And thank you, God, for today.
I'd woken up after another interrupted night due to allergies and was spending a moment in prayer before I opened up my laptop to face the barrage of inane questions and vague requests that had been hovering in cyberspace since I'd shut it firmly at 5 pm the day before. I looked out my barred window into a perfectly blue fall sky and breathed out in gratitude. Without a thought, the words of thankfulness came to my mind. I spoke them into the atmosphere. . .then stopped in shock. It was the first time I'd woken up thankful to be alive in a long, long time.
These past few months, maybe even a couple of years, have been very dark for me. Some would attribute it to situational depression, and they would probably be right. I'd taken the online quizzes from psychcentral. I'd noticed my energy levels slipping, my motivation disappearing, my only interest to stay home and lose myself in a virtual world of Facebook and Homescapes. I withdrew from all my social circles, making excuses when someone wanted to meet up. I began to go through a series of existential crises with no simple answers in sight and I wondered if I would ever come up for air.
From struggling to trust God as good in the midst of all the evil I was seeing, to constantly fighting for my simple basic rights in the system I functioned in, from seeing how little value was really attributed to me as a person to reaching my breaking point with the political Christianese, I was holding on to a thin rope that was fraying rapidly.
I began to lose what little patience I had left. I froze in the grocery aisle. I cried as I sat in a melee of cars pressed tighter than sardines. I tried to peer past the next day or week and I could only see blackness. My patient husband cleaned, cooked, listened to me process, and did all he could to support me but I still woke up every day feeling empty and went to bed most nights with tears slipping down my cheeks.
I had passed an invisible road marker and was heading for a steep drop-off with brakes that no longer worked. As much as I pumped those brakes, people crowded into my vision, trying to persuade me to give this, to do that, to donate here, to help out there and each request was like a thin slip of paper under those brakes. If there had been only one or two slips, or even five, under those brakes, I could have pushed down hard and managed to come to a complete stop. But those papers were piled so high, they had jammed the brakes dead up so there was no stopping power at all. I was headed to a fatal end with no U-turn in sight.
In the span of 30 hours, I was asked to attend a 10-hour training on how to do small groups, to assist in a 4-6 grade branch Sabbath School class, and to go to a meeting for students in my husband's department. And of course, these events were all scheduled on the weekend.
I knew something had to change. So I started to talk. I stopped pretending everything was okay and I asked for help. I posted on my social media site the realities of the region where I was living. The economic crisis had resulted in a very unstable situation—one that made it impossible to create a monthly budget as the exchange rate fluctuated widely, let alone plan the week's grocery shopping when the local currency was tied to that exchange rate.
I started talking to people again. An older woman who had seen much of life, my mom, my sister, several best friends, and my husband. I was honest about my struggles, about my fears, about how I cried in the grocery store because I didn't know how to manage anymore. I asked them to share how they had managed expectations from small church communities or worked with the politics in the system we all knew far too well. I listened and as I listened, I began to realize that things were different than the faulty tapes I had been listening to for far too long.
And I stopped saying yes and I stopped feeling guilty about it.
Slowly, I began to remove those slips of paper. I tore them up into tiny shreds and threw them out my window. As I did so, one by one, I started to feel the power returning to the brakes. The cliff's edge began to recede and my car started to slowly turn to face a meadow of luscious green grass, dotted with pink and purple morning glories and yellow-white daisies.
I still get irritated at times. This evening there is some kind of celebration outside in the valley, banging on a drum, music playing loudly, and people making lots of noise. Earlier, a loudspeaker broadcasted some announcements or religious ritual so loudly, I had to close my windows so my students could hear my teaching. I'm worried about whether we will be able to buy gas tomorrow because the long lines have returned, even though gas is now 10x the price it was 3 months ago. I'm so so tired of fighting every day just to manage the little things that in another country wouldn't take another thought.
But I'm finding me again. I'm learning to be grateful and I don't feel the heavy cloud of darkness settle on me quite so often or quite as heavy as before. I'm taking time to really be present and I'm finding I very much enjoy it. Whether it is sitting on our veranda overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and sharing a meal with a friend, deep-cleaning and organizing kitchen shelves, trying my hand at making a felt puppet from scratch, or baking snickerdoodles and apple pie for an appreciative husband, I'm finding meaning again in life.
I was so caught up in what I thought I had to do for everyone to approve of me that I forgot to ask myself what brought me joy. I forgot to slow down and savour breathing. I forgot to appreciate the smell of clean sheets and the sight of a tidy kitchen counter. I didn't understand that in trying to please others; I had lost myself. Until it was too late and I nearly lost the ability to live life.
Depression is real. But realer than that is life. Today. The day I'm living and the day I will forever be grateful for. Thank you, God, for today.
