Recovery is Boring

By Ayoposi Ojelabi · 8 September 2026

Essay · 7 min read

Recovery from a serious illness is one of the hardest things a person can go through. That experience will vary depending on the illness, but I can speak most honestly from the perspective of neurological recovery.

If I had to describe recovery in a single sentence, I would call it a boring and uncertain process.

That probably isn’t how most people imagine it. We tend to picture recovery as a steady climb towards normal life, with clear milestones that everyone can see. In reality, it is often much quieter than that. It demands patience, repetition, and a willingness to continue even when nothing appears to be changing.

I think of the physiotherapy sessions during rehabilitation, where every exercise was broken down into instructions so basic they would have embarrassed me before I got sick.

Lift. Hold. Release. Rest. Repeat.

What once required no thought at all now demanded my full concentration, and even then, the body didn’t always cooperate.

There is nothing dramatic about that kind of work. It is the opposite of dramatic. But it is where recovery actually happens.

Sometimes, you are the only person who can measure whether you are getting better, because the progress is too small for anyone else to notice.

People often ask how you’re feeling. Whether you’ve improved. It is a simple question, but not always a simple one to answer.

How do you explain progress when there is no obvious physical evidence to point to?

Some days you feel stronger. The next day you feel weaker again. One afternoon you manage something that seemed impossible the week before, only to struggle with it the following morning.

It can feel confusing, but I have learned that fluctuation is not necessarily failure. Sometimes it is simply what recovery looks like.

I remember the first time I stood using a supported standing frame. It wasn’t independence. The frame carried most of my weight, and a nurse stayed close in case something gave.

Nothing about that moment would have looked like progress to anyone watching.

But months later, I was able to perform a sit to stand on my own. That difference, invisible in any single session, only became visible by looking backward across many boring, identical-seeming days.

But even that progress has not been straightforward.

There have been times when I have managed the sit to stand, only to find that the following days were more difficult again. Something I had done before could suddenly feel much harder. That can be discouraging, especially when you are tempted to think that being able to do something once should mean you can now do it consistently.

But these are simply things I have observed in my own recovery.

Sometimes the body gives you something back and then makes you work for it again.

It can look like going backwards.

It can feel like going backwards.

But I have learned not to treat every difficult day as proof that nothing has changed.

One thing I have come to understand is that recovery is not only about the body. In my own experience, my mind had to change before I could recognise what my body was already doing.

For a long time, I measured myself against the person I had been before illness. Every comparison ended in disappointment because I was looking at everything I had lost instead of everything I had slowly regained.

The moment I stopped asking, “Why am I not who I used to be?” and started asking, “What can I do today that I couldn’t do yesterday?” recovery became easier to recognise.

I have been on this road for a long time now. I still receive IVIG every two weeks. There is no date on a calendar where this ends and ordinary life resumes.

It is still boring.

It is still uncertain.

There were moments when my medical team told me there was nothing more they could do, and moments when I was reminded how little was known about my condition or what my future might look like. Those conversations were difficult to hear, but they did not become the final chapter.

So I learned to live differently.

Not by measuring my life against some distant finish line, but by taking it one day at a time.

Some days are good. Some are frustrating. Some feel as though nothing has changed at all.

But recovery is not always measured by dramatic breakthroughs. More often, it is measured by the quiet accumulation of small things that almost nobody else can see: a spoonful of rice after months of not eating, a sentence typed slowly with a device instead of a keyboard, a sit to stand performed without anyone holding the frame.

The strange thing about recovery is that the days which feel the least significant are often the ones quietly rebuilding your life.

And sometimes, that is enough reason to keep going.

Before You Go

If this reflects something in your own experience, I write occasionally about illness, recovery, and identity. No frequency pressure, unsubscribe any time.

Recovery is Boring

Further reading and getting in touch

Before You Go