The Recovery Tweets

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Some Rights Reserved by glenn_e_wilson at Flickr.

People – sorry -tweeple have been finding all sorts of uses for Twitter – live tweets from conferences, on-the-spot reporting from cell phones, group collaboration and even a webinar in 10 tweets, not to mention serious micro-blogging. You can tweet tweeple with common interests by using this format – #recovery, or searching at Twemes, and pick from many groups to join or form a new one (Twibes). You can search for tweeple to follow based on their stated interests (Twellow) and have the equivalent of a chat room using the private message feature. The best way to use the platform is not through the website but through a desktop client like Twhirl, Tweetdeck or Seesmic. You can schedule posting tweets through Tweetlater and add pictures through Twitpic. That’s just a start – twitter applications keep multiplying, and there seems no end of perfectly silly names for them.

Here are a few thoughts about recovery from depression.

  • In early recovery, I tried to forgive myself for the childhood harm I never caused.

  • Why so hard to say honest & feeling words, why so many bad-tasting bitter ones, so many sugary & false?

  • If I could watch my recovery from a distance, I’d see a reaching hungry shadow at my back slowly disappearing.

  • Real depressed men want recovery by changing partners, cities, jobs but always stare at the same mirrored face.

  • Recovery is the small seed in winter that compresses all life in a tiny space & waits for the spring unfolding.

  • If depression is Hell and recovery Purgatory, I’m sure not stopping there. Something’s up ahead.

  • It’s a mystery. Depressed, I hid rage, fear, despair & fought each one in turn. In recovery, they vanished! How?

  • Recovery like conversion sends waves of new self-belief, meaning & purpose crashing through everything.

  • Recovery from depression begins with determination & a quiet stirring of imagination. You will do it.

  • Recovering by medication alone stops symptoms, recovery from within opens life and the future.

  • Now I can hear what people say to me and respond to who they are. Amazement makes me verbal once again.

  • Recovery is a forecast of great weather amid storms of mild air and still broken blue skies.

  • Recovery shocks me with unexpected laughter at the oddest times – beats the opposite.

Where this thinking comes from

A lot of what’s in this post grew out of the work that became my ebook A Mind for Life: From Depression to Living Well — about the mindset, the skills, the daily practice that has helped me stay in recovery. If you’ve been finding your own way back, some of it may speak to you.

Read more about the book →