I started the morning with a video a friend sent me. In it, a guy was talking about his workout attitude. He had been all-or-nothing. If he couldn’t do it perfectly, he wouldn’t do it at all.

That hit me. Hard. I’ve been circling around this idea for years: literal thinking, binary thinking, the trap of all-or-nothing.

An ex once told me I flip my emotions off like a switch. It was cruel. Cruel because I believed it. Because for a long time, I thought that’s who I was: someone who went from 100 to 0 in an instant.

But therapy, and the sheer privilege of time and space to sit with myself, has taught me otherwise. It’s not a switch. It’s a dial. And yes, obviously, the dial goes up to 13.

From a distance, you can’t see the erosion. The bumps and bruises, the micro-aggressions, the little assaults we tuck away. At work. In love. In friendship. In family. What looks like a sudden flip is almost always years in the making. The dial has been slowly turning, feelings flickering and static, until finally… it bottoms out. Everyone sees the effect, not the quiet work that set it in motion.

Which brings me back to the video. The man in it said he sets both a floor and a ceiling. The floor is the minimum—what he commits to no matter what. The ceiling is aspirational, almost mythical. His floor was something like 100 pushups and counting his mala beads, and his ceiling was basically climb Mount Olympus and chill with Zeus. You get the idea.

When I was recovering from burnout, mental break, crash, call it what you will, I had to set my own floor. Mine was not 100 pushups. My bare minimum was simple:

• Take your medication.
• Sit in meditation.

That was it. Two things. Logged each day in a pleasing pink journal just so I’d know I was keeping the promise. But what about the ceiling? After a week, I added a third M: Move.

Move could be anything that wasn’t strictly necessary. Walking to another room counted. Stretching in a sunbeam counted. One day it was the slowest imaginable walk around the neighborhood, just to see if I could spot a pretty flower or a friendly cat.

Medicate. Meditate. Move. The three M’s became my dial, my floor, my ceiling.

It’s easy to think we’re built for switches. On or off. All or nothing. But I’ve learned that recovery lives in the in-between. In the dial that shifts. In the floor you cling to when you can’t reach higher. In the ceiling you might never touch but still glance at sometimes, just to remember it’s there. Because some ceilings are worth marveling at, even if you’ll never touch them.

And here’s the hardest part to admit: the only reason I was able to recover at all is because I had the safety to see it this way. Time, therapy, privilege, space. Without that? Maybe I’d still believe the lie that I’m a switch, that I’m all or nothing. And I don’t like to think about where that would lead me.

But the truth is: it’s always a dial. Always.

And that’s just as true for recovery as it is for growth. It wasn’t one appointment, or one meditation, or one pill, or one conversation that brought me back. It was hundreds of them, stacked up and layered over months. Years. One notch at a time it turned, until, seemingly out of nowhere, here I am. MMM is still my cozy floor, and right now my ceiling is full of light.

What’s your floor right now? The bare minimum that keeps you steady when the dial turns down?