I'm Doing Just Fine

"It's okay, you don't need to worry about me," I lie through my teeth and I swallow the screams.  I tell them not to worry but I'm worried, I'm scared, I'm coming apart at the seams.

"I'm doing just fine," I tell them when they ask but the words burn my tongue.  Fine is a lie, fine is a myth, fine is a long way off and I wouldn't know it even if I felt it because it's been so long since I've really been fine.

"Everything's great," but nothing is great and I'm falling apart.  The weight of each morning crushes down and the chorus of my sick and broken brain sings lonely, stuck, worthless over and over until I can't see straight.

"I'm just tired today," but tired of what I don't tell them.  No, don't tell them you're tired of waking and tired of breathing and tired of lying through your teeth.

Everything in me hurts but I push a smile that stings my eyes onto my face and I lie through my teeth and people smile back because I haven't slowed them down.  Because if I told them the truth they wouldn't know what to say.  Because when they ask how you are they don't want to know- not really- they want the civil answer, the easy answer, the one that requires nothing from them.  Because when they ask it's out of politeness not of caring and I'm so tired of fighting with myself I can't bear to fight with them, not over this, not over me.  So yes I'm doing just fine and everything's great and I'm just a little tired today.

Let it Take Me

Change comes barreling down the tracks and I dig my heels in.

I will stand here, I will wait for it to hit, but I will not move.

I cannot move.

I am paralyzed with fear and the bright lights of new dawn come towards me ever faster.

I fall down the rabbit hole of memories and I ache for something familiar, even if it hurts.

I reach back in time, grasping at something long gone just to feel the comfort of the familiar against my skin.

At least the things that scarred me left their marks behind so I can trace them when the world changes a little too fast for me.

Maybe that's the sickness inside me; the wanting of the things that hurt me just because I'm familiar with the pain.

Maybe I should let go of that and open my arms wide so change can sweep me up and away.

But I don't know how.  

So instead, I see the train coming and I plant my feet on the tracks and I stand still. 

Let the change plow me down.

Let it destroy me.

I am familiar with destruction.

I am familiar with the feeling of being overrun with pain.

Let it take me.

Living Grave

 There is a kind of grief that no one prepares you for.  It is grief not found in the solemn pews of a funeral home or the quiet agony of a cemetery.  It is grief that finds no resolution over time, but instead sleeps, silent under the skin until it wakes and bites deep and hard before falling asleep again and leaving you aching.

It is grief that finds me when I look into the mirror and don't recognize the eyes that look back at me.  It is a grief that mourns a girl, lost to time and pain, a girl whose body didn't die but keep on going long after the spirit of her was snuffed out.

There is grief that sinks its teeth into me like a panther and reminds me of the girl I used to be; the girl who died.  I mourn the loss of innocence and youth I used to be filled to the brim with until I was spilled out on the ground.  I ache for the loss of the girl who saw the world through pastel hazes like her eyes were made of stained glass.  I cry for the girl that no one in my life now had the chance to know.  I cry alone for myself and who I used to be.

The grief that swallows me whole, unannounced and inconsiderate is one that I never prepared for in all my loss.  It is inescapable and raw as I look in the mirror and behold a stranger.  I miss her, I realize now, I miss the naive girl who believed in magic and had a dangerous faith in everyone she knew.  I miss her, her bright eyes and wild laugh, and unburdened spirit.  

Life teaches you to grieve the people you lose, but what I never accounted for was being among those people myself.  How do you grieve yourself and live in the same skin after the person inside has died and gone?  How do you mourn a spirit of the past while trying to raise a new one?  How do you bridge the gap between who you once were, who you lost, and who you've found?  I don't know.  

I don't know so I weep at the sight of empty, strange eyes in the mirror and I cringe away from the foreign voice spilling out of my own mouth.  I don't know how to lay her to rest, that girl I thought I'd be so sometimes I read her favorite books and sing her songs and try to catch her ghost for a moment.  I read her diaries and smile as tears blur the lines written big and wild and in vivid colors that bring the stories to life.  I close my eyes and wish she'd come back to life, if only for a moment to help me catch a breath.  She breathed so easily, I remember now, breathed free and careless like life belonged to her.  If only I could remember how to breathe like that.  If only this useless body could remember for a moment how to live like it used to when she was pulling the strings.  Instead, I have a new soul trapped in this discarded corpse of a body that so often feels like it doesn't belong to me.  No, it belongs to her;  to the girl that died.  To the girl they killed.  To the girl who deserved to live.  To the girl I lost.  

So instead I live clumsy and unsettled in the skin that doesn't feel quite right and I grieve her, I grieve and mourn myself.  I am a grave unto myself, a grave no one visits.  I am a living mausoleum free of flowers or condolences save for the grief that resides in my chest and roars so loudly it shakes these stolen bones.

Person Made of Words

 I am a person made of words.  

Phrases stitch my limbs together.  Stories fill my head like flowers fill a vase.  Words are etched into my bones and I fear what secrets my body might betray if I let someone x-ray me, for all the words seem housed there in the marrow.

I am a person made of words and he leaves me empty every time our eyes meet.

Sentiments dry up on my lips and I swallow thorns when I see him.  It is a waking nightmare.  It feels like the stringy sinews of my muscles being pulled out one by one.  The world feels far away and as he speaks, the words evaporate out of my skin and my mouth and my bones and I am left hollow.  I sit for weeks wondering who I used to be.

I am a person made of words and he takes them all for himself, like he always has, like he does everything else.

I see him and I try to talk myself off the ledge, hold my breath, don't spin out.  But the spinning has begun already and I am too late to stop the catastrophe.  What is a bird without wings?  The ocean without waves?  The sun without heat and light?  What am I without the things that piece me together and make me real?  Worthless?  Alone?  Empty?  Quiet?  Haunted?  Whatever it is, it is what I am with him.  

I am a person made of words and I have none when he sits down beside me like he's done nothing wrong, like he belongs there, like I belong to him.

The words I prepared for years, for this moment exactly, shrivel up to dust and I have to swallow hard not to choke on what they used to be.  Soft civility comes out instead, muted and weak the way everything feels when he comes into a room and takes up all of the space and all of the oxygen and all of the words.  He asks questions and in a daze, I answer them gently as I feel my heartbeat slow to a dangerous lull.  If he keeps talking, I'll cease to exist.  And I die softly, gently, lonely, when he shows me the wedding band on his finger and when his wife walks in and they walk out hand in hand and he leaves me once again.

I am a person made of words and they fail me.  

He sucks the life from me, the words from me, the strength from me.  He takes everything I have, everything I am, everything I need, and he absorbs it to make himself more.  As if he needs more.  As if he isn't the center of the gravitational pull of the planet, as if I haven't died a thousand times wondering why he left me alone, as if he doesn't own everything he puts his eyes on.  He takes, and takes, and takes and he can have it all because he kills whatever tries to exist beside him.  He is the weed choking out the flowers in the garden.  He takes all the oxygen and when I look at him, I am at a loss for the words that keep me alive and he does it all with a smile. 

I am a person made of words and he is a plagiarizer.  

He is a thief and all the words he has from our time together are poison that still runs in my veins, killing me a little at a time.  He continues to exist by snuffing me out and he doesn't care that it will take me months to heal from the last five minutes we spent together.  He doesn't care that I have spent five years healing from the five months I truly knew him.  He doesn't care that my most sincere wish is that I had never met him at all. 

Mental Illness and Faith

Mental illness and faith are hard to reconcile.  They feel like two of the biggest things that make me who I am.  My mental illness is my battle of a lifetime, it's the thing I can't get rid of no matter how I change my hair or my clothes or my face.  My faith is who I am, inside and out.  The two stand in opposition, they grapple and fight and I am taken between them and tossed wherever they go.

When I am depressed, I'm hopeless.  I'm turned inside out with exhaustion and breathing feels too hard.  My hopelessness, however, doesn't extend to my faith.  I know that my God is on my side always, I know my salvation is firm, I know my final destination.  But the thing that trips me up is that the hope I have in Christ does not cancel out or lessen my depression.  I can lay in bed sobbing, heartbroken and exhausted and also know that God loves me.  Sometimes when people hear what I'm going through, they seem to think that if I'd just pray more my depression would go away.  As if I don't lay in bed sobbing, gasping for air, screaming in my heart for God to fix me, begging for relief, aching with fervent prayer for a reprieve?  Being clinically depressed is not the same as being in the darkness without God.  Being clinically depressed while also trusting in Christ's salvation is sitting in the darkness, unmoving, broken, with Jesus's arms around me while I fight through the side effects of a sick mind.  In my experience, when I ask God to help me with my depression, God has not taken a Mr. Clean eraser to my brain and cured me.  He has, instead, lead me through prayer and supplication to open conversations with my parents, to therapy, to working myself into healthier mindsets.  When I talk to people who tell me I need 'to give it to God,' I get discouraged.  As if I didn't think of that?  As if I haven't already?  As if that wasn't my first line of defense?  As if I would be 'cured' if I just had a little more faith?  No.  People who say that are people who don't understand what I'm going through.  People who say that fail to see that God has already got it, already provided for me, already helped me even though he didn't 'cure' me.

Anxiety is hard to reconcile with faith.  How can my Creator, who sent his Son to die for me let me feel so worthless for so long?  Does he forget about me?  Has he left me?  Does he even care?  These are questions I ask about everyone in my life.  Questions my sick, tired brain asks about my parents, my best friends, my most cherished people.  And my sickness extends outward and asks the same questions of God.  It confuses me, and it makes me feel like I'm weak in my faith even though I know it's not my rational brain who's asking.  My rational brain says that God looked down through time and ordained the exact circumstances that lead to my birth because I am worthy, because I am loved, because I am His.  My rational brain knows that God knows me, personally, individually, and he has plans for me.  My rational brain knows that God promises he will never leave me or forsake me.  And yet, my rational brain is not always in control. My anxiety often makes me feel like a fake when I sit in a church pew where I should feel most at home and can barely sit still because anxiety is eating me up telling me that no one wants me there, that I am in the way, that I am nothing.  I stand between God's people-my family-and I feel nothing but judgement that my brain has convinced me lurks in their eyes and their words even though I know better, even though they would hold me and weep if they knew what my brain was saying about me.

Sometimes, my fellow Christians are the ones who misunderstand my illness the most.  They know that I have the insurmountable joy of God and the peace of Jesus living in me and they can't understand why that isn't enough to make me feel better.  Honestly, I can't understand sometimes either.  When the darkness takes over, when I've spent my days counting in eights to keep my mind busy and popping my fingers to keep my hand busy and taking measured breaths to stay on my feet, I wonder why I don't have the "peace" that everyone else seems to have.  The reality though is that I do, my peace just looks a little different in the scope of my anxiety and depression.  My peace is my therapist that makes me feel incredibly safe and helps me learn how to deal with my illness.  My peace came in the form of parents that didn't bat an eye when I told them I was sinking and needed help; they just said "whatever it takes to get you feeling better."  My peace comes in the form of friends God strategically placed in my life who prove time and time again that my anxious shutdowns will not scare them away and who reassure me of their love as often as I need.  Sometimes they tell me 'just listen to God' like I've been ignoring him all my life and he's been saying "feel better" the whole time.  I have listened to God, I have followed his leading.  His hand in my healing wasn't an instantaneous cure.  It is an ongoing process of trusting him while retraining my brain and clinging to him while relearning what life should look like.

Mental illness and faith can coexist.  They DO coexist.  It's not pretty.  It's complicated.  It's something I never see or hear talked about and it's something I have such a personal connection with.  I guess that's why I'm here, writing this.  I believe that God looked at my life, knew the battles I'd face, and gave me this outlet as a way to help people.  I have the chance here to educate people who don't fight these battles on how to talk to me, how to help me, how to understand me.  Even if only one person reads this and realizes something new, that's enough.  

I also have the chance here to talk to my brothers and sisters in Christ who have these same struggles and let them know: your fight with anxiety or depression or any other mental illness doesn't make you any less of a Christian.  Your fight doesn't mean you've failed your faith and it doesn't mean God has abandoned you.  He chose us to exist.  He looked at His creation and decided that it needed you and me.  We are not accidents, we are not extras, we are not by-products.  We are Creations of the most high King who holds time in His hand and calls the stars by name.  We might have been chosen to fight some of the hardest battles, but we are not a forgotten regime left to fight and die.  

We are known.  We are seen.  We are valuable.  We are not alone.  

I am known.  I am seen.  I am valuable.  I am not alone.