Emerging

I can't give a reason why things go this way, why we seem to be wired for suffering.  I can try to explain the truth that I've come to know through the steep ways of my life and the hills I've had to climb.  I  feel like I can bring you hope borne out of my own suffering.  One year ago things changed for me.  I began a new journey that’s made such a remarkable difference I need to share it with you.  This kind of sounds like a sales pitch for a multilevel marketing scheme, but stick with me, I promise it’s not.  However, I should start at the beginning.

For the majority of my life I’ve been able to tap into a certain melancholy that never seemed to lift.  Like walking a tight rope over a pit, I felt I was always on the verge of a misstep that would send me crashing to the bottom.  No matter the circumstances I found myself in, that fog of melancholy stayed with me.  Through the ages of 10-11 I experienced the illness and eventual passing of my mother, so it was always reasonable to me that this trauma was the cause of the fog.  I didn’t really know anything different and, to be honest, I never tried to imagine my life without this dreary companion.

I was able to experience happiness and celebrated marriage, births, birthdays and the like.  But, even then, that fog was never far from me.  In fact with the birth of my fourth child I was fully swallowed by it in a way that was new and startling.  I remember going to my doctor at the time and explaining to him how I was completely overwhelmed and didn’t feel quite “right”.  His comfort to me was that I WAS overwhelmed as a mom to a new baby with 3 others 6 and under and things would improve.  But they didn’t for quite some time and the fact that I was struggling to feed a baby who had some other unknown health issues only added to the mountain of despair I felt I was pushing a boulder up. 

But one day, more than a year into my fourth child’s life, I was folding laundry and realized the fog had lifted.  The fact that I was folding laundry should have been a huge clue given that I had done very little outside of the care and feeding of the baby.  Everything else had fallen on my husband, who did everything without grumbling and an immense amount of patience.  No one knew what we were dealing with and I struggled to articulate my feelings to even my closest friends.

When we discovered I was carrying a fifth child I panicked.  Completely afraid I was going to derail even further with the birth of this child I looked for outside help.  I went to counselling and began to invest in my physical health by running and eating better.  These things absolutely helped and I was thankful for the intervention and support they gave me.

But, isn’t life funny?  I guess when you’re walking a tight rope there’s only so much you can carry without becoming unbalanced and listing to the left or right.  With every season in our lives I discovered ways to pick up and put down the heavy things I was carrying and the fog stayed off for months and even years.  But I knew it was never really gone, I was just learning how to fan it away.

And now we come to the more present day.  Our circumstances changed in more ways that I can describe and everything that felt okay was suddenly not so much and the fog was finding its opportunity to grow in thickness and opacity so that I could no longer even see the tight rope across the pit.  And as I felt myself fall I reached out to grab what I could of the rope.  Holding on with my two hands with all my might only to feel the numbness in my fingers forcing me to let go.  For me the falling wasn’t sudden but more of a gradual waking up to the reality that I was now sitting on the bottom of the pit I’d tried so hard to stay out of.  All I could see above was fog heavy, thick, and despairing.

But God is good and always there, especially in our darkness, His hand holding securely to us even when we don’t have the strength to grip onto Him.  I called out to Him so often through blubbery prayers and countless rambling words.  The Spirit praying on my behalf, making sense of my mourning and wounds to the heart of the One who refused to let me go even when I wasn’t able to make sense of my life.  Isn’t He wonderful?  “But God” became a prayer at the end of my weary day, I still knew He was there even when I didn’t know how I was ever going to get out of the pit I sat, slept and ate in each day.

But God showed up in the sweet and firm voice of my sister-in-law Kelly who called me weekly to see how I was doing.  We would talk about the normal day in and day out of family and every conversation ended in my crying, trying to articulate how miserable I was.  She was persistent and continued to call me, even when the conversation was one-sided and hard to understand through the voice of an ugly-cry.  She spoke Truth.  On a video call on my 48^th birthday she said to my tear-streaked face, “Angie, you don’t need to live like this.  You need to call your Doctor”.  And, for some reason I finally understood that this foggy companion of mine was not merely a personality trait to work through but something unruly, harmful and overwhelming.

I previously had been in touch with my doctor about hormones, thinking perhaps my early menopause was the reason for the decrease in my ability to cope and live normally.  Ladies, I know you understand what I’m talking about when I speak of these things….menopause can be relentless.  So when I did call the doctor to talk about something more for my situation, she was already aware that I was struggling.  She asked me questions about depression I didn’t even know were symptoms.  She was kind and affirming.  We made a plan for me to begin on a low dose of a mood stabilizer and we would talk again in a few weeks to see how I was doing. 

I remember the first morning I swallowed the little white odd-shaped pill.  I was desperate for a turn around.  In a little over two weeks I began to emerge from the weight of that useless fog.  I must confess that I always feared medication would make me numb to the normal ups and downs of life.  This just is not the case.  I have felt anxious and I have felt sad but it’s never out of balance, not like it had been for so many years.   I once commented to Wayne and a dear friend that I didn’t feel like a normal, human person.  But not anymore, finally, I feel like a normal, human person with a healthy inner life, able to cope with things that would have thrown me off for months before.  It’s really kind of hard to understand that I struggled so needlessly for so many years.  I would be lying if I said I didn’t regret those years, I do.  But, that’s okay I'll do better now because I know better. 

For any of you who maybe can identify with my story in any way shape or form, I want to encourage you to seek help.  Maybe you need to have a serious conversation with your family doctor and family members about your current situation.  Perhaps you need to seek counselling and invest in your mental health in that capacity.  Maybe medication and counselling are your way through.  No matter the path you take you MUST take one.  You don’t need to feel like this.  I’m forever grateful that Kelly was there for me, encouraging me to take care of myself, mothering me when I couldn’t mother myself.  So, today, I'm encouraging you to take that step yourself.  You absolutely are worth it.