Sometimes, I still have bad days. Days where my brain reminds me
that it’s still sick, despite all the positive self-talk, getting off the
drugs, and being discharged from specialists and therapists. What I heard from
all of those people, myself included at the time, was only the same message
that any mental patient dreams of hearing in their heart of hearts: “it’s gone,
you don’t need this label anymore, you’re good.” A more accurate translation of
those words and occurrences would be something like: “now we’ve reached a point
where you’re relatively stable, and you’ve demonstrated the ability to not
control, but manage the symptoms.” I still have bad days, where sometimes I
feel like the best way to manage the nausea, lightheadedness, panic, and
general depression is to just stop everything and stay out of the way, and try
to think about what’s really going on.
And I feel like people judge me for it, but not as harshly as I judge
myself. “No one else cries and hits themselves while they drive. No one else
has to worry about having to make the last minute call over whether or not they’ll
be okay to go to work, and worry about rescheduling clients if the day seems
too big of a stretch. No one else talks about this as openly as you do. No one
else worries about whether or not people are too concerned about them. You must
only do this because you’re selfish and want attention. No one else wants to
see you like this or try to figure it out, so just go be alone, don’t get
anyone else involved.” It’s hard to sift out the lies from the not-lies.
If your mind is like a sieve, the lies are sand. They’re very, very
present, but only for a brief moment. The truths are like rocks, they’re not
going anywhere, but sometimes when a fresh load of sand joins the party, they’re
harder to find. Sometimes the panning turns the rocks over, exposing a new side
of the truth, which can be scary at first, but it gets thrown into the roster
with all the other truths once its threat is debunked. Then, sometimes there
are clumps of dirt that are hard to distinguish from rocks; the lies that look
and sound so much like truth that you have to poke and chip away at them over
and over again, from all sides before their fallibility becomes apparent.
It’s okay if there’s more than rocks in your sieve. There’s never
going to be only rocks. Sometimes there are more dirt clumps than rocks, and the
rocks are hard to identify, so you poke everything to see what stands and what
disintegrates. God’s a rock, and I’ve spent some time poking at him recently,
but he’s still in the sieve. I’m poking everything. I’m sorry if that makes me
selfish, or doubtful, or stupid, or neurotic, or anything else I shouldn’t
desire to be. God always has been here and will always continue to be here, but
he isn’t a bandaid that I only break out when the bleeding gets bad. I
absolutely don’t believe that he’s just a magical man in the sky, waiting for
me to pray some magic words at the right moment before he feels like he can
cure me of this disease. He gave me a brain, and although it sometimes doesn’t
work the way it should, I think it’s really trying to believe that his purpose
is greater than this affliction. It gets hard to believe on days like this, but
these days also really make me realize that I have zero grounds to put any hope,
investment, or downpayment on myself as a human individual—I am nothing, other humans are nothing, so my hope has to be in the
Lord.
So, sometimes I have bad days, but God is sovereign every day. That’s
cool.
