want less of?

What have I been tolerating that I no longer want to tolerate?

What have I been putting off?

Where am I playing small?

What would make me feel alive again?

Those are very different questions from the ones you ask in survival mode.

And, in my experience, they are far more exciting.

This is where coaching can help

There are parts of recovery where coaching is not the right tool.

If someone is in crisis, seriously depressed, actively grieving, dealing with trauma or needs medical care, therapy or another form of professional support may be exactly what is appropriate.

But there can come another stage.

You’re functioning again.

Life is steadier.

You’ve got your feet underneath you.

And yet something is still nagging at you.

You know you don’t want to simply return to the life you had before.

You also aren’t completely sure what comes next.

That is where coaching can become very useful.

Not because a coach has the answer.

But because having somebody challenge you, ask better questions, help you notice the things you’re avoiding and hold you accountable to the decisions you make can help turn “What now?” into something much more concrete.

For me, that is one of the most interesting parts of personal growth.

There comes a point when you stop defining yourself by what happened to you.

You start becoming interested in what you’re going to do with the life that remains.

And that is where things can get exciting again.

So if life has handed you your ass, I’m not going to tell you to bounce back.

Take the pressure off.

Start where you are.

Rebuild your capacity.

Notice the small signs that life is starting to feel like yours again.

And when you eventually have enough room to look beyond recovery, don’t automatically assume the goal is to recreate who you used to be.

You may have a much better question available to you now:

What do I want my life to look like from here?

That question changed a lot for me.

It might change a lot for you too.

If you’ve reached the point where you’re ready to start answering it, that is the kind of work I do at Vivus Coaching.