Who Gets to Be “Well”?

I don’t identify as someone in recovery anymore. I did for many years, and for a while it gave me something to hold onto. But over time, I saw what that word had become. I’ve lost too many friends who died trying to hide that they “lost their clean time.” The shame of starting over, the pressure to perform a version of healing that wasn't true to their lives, became deadly.

Recovery has turned into a sanitized performance. A measuring stick. A finish line people are expected to reach and stay at forever. In many mainstream spaces, it now means stability, independence, regulation, and silence. It means being seen as "compliant" and performing wellness in a way that fits the system’s comfort zone. Productive members of society.

But that version of recovery doesn't include everyone. It never really did.

It leaves out Mad folks. Disabled people. Chronically ill bodies. People who use drugs. People who reject diagnosis. People whose survival doesn't look linear or clean or polished. People who live in crisis, in complexity, or who simply don’t want to be “better” in the way the system defines it.

So many recovery spaces have become harmful. They demand people come off medications. They ban talk about “outside issues” like trauma, racism, abuse, or poverty, as if these things aren’t deeply tied to our pain. They frame accountability as control. They punish recurrence or distress. And when someone can’t keep up with the performance, they’re labeled as unready or unmotivated.

Wellness becomes something you earn by acting the right way. Something disconnected from the structural violence that made us unwell. A product. A performance. A goalpost that keeps moving.

But not everyone heals. Some of us live in ongoing survival. Some of us will never be considered well by dominant standards, and that’s not a personal failure. That is a reflection of a world that refuses to make space for us.

We need care models that resist binaries. That let people show up as they are. That center the folks most often pushed out and punished. Because healing, if it’s real, should never be about becoming easier for systems to manage. It should be about reclaiming our autonomy, our truths, and our right to exist without apology.