I’ve felt better over the last 5 days than I have in about 8
years.
Last Saturday night, I came to the decision that I wasn’t going to
go to church the next day. I was really tired and unlikely to wake up on time,
for one, and I had attended a church the previous week that I had been to once
before, and although I enjoyed the service, I didn’t really feel comfortable
there. I felt like an outsider, and no one spoke to me other than the greeter
who gave me a bulletin, and I’m not the type of person to jump into
conversation as a stranger among a group of friends, so I left promptly after
the service was over. I didn’t have any desire to play the same game of
roulette with a different congregation, but I knew that I was going to end up
disappointed and sorry if I didn’t go to church, and that if I did go, I’d get
something out of it, God would use something
to speak to me.
But I didn’t go.
I spent hour after hour watching marathons of renovation shows and
British dramas, obsessively checking my social media accounts during every
commercial break the way that some people check their refrigerators, afraid to
miss out on anything new that might appear. I was angry at myself for not going
to church, or going out of the house, or even getting dressed. After about 14
hours (yeah, disgusting, right?) of binge-watching, the questions bouncing
around in my mind became more prominent than the removal of asbestos tiles and
tone of hardwood that was going into that downtown semi, or the intricate terms
of various alliances that were being formed by historical, fictional
characters.
When, how, and why did this become my life?
The instinctive answer to the “when” was when anxiety became a part
of my life as something that I consciously and constantly had to deal with on a
daily basis, but different occurrences from even before that yielded similar
results. In high school, I tore a ligament in my knee, which ended my athletic
career for the time being, since it was a year between the injury and the
surgery, and a year of recovery following that. After that ordeal, I babied
that leg for years until I developed severe symptoms of overcompensation in the
other leg, which required further medical treatment. I was so afraid of getting
hurt again that my efforts ended up being harmful.
Almost 3.5 years ago, after living as normal of a life as I could
for the previous 4 years dominated by knee injuries, life took another blind
turn. All of a sudden, I was having 3 violent panic attacks a day and had to
wait until I was feeling well to do anything that involved leaving the house,
and even then it was a gamble. Mental illness is SO different than physical
illness. It’s easy to Velcro on a futuristic-looking brace and be excused from
potentially harmful components of a game or workout session. It’s so much
harder to explain to your TA that you haven’t been to your tutorial in a month
because you literally are unable to get out of bed without hyperventilating,
gagging, and crying, and so aren’t able to get to the doctor to get a doctor’s
note.
So the posture quickly becomes one of self-preservation when one’s
safety or well-being seems threatened. That’s something I acknowledge that I
tend to gravitate towards, and I’ve been working on it. To other people, it
sometimes comes across as selfishness, or attention-seeking… There’s been a lot
of healing that’s had to happen over the last year or so as a result of me
believing those lies about myself.
When you have a mental illness, your self-worth is in the toilet. It
is no source of pride or confidence to wake up in the morning and only be able
to cry because the challenges embedded in the tasks of daily living are
insurmountable in your present state, and there’s nothing anyone can do to take
it all away. Adding insult to injury is when:
1)
society tells you that you need
to make your own happiness (kind of impossible when you can’t even make
yourself dinner because you can’t get out to do shopping)
2)
individuals with no experience
or knowledge of the disease treat it like it’s nothing, and you’re being way
overdramatic
3)
the church and its people say
things like “you don’t need to have everything together to go help and serve
this other person/group of people” (meaning: “you don’t have to be a perfect
person” and not “you don’t have to be able to do anything”), or dismiss mental
illness as spiritual inadequacy, or demon possession
It’s been a rough few years, and I’ve been hurt in all of these ways
and more, and it’s chipped away at my self-worth piece-by-piece until there’s
been nearly nothing left and I’ve just gotten up in the morning and cried
because I was still alive and nothing had changed—for weeks on end! I knew that
God loved me, that that was truth,
but when your self-worth is swirling down the pipe after that flush and you
believe that you are nothing, anyone
else’s words and thoughts become more credible than your own, and you can start
believing some really hurtful things about yourself if the people around you
are not supportive, or have a different idea than the gospel of love and
healing.
Permanent change doesn’t happen quickly, or easily, or painlessly,
but the alternative is extremely unappealing. I want to change. I want to be
uninhibited by physical and mental afflictions. I want to be confident in the
truth that God loves me, and to rest in that. I want to take risks and live the
full life that he intended me to live, without guarding myself from irrational
circumstances. God has proven to me time and time again, that although things
are not always comfortable, he is with me, protecting me, and I will be okay. I
want to be convicted of that on a much deeper level this year, and beyond. I’m
making a conscious effort to step into that conviction this year, going out of
my way to go places and do things where I would’ve preferred to stay home and
do nothing before, just to prove to myself that it’s okay, and that I can do it
because I’m relying on the unwavering strength of the Almighty. I’m bound and
determined to get my old life back—my old, uninhibited, confident life—the only
difference this time around is that the Lord is in the picture, and has
convicted me time and time again that things are so much better when he is
there, and that I need him there.
This has been an incredibly slow, and, at times, painful process of
healing that has been full of setbacks, but for the first time ever, I firmly
believe that healing is happening. Healing is real, and it is something that God
wants for his children. It doesn’t happen when or how you tell it to, and not
as a result of you or others doing anything other than asking for it, but it is
absolutely real!
16 So we do not
lose heart. Though our outer
self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed
day by day. 17 For this light
momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all
comparison, 18 as we look not
to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things
that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
– 2 Corinthians 4: 16-18
Truth. I can’t even say it any better than Paul
does here. I put this passage on a sticky note on my desktop almost a year ago,
with little conviction that it was truth, but reasonable conviction that it was
something I needed to let sink in, and it has sat there, and sat there, and I
see it multiple times a day. I’ve scoffed at it, sworn at it, read multiple
commentaries on the passage, called myself the exception to the rule because “there
is no way this is true and I am being renewed because I feel like shit every
day and this is only getting worse and I feel like there’s no one to talk to
about it and God isn’t listening to me…” and then the thing that you’ve been
praying for for years starts actually happening, and you finally gain the
wisdom and perspective to sort of begin to grasp what’s really been going on.
One last resolution: I want to help people affected by mental
illness. This is the loneliest life ever, and even if you have people who
support you, that doesn’t mean that they understand what you’re going through. You’re
always afraid of people dismissing you when you tell them how you really feel,
or that they’ll overreact, or that the people who knew you as the person you
were are going to see you differently and that it will ruin those
relationships. It sucks. I’ve been through it and I have no idea what it looks
like to effectively minister to these people, other than coming alongside,
sitting, listening, and being patient. It’s not very glamourous, and probably
really messy, and likely won’t produce observable change in a relatively short
period of time like some other forms of ministry, but I really believe that it
is very important, and often overlooked because it’s literally invisible most of
the time. It doesn’t have the appeal of building a school in Central America or
holding orphan babies in Africa , or even
helping students meet Jesus, and honestly, that makes me kind of ticked,
because it’s just as needed as all of those things.
In summary: praise the Lord, healing is real, and unresolved angst
that I hope leads to something larger and more important.
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