In The Depths

There is no simple formula for living with anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. No matter what a self help book has told you, there aren’t four steps to overcome depression or a one size fits all healing journey. This is a glimpse into my life with depression. 

Many of you reading this might be shocked or even become worried, when you find out I struggle daily with depression. My natural personality is very outgoing, strong, confident, and bubbly. I love to laugh. I love to be around people. You see that’s a misunderstanding about people that deal with depression, some might think a “fun” person or someone who is the life of the party can’t be depressed. I am here to peel away some of my layers to show you how depression and anxiety have entered into my life and tried their hardest to steal my life.

My earliest memories of anxiety are in the fourth grade. I was so worried about performance and maintaining the perfect life. By high school, it spiraled out of control and I found myself in weekly counseling and daily medication for depression. Panic attacks then entered in and became a monthly occurrence. My senior year I had a nervous breakdown. I remember being at church camp and on the way home crying. I couldn’t stop the tears. I felt unseen. I had been wearing a mask for so long no one knew who I was and more importantly I didn’t know who I was. I need you to know that on paper I had everything. A boyfriend, great friends, actually amazing friends, captain of the swim team, officer for SGA, and several other clubs. I was an FCA huddle leader and stood up in front of my peers almost every Friday morning and shared the Gospel. My family was well known in the community and respected. So why did I find myself wanting to just stay in bed and cry? Why did I find myself applying for colleges so far away that no one would know me? Well, that’s exactly what I did. I ended up going to college four hours away and I didn’t know a single person. Finally I was ready to be who I wanted to be. The only problem was, I would find myself over those four years failing over and over again at just trying to create a new mask to wear. I had no idea who I was, much less who God created me to be.

It was somewhere in my mid twenties when I started accepting the ride of depression and anxiety for what it is. Just that, a wave of emotions that knocks you down when you least expect it. But instead of putting on the mask or bottling it up or fighting against the waves, I found that I could ride the waves into safety. The safety of knowing that I am loved and seen and not forgotten about. Can I be honest with you? It hasn’t changed the height or depths of those waves. It hasn’t changed how scary, dark, and life threatening it feels, but what has changed is knowing it will end. I will be pulled to safety (hopefully sooner than later).

Fast forward to Spring 2020. I hadn’t had a manic depressive episode in about five years. I had been off medication for four of those years. Going to monthly counseling, journaling daily, and spotting my triggers far in advance before I spiraled out of control. I thought I had “mastered” my dark seasons. I didn’t think I would ever see one on the horizon again. I didn’t believe I was “healed” from depression but I did believe that I had the necessary tools to not be knocked down by the waves or to stop the dark train of thoughts before they spiraled out of control. Well I was wrong. In April and May of this year I pushed my body and mind to a place that felt like no return. I hadn’t been there in so long I was scared for my life and so were those people close to me. 

I started to see my trigger warnings. Requiring more sleep, missing days in a row of journaling, cancelling on my counselor, and doing lots of things halfway. Hours of Netlfix binging, not brushing my teeth or wanting to take care of myself. Before I knew it my depression was coming out physically. My vision was blurry when driving. It got to the point where I didn’t feel safe driving with the kids in the car. My whole left side of my body would go numb and cause me to lose my balance. I was having migraines daily and exhaustion at such a high level I thought my body was going to collapse. My body was warning me that I was about to spiral out of control. I had never experienced an episode like this since the babies had been born. I told myself to push through because I can’t be a good mom and lay in bed. A good mom would push through and be there for her children.

But I found myself in bed weeks on end during quarantine. My body and mind were so exhausted I was sleeping 14-16 hours a day. When I was awake, I was crying. I would hear the babies laughing with Ryan down stairs and just roll over and cry, because honestly I didn’t even want to be down there with them. I wanted to sleep forever. I wanted this to end. When I say I didn’t brush my teeth or care for myself, I mean it. When I say that I laid in a dark room and cried and slept for weeks, I'm being honest. I didn’t return texts or phone calls. I ignored pretty much anyone close to me because I was embarrassed. What would they think if they knew I was laying in bed all day? What would they do if they found out how I was spending my time or what my mind was telling me to do?

Ryan finally saw that there was no end in sight and I needed help. He called my parents and my sister that lives in town and I then broke down and told them what had been really going on. It is HARD to show someone the broken side of yourself. What if they don’t help? What if it’s not loving or what I need? What if they don’t follow up and I’m left here all alone again? We met and I told them the hard truth that no sister, mother, or husband wants to hear. I told them the dark truth, that my mind was meditating on scary plans I would never be able to come back from. My husband and I seriously talked and contemplated about me checking myself in somewhere. I needed help. Help far beyond what Ryan or myself could offer. I’d love to tell you that after those conversations and being honest that it was easy. That it all fell into place. But that’s not the truth of what happened. I have learned some things about my depression since middle school and that is, the more I keep it to myself, the more it grows. I knew the first step was to be brutally honest with those that could help pull me out of this. So I then talked to my best friend and she said something to me that slowly began to change my vision. She asked me, “Do I believe that God loves me JUST the same, JUST as much when I am laying in my bed crying and ignoring all responsibilities, even my children, as he does when I am standing tall at church with my hands raised singing worship songs?” Through the tears I told her, “no.” I don’t believe that. I know in my head that’s true, but I don’t believe that in my heart. She then encouraged me to be brutally honest with God. Let him love me in this dark space. Let him see it all. And you know what I found, she was right. God loves me at my darkest.

Five months later, I read a book that stopped me in my tracks. It was every word and feeling I had felt in those long 8 weeks of darkness. “Sitting with my shame in God’s presence helped me see that God wasn’t shocked by it. In fact, he seemed to know all about it. And he still accepted me! I became aware that whatever the shame was about, I did not need to hide from it, because God already knew about it. Sharing it with God allowed me to experience his love in a tender, vulnerable part of me.” The Gift of Being Yourself

These past five months have been hard. There have been weeks where I have been fighting for my life. It has forced me to show people my limits. I allowed my bible study girls to enter and they have weekly asked me how I am doing, brought meals, gifted massages, listened to me cry, WITHOUT judgement. Not one person I have opened up to about this season has wounded me with the words of, “get up,” or made me feel like a failure. If anything I feel more loved by my everyday people, because they have seen the darkest side of me and still love me and encourage me to keep showing them. I wish I could tell you the four steps to enter out of a dark season. I wish I could tell you how to “fix” your brain to not mediate or drift to the dark and scary corners. I wish I had a bible verse that would make it all go away in an instant, but I don’t. I have been on this journey in some shade of darkness since I was 10, so for 22 years. I have gone through seasons where I begged and pleaded with God to take the depression away. But it has been in this past season with God that I’m learning, maybe it’s not about fixating on healing, maybe it’s about being able to be so authentic with myself and God, that I learn to love my whole self. That I learn that there is no distance I can go, that God doesn’t see me and love me. And in return I can love others more authentically because I have experienced His love in the darkest depths of me.

Dear friend, if you are with me in this dark season or see one on the horizon, please know that God accepts you fully and unconditionally. In this season I have been reminded of the miracle in Luke 6. A man has a withered hand and in order for Christ to heal it, Jesus says to him, “Get up and stand in front of this crowd...now stretch out your hand.” This man’s hand was healed. But when I put myself in that scene it makes me uncomfortable. In order to be healed, in order for Jesus to do what he does best, make us whole, this man had to stand in front of a large crowd and stretch out his withered hand. A hand he had probably kept hidden his whole life. A hand that limited him. A hand that left him ashamed. In order for him to be healed he had to be willing to show the withering part of himself. I wanted to keep my depression hidden from everyone. I believed it limited me in my ministry and relationship with Christ, but God. God wants us to put our withered parts on display so that he can do his work. What makes this encounter in our lives a miracle, is us putting on the lens of God. Because when we learn, I learn, to see as God sees - deeply loved in my depths and sinfulness, then I allow God to enter into the darkest corners of my mind and heart. I allow him complete access to transform me and to go ahead of me in the dark and stormy waters that is mental illness.

Praying today that we both see ourselves as God sees us. And that in the bottom of the ocean, in the lowest depths, he is waiting there with his love.

-Abby