My struggle with depression – part three

Hello all, I know I’ve been AWOL for a few days so let me explain (no too much to ’splain, let me sum up) I gave an analogy to NorEaster and Michelle about how writing about bad stuff is like sucking the poison out of a snake bite.  Well I forgot that sometimes sucking the poison out can make you ill all over again, point being I got a little sick from the poison I was sucking out.  That is why I went AWOL.  But I’m back now and if you all will allow I am ready to suck out the poison and after that look back on all of it the dark spots and the light and smile about it knowing it has ALL made me who I am.

Once summer hit I moved off campus and into a house with a few of the girls from the church I was (kind of) attending.  Despite the fact that I did so well in my classes freshman year it wasn’t that great of a year and the summer was shaping up to be more of the same as far as my moods went.  I felt alone, isolated and un-natural.  My view of the world was this – everyone was always smiling and it looked like their lives were perfect or if they weren’t happy it was usually because something really horrible had happened in their lives.  And all of this only made me feel worse.  I should’ve been happy and I wasn’t and I felt like there was no reason I shouldn’t have been.  I had a pretty awesome family and nothing terribly traumatic (like parental abuse) had happened to me.  What was wrong with me?  It tore me up and made me even more hesitant to confide in anyone about what I was going through.  I spent my summer working again at a restaurant in Greeley and since I worked nights I spent most of my days either sleeping or watching movies and since most of the people I had gotten to know over the school year worked during the day and were free nights I felt even more isolated.  I know that my childhood wasn’t perfect; my family moved about every three years, we took on foster kids, I had a difficult older brother (but then again I wasn’t the perfect sister), my grandmother developed Alzheimer’s, as previously mentioned we experienced discrimination due to my dad’s job and we had several bad experiences as far as church was concerned.  But on the other hand I had parents that were loving and open, a pretty cool older brother (albeit difficult) and my family supported me in my decisions.  So you can see where the confusion about why my moods and thoughts went where they did developed.  Towards the end of the summer my brother joined the Navy and my parents moved to South Dakota, I stayed in Greeley.  The church I was (kind of) going to also hosted a college group church in the same building which I went to faithfully; I enjoyed the college group more than the regular church, I felt they were more open and honest and real.  This next part is difficult for me to put into words so far every time I have tried it just doesn’t come out right so I am going to start by sharing a dream I had that preceded what I consider to be one of the most important developments in my life.  A house sits in a field there are trees on one side and the house looks to be a beautiful farmhouse.  But on closer inspection there appears to be something wrong.  There is a large crowd of people being frantically directed by a young woman to work on the house.  They are frenetically trying to protect something inside the house from somebody, anybody.  There is a lot of shouting and gesturing going on until a man walks up; he walks with his head held high and full of a natural confidence straight to the young woman.  The workers stop and watch.  She looks up at him and he smiles down on her.  He says something that is barely heard it could be “the deadline is up,” or “this house will fall.”  The young woman scoffs and rebelliously asks how that will happen.  He smiles and there is a certain sadness in his eyes and he looks over where a wrecking ball has taken up residence next to the house.  The woman panics and makes an aborted attempt to rush towards the house but it is too late.  The wrecking ball has swung towards the second story and now it is obscured for a moment by dust.  The young woman looks betrayed but the man simply gestures towards the house.  The house still stands but it is different.  The house has changed from its original design, it no longer hides the young woman from the world but now it offers shelter for her and anyone else who would come down the road.  Now let me explain this in relation to the next part of the story.  For about a year and a half I had been taking drives in my car and usually wound up sitting in a parking lot either by target or next to the building the church was held in and crying.  I always wished someone from the church would find me and finally see behind my mask while at the same time (without actually realizing it) I was terrified someone would see Me.  So anyway the same day I had the aforementioned dream I went to the college group since it was one of the rare nights I had free to be able to go.  In the last few years I have come to the realization that the part I enjoy most and feel closest to God is during the music portion.  I’m not sure what it is but the music lets me let go and live in the moment, for me it feels like the one time (other than when I’m dreaming) that I can forget whatever is going on in my life and just be.  During the music portion that night I once again had let everything go, I wore no mask, I simply was.  Well apparently that night God had decided would be the night I would get what I’d asked for but never expected.  I forget the song that was playing but it moved me and in that moment God reached in and took away my ‘walls’ and my mask.  I couldn’t have felt more naked if I’d suddenly lost all my clothes.  I responded in terror.  Usually when I began crying that soul-shuddering cry I’d experienced before usually I can stuff all the emotion into a box and forget about it in a matter of minutes.  That night I couldn’t stop crying.  I wanted to, I desperately wanted to, I felt like I was reaching out and grasping for what used to be solid brick and instead was finding air.  This was God’s answer and now I had to actually deal with everything I’d shoved behind those walls and I had to be real with people and trust God that my heart could handle it.  I was not sure I was onboard with God’s plan.

My struggle with depression – part two

After I graduated high school I went directly to college in Greeley, CO, my major was declared as pre-journalism with a minor in military science.  The summer beforehand was fairly un-eventful I worked a few jobs and spent most of the summer either working or sleeping.  As soon as I got to school I began to face some of the same questions I had spent the summer trying to forget – who was I, who was God, did I even believe in God anymore, why did those people at “The church” do what they did, what should I believe, was this all (life) worth it, why did these horrible suicidal thoughts keep occurring to me, why couldn’t I be happy like everyone else and why did I feel so empty and dark inside?  I spent my days wearing my ‘happy’ mask and pretending that everything was okay and as long as someone was around I was “fine” but as soon as the doors shut and the lights went off I fell apart.  It is difficult for me to recall my mindset during those times but I feel like it is necessary and worth it to understand what drove me to those times when I seriously considered suicide in order that I might see the warning signs if it should happen again.  I started keeping a journal, an idea I got from one of Frank E. Peretti’s characters, so that I could try and understand the dark, twisted thoughts that ran through my head and I felt like God had abandoned me – I called this feeling “the silence.”  I wrote things like “the silence hurts a little less today” and made declarations like “I will figure this out no matter how long it takes.”  One night as I sat in my dorm room feeling utterly lost I picked up the phone and held it to my ear until the dial tone turned into a busy signal and that turned into dead air and talked into the phone as though I was talking to God and just pled with Him to pick up the other end.  If He did that night (metaphorically) I don’t remember.  I just remember feeling lost and alone and hurt.  This next part is quite frankly a miracle; I had decided that I wanted nothing more to do with God and church but when I got a postcard in my mailbox about a college church group off-campus I searched out the location and went.  I still look back on that and go “what got into me?”  The answer is obvious; this was God’s way of picking up the other line.  Anyway I began going and through that to one of the small bible study groups that met during the week.  I started going regularly and I put on such a good show of being okay that I nearly believed it until I started on my way home and then I’d sit in the parking lot crying and calling out to God to take all this hurt away, erase it and make it as though it’d never happened.  I was trying to understand why I felt so depressed and why I’d think that my family would be better off without me.  I just remember feeling like there was this great big sucking hole of darkness and it was slowly swallowing me whole.  But I kept going to this bible study group and every time I went I felt like they might be able to understand what I was going through.  I still held back though, unwilling to let anyone get close to me again and I think they sensed that somehow.  I remember at the end of the semester the last time we met before Christmas break we went around the room and shared a little bit about how the semester had gone for us and what had changed for us and I, truthfully for a change, told them that I was surprised that I had ever come back a second time.  One of the guys said he was surprised as well given how I acted the first time.  Christmas break was pretty good, I honestly don’t remember much about it, according to my bro it didn’t compare to other Christmas’s we’d had.  Second semester went about like the first.  I was still struggling with figuring out my faith and belief and moods as well as understanding them.  I went through up and downs though it felt more like a lot of down than any ups.  I remember days where I felt fairly normal and then I’d start thinking about “The church” and it would set off a storm of thoughts and emotions beginning with anger and usually ending with pain and I’d be miserable the rest of the day.  Then there were the days where I just wanted to hide in a corner and cry.  And then there were the days where I was so angry that any little thing would send me off in a rampage of swearing and hitting my computer.  I felt like my carefully constructed façade that was supposed to protect me was tearing me apart.  It was an odd year for me.  On the one hand I was going to a bible study group pretty regularly and finding more and more that I was enjoying it while on the other hand I was digging deep into several other religions trying to find answers to my questions while discussing things with my atheist roommate, who incidentally was researching Mormonism.  I bought books on Mormonism, Taoism, Judaism, Buddhism as well as several C.S. Lewis books – I was searching everywhere for an answer including the Bible.  On top of all this I was falling apart.  Now I want to make it clear that the only reason I don’t talk about my family a whole lot is because I didn’t tell them what was going on and I’m not sure they knew but they supported me in school and helped me as much I would let them in my search for an answer.  One last note before I end this “installment” – towards the middle of the year, probably sometime after Christmas break I was sitting in my dorm room reading through one of the Old Testament books of the Bible and reading C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity I was asking myself again whether or not I believed in God and I decided that whether or not I felt His presence and despite having been hurt by “His people” I believed in Him and I haven’t wavered from that decision since.  But my trial and search were far from over.