the solidarity i feel with my new mutuals is unparalleled
the nwtb brainrot is strong but together we are stronger
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there's something about writing recovery. recovery in real life never concludes. it's sedate and day-to-day. there are milestones but mostly you don't realize you've gotten much better. i think. so writing it is strange. writing the slow gradual change of soul feeling like he's a person rather than a thing would be strange. like wouldn't you need tens of thousands of words of slice of life? or you cut it off. or you decide a point in which you'll be done, soul is recovered now. and you know that isn't really true but it has to stop somewhere. that kind of scale is just impossible to have in fiction, right? i don't know. i don't know how i would do it, it's a pretty insurmountable task, or it seems so. portraying the creeping feeling of things getting better. of taking longer and longer to relapse each time. or you could do it to love sound again style and just have a moment, a moment in which he realizes - yes, i can live like this.
these were the reasons that i decided to have the fic just be like. soul gathering a will to live. cause that is so much easier. idk thoughts
^^^
I agree that it's difficult to write recovery. It's certainly nice to have a character have a neat, linear recovery where they're perfectly healed by the end of it and manage to fix all of their problems and issues. It's nice to have a character face all of their challenges and trials, and triumph over them, and then get to say and then they all lived happily ever after.
But in real life that's just. Not how things work. Recovery is not linear. It has ups and downs. Things get better, certainly, they do. Things get less hard. But it's like that one post like— grief never goes away, and it doesn't get smaller; you just grow around it. Things get better, but perfection, some state of complete healed-ness where you can point at them and say "see, they're perfectly healed now!" is just. not attainable.
I mean yeah, the nature of stories is that you need to end it somewhere, which is one of the reasons it's so hard to write recovery in a way that feels fully realistic and true. Because recovery is never truly, fully done. Even at one's best, there would still be times where reminders of things that happened would come up, and it would still sometimes hurt, even just a little bit. It would take a lot of dedicated time to be able to portray something close to the reality of it.
But like. You can patch wounds up and treat them, but that doesn't make them fully go away, it's not just something you can forget about. But you can get patched up and treated and let the wounds heal. And scars are a lot better than just letting yourself bleed.
An ending that feels true would differ from person to person, I think, because everyone's relationship and journey with recovery is different. I don't personally know how I would write it, but that's a mixture of I've never written anything that's super long + writing is a journey and if I actually got the ideas and motivation to sit down and write a long recovery piece, my answer to that question would probably change by the time I was done.
Obviously with recovery one would need to portray, like, backslides, times where things get worse, or relapses, and how that affects their view on their own recovery and how they get past those things, but that's mostly just a given.
It would be a lot of moments strung together to tell the wider story, as recovery often is irl. You would need a lot of slice of life stuff. Especially because that can often be where some of the most important realizations happen with recovery.
But yeah. Writing recovery is difficult, but it's not impossible. Just like recovering oneself is difficult but not impossible. It can be daunting and it would take a lot of effort, just like writing any longform story would be.
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