Perhaps the greatest danger posed by your illness is its unending intention to undermine and ultimately efface your identity. It gives you shame, then tells you that shame comes from who you are, and both for the feeling of shame and the belief that it's rightfully placed, you begin to attack yourself. Through self-criticism, you learn to keep watch for all the arenas in which you do not stack up to the standard. You see so many failings, you begin to think more poorly of yourself, and to raise your standards, swear your greatest effort on doing better, doing - indeed - the best that can be done. This moves you into perfectionism, and because the point of these standards (for the illness that put them there) is to prove you cannot live up to them, you do not manage to do so. You do not manage to become perfect, but you manage to believe you must be. Your standards grow higher as your self-esteem drops; thus, the gap between who you see yourself as and who you believe you should be widens tremendously. It threatens to engulf you.

Here, illness, addiction, disease, or disorder enters with the same subtle swiftness and presents a plan. Failed as you are, it isn't safe and prudent to leave your life in the hands of your instincts, intelligence, and emotions. Something must be done to counter who you are, to keep you as closely tethered to the-right-way as possible. Your essence, which has brought you such shame, defeats you before you have a chance. Your inability to do well, the illness contends, comes from who you are, and if you can just be less yourself, you will manage to be less of a delinquent.

You may not always have understood that this proposal took place when it did. You may have slowly fallen into a pattern, not asking how it started, whom it served, whether it felt right to you, and why. Or you may have overwhelming memories of conversations such as these, where - beaten down by the self-hatred and shame - you pleaded for a way out or an end. At that point, however it came about, when you had suffered long enough to believe you deserved it, and long enough to feel desperate for a change, the proposal went into action. The illness took the reigns, completely; where it had subtly planted ideas and emotions, it now conspicuously reigned. It engulfed you.

It might have done so slowly, pulling you into a new life - its life - carefully enough to ensure that you would feel safer, more in control, replenished, to ensure that you would not fight. Mental illness has the awful ability to access our minds, to use our own intelligences against us; so, it engulfed you in a manner specific to you. It convinced you that your identity was worthless, then used that very identity to ensure its hold on you. The necessity of knowing who you are to trap you in its hold is one of the greatest proofs of that fact disputed by addiction: that your identity is distinct, that your needs are important and unique, and that anything which hopes to succeed in your life must meet and fit, impeccably, with who you are.

Who are you? That question grows difficult as it grows more important. The illness has decided who you are, and uses its knowledge to torture and eventually kill you. Its ability to exist within your mind, to see through to your deepest needs, beliefs, fears, and desires gives it power, power that you don't have to go without. You can come into that power yourself, come to the counsel within you for guidance, strength, and all else that you need. You can fight fire with fire if you will suspend your belief in the perspective you've developed in sickness, long enough to examine that perspective, to examine what within you has made it necessary and has allowed it to thrive. If you follow the threads of what is and is not working in your life, you will undoubtedly find who you are. And with that information the battle against this disease becomes one you can win. You gain all the information of your enemy, without the twisted perspective of it. You come to an understanding of the information that is true, compassionate, and conducive to your life.

Why do you live? Why do you deserve? Why do you continue? Because only you can do so. Hold onto this, if you will hold onto anything: no one will ever live your life again. No one will ever have the combination of experiences, feelings, knowings, skills, talents, affections, relationships that you have. You may not know why your life's collection is made up as it is; you may question the pain within it. There's no reason for you not to question. Better to question and stay on guard against false answers, ones that try to douse the light of your healing with heavy shame and dark thoughts. Question, stay aware, and respect yourself as an individual without equal, in both the world and time. Follow the threads of your life to your identity; follow the intuition of your identity and do so without shame.

Why must your needs be met? Why do you deserve compassion? Why does your life matter? Inarguably, your life matters because it is yours. You deserve compassion because you exist, because you need it. Your needs must be met because there are your needs. They are instructions which will never again be given, and the only way to follow through on them, to live integrously and with respect to your own duty and worth, is to complete desire with action, need with nourishment, emotion with compassion and understanding. Illness threatens your identity because it knows it cannot thrive if you know your own power. The search for identity, then, begins everything. To recover, you must recover who you are. You must understand yourself and treat yourself kindly. Venture, even fearfully, toward your identity. You do not need to believe yet; you only need to hold out a small doubt against the illness' reality. You do not need to feel this power to begin looking for it; you only need to withhold a portion of your belief against your illness. Keep something for yourself, and you will find yourself in that something. You will find the way to work out of your illness, the purpose of your life, the unbelievable feelings of worth and self-love. Dare to imagine it. You already know how it will feel. You already know that this gift, so long buried and attacked, will give you more and matter most of everything you'll ever come to know.