Restoration

I had a glorious childhood.

My formative years were pretty much awesome 24/7. I was energetic, curious, loud, imaginative and playful. My world consisted of two super fun parents, who read to me every night, put on puppet shows for me, encouraged me and when needed, disciplined me in a fair and loving way. I also had this really fun little sister, who was four years younger than me, and almost completely accepting of everything I told her. I think we lived a pretty simple life the four of us. Sure, we moved more often than the average family, and Lord knows my parents have spent more money on new carpet than most, but in general, we were just like everyone else. I met all those developmental milestones psychiatrists are always concerned about. I was a little impulsive, which led to several emergency room visits, and I was far too bossy, but otherwise, I was a normal kid.

When I looked at my life years later, seated in my therapist's office, it was pretty hard to think of anything that could have triggered the incredible mental pain I was now in. In particular, there was no identifiable reason for my problems with self injury. Many people who struggle with self harm have themselves been harmed in some way. They tend to be people who experienced mental and/or physical abuse, sexual assault, or trauma. There are many who present with an eating disorder, or a personality disorder. But not me. I had a pretty limited scope of what I could blame my problems on. As you can imagine, this pretty much made it worse.

As a licensed social worker myself, with the same license now, that my therapist had then, I can vouch for the fact that when a patient has an issue like depression or self injury, most times there is a catalyst for those problems. My poor therapist was stuck trying to help a young woman who had no explaination for why things suddenly started to suck and why they stayed that way. Without a point of origin to work with, coping with depression was a much harder task. Therapy visits could not center around having been abused and focusing on working through that experience. No such trauma had occured, I had a glorious childhood! Many times, in that office, I felt kind of stupid for being sad. What was there to be sad about?

So even within the mental health community I did not fit. I have already written about how once I started to stuggle, I didn't feel like my faith fit anymore either. I think this may be why my depression was resistant to treatment and lasted as long as it did. I didn't know anyone like me, and I felt incredibly isolated. And when the depression became a fully-formed all consuming, day to day reality, I also lost the ability and desire to write. Back in high school I had started fervently and diligently writing at least two pages every day. Prayers, stories, poems, I have a dozen journals packed with the moments of my life. Depression took my favorite way to sort out my feelings about friends, family, God and life, and held it as a prisoner of war.

Journal Entry, November 1, 2001

I feel so tremendously guilty for being depressed. I feel like I have let people down. I hate this so much and I can't free myself from it. I've tried, I really have!
So I get thinking, well maybe I'm not really depressed. I mean I just can't be. It's someone else's life, not mine. I don't believe this is real, it can't be! I'm a Christian, this is not supposed to happen to people like me.
The thing that scares me the most is: am I letting God down? I mean, I'm so sad, how can that be of God? If I am so sad, so broken, so messed up, does that mean God is not with me anymore? What did I do to end up here? Why am I so far from Him?

It was desperate entries like this one, which eventually led to me not wanting to write at all. I kept asking all these questions that I had no answers to, and it just made my frustration with depression worse. I stopped consistently journaling shortly after that entry.

Writing was pretty much reserved for school after that, and while I still wrote occasionally, I never really felt the same passion for it. That is, up until about a week ago, when the passion for writing and desire to get back to it, overwhelmed me and sparked the idea for this blog.

I had a glorious childhood. For a reason that is still not clear to me, I suffered with some inexplicable, overwhelming pain, and when that pain disappeared, my desire to write came back. And here I am, on the other side of something I was pretty convinced was going to last forever. I am being restored, and this little spot on the internet is a part of that restoration.

I Need You - The Swift

L