When you are afraid to heal in your depression
May is Mental Health Awareness Month and I’m doing something different this year in its honor.
Instead of providing facts and figures about mental illness, I am offering thoughts and ideas that might help someone with depression or another chronic issue move towards health.
I’m calling it hesitant healing. Why?
About five years ago just after Still Life (my memoir) released, I began to experience some healing after a decade of debilitating depression. Although I struggled (and still do), my depression episodes became more sporadic and less desperate and dark. I found some fight and started to move towards health.
And I was scared to death, because I didn’t know how to live not depressed. Can you relate? My normal, my heartbeat, and my hobby (if you will, I know that most of us don’t choose to take up depression like we take up tennis or something), had been depression for so long. If I were to heal, if I wanted to heal, than it was going to take not only the lifting of depressive episodes (which was happening), but my participation and attention to habits and thought patterns and all the things. Healing, I’m finding, is very difficult. It doesn’t come naturally. And it demands attention spiritually, practically, and communally.
I’ve had many conversations with friends who fight mental illness and we all agree. Healing is elusive. It’s not linear. It’s hard work. We don’t know how to do it. We need each other. We need practical suggestions. For Christians, we need the ultimate healer, the Great Physician, to lead us. We need scripture to teach us. We need Jesus’ intercession. We need the Holy spirit’s prompting.
The topic of healing in depression is also tricky. We don’t want platitudes. We don’t want quick fixes that leave us feeling more broken than before. We don’t want to pile on more guilt if it ‘doesn’t work.’ But there are things that we can do, practices that help, to pursue health. If we can work on health, if we are at that point in our journey, I think we should. At least I’m trying, anyway.
My prayer is that my thoughts will bless, encourage, and inspire you. Some of us have located pockets of light after long stretches of darkness. And we need encouragement to follow that momentum. To stay in the light. To keep going. Depression was my normal for two decades. And although I probably will continue to struggle with mental illness this side of glory, I’m learning, albeit with bated breath, that it isn’t my always, and regardless, I am not alone in the journey. And more of us need to be talking about the work of health.
Stay tuned. Check out my Instagram and Facebook page (#hesitanthealing) and share these efforts with anyone you know who is trying, but needs encouragement and help. I’ll post thoughts and tips about three times a week on social media and have planned out five blog posts (also can come through my email Noteworthy), one for each week in May, that will go live each Monday morning.
And I’d love to know … Do you relate to the idea of hesitancy in healing? Does it make you guilty or leery or encouraged? Please leave me a comment and share your thoughts.
My goal is really to come along side others in a helpful companionship in the pursuit of healing.
***Next week’s topic: Noticing is a sign of healing