From You are not Alone Blog

This is Who I Am

It’s funny, some moments of your life you can just point to and say there, that is where my life changed. I've had several moments of my life like that so far, some for good, and some, well not so much. When I think on my depression there is that moment, well weekend really that sent it cascading into my life. Now don't mistake me. The circumstances had been building for years. I was a train wreck waiting to happen- until it did. 

It was a crazy time in my life, I was in school full time and had foolishly taken the three most difficult courses of my degree in one semester- essentially I was writing 30 to 40 pages of papers a week and had 500 plus pages of reading to go with it. I was also working part time and on the weekend in question had committed to leading a group of teenagers at a conference. If it had just been that semester I likely would have been fine. However this would be my second burnout for exhaustion, the first occurring 8 months previously during my fifth semester in a row. I was working part time and going to school full time. Instead of taking time off after my first burnout I did a whirlwind tour of Europe and then went to work at a camp where I often worked 14 to 16 hour days and left almost as exhausted as I came in.

It's funny in retrospect, but I had a great time that fateful weekend- exhausting but great. I was at the conference all day and had stayed up half the night writing papers each night. I went home exhausted and slept and slept. When a week later I was still sleeping 12-14 hours a night I was concerned but rationalized it ‘my busy-ness must be catching up to me.’ As my energy levels slowly went further downhill over the next few months to the point where I could only get out of bed for an hour or two a day I started to realize I had a serious problem. 

I had taken a blood test a few months earlier and tested positive for hypothyroidism. My doctor had said at the time that it was probably a fluke but gave me a follow up test to take in a few months- I took it and waited to hear from her. Eventually I booked an appointment and she told me the second test was negative. I described my symptoms and she gave me a sheet full of questions with this funny number scale and I answered it. She tallied it up and did a double take. It was a very high number. She broke the news that changed my life. You have Major Depressive Disorder. My first thought was she must be wrong- I wasn't sad or crying all the time. I was just tired. Really, really tired, lethargic and apathetic. I had very little emotions about anything at all... maybe I was depressed. After making me assure her multiple times that I wasn’t going to kill myself I left with another battery of blood tests, a prescription for an antidepressant and an appointment for the following week. 

Appointments came and went, my blood test came back all normal and I came off the medication a year later. Nothing in my life had really changed. I was still going to school full time and working part time. The only difference was that I had the energy to do those things again. 

As I came off the pills that April, I suddenly rediscovered having emotions. On the drugs I had almost been a robot (not that I noticed or cared). I vowed never to go back on them. Besides I was sure I would never need to; it was just a temporary bio-chemical imbalance. I worked full time that summer and finally felt normal again. Then I went back to school and work madness in September. Things quickly went downhill from there. 

I went back to the doctor in October and stressed that I would not go back on the other drug. She told me she'd never heard of someone having the side effects I did (story of my life. I always get every weird side effect from pretty much every drug I've been on). She gave me a prescription for a different one and for counseling. 

I went home got in the bath and sobbed. I didn't want to be depressed. It wasn't fair. This wasn’t the plan. Why was this happening to me?

Much of the following months and years I don't remember. The drugs and depression fogged my brain to the point where I could barely remember what happened from one moment to the next. I began counseling and learned (much to my chagrin) that I might have had a role to play in causing the depression. It didn't just happen. Even with all the counseling and medication- I wasn't getting better. I was in so much pain at times that I would just curl up in a ball and rock back and forth. I was unable to cope with it, crying out to God to help me. He always did in those darkest moments. He was my Rock. The only way I could go on without killing myself. But the rest of the time he seemed absent. I got on my knees often in despair and begged Him through my tears to heal me, to take away this curse. Yet there was no end to it in sight. 

I was so angry. I knew God was there. I knew He was listening. If He loved me, why did He not heal me? Why leave me in the midst of my suffering? 

I didn't understand but I loved God and I knew He loved me. I was still angry- how I railed at Him! But I did my best not to let that anger take root and grow into bitterness against God. Bitterness is a cancer. It starts somewhere and grows through your whole life tainting everything. I knew even in the midst of my suffering that I couldn’t let it get a foothold in my life if I ever wanted to get well. It is so easy to just let it take over especially when you are hurting and angry. Eventually I had to choose to either come to accept that God had allowed the depression to happen and was not healing it and was somehow even in that still a good God who loved me or to grow bitter against Him. I certainly didn’t understand why God allowed the depression, but at some point I chose to accept it. I was depressed. I couldn't change it. No matter how much I asked, God wasn’t changing it.

In many ways even in this struggle I was fortunate. You see I never doubted that God was real or that He loved me. Many years before my depression began, when I was 11 I doubted that God existed. In fact doubted was probably a tame word, I was quite convinced that God wasn’t real. I chose to share this with my summer camp counselor who challenged me to ask God to prove Himself real to me in the next year. I did so. About halfway through that year my mother announced she was pregnant. After my brothers birth two years after I was born my mother was unable to have any more children. I had always wanted and prayed for a sister. A year and a bit after I asked God to prove Himself real to me my beautiful little sister was born. Fifteen months later a second sister followed. God did not just answer my prayer, He gave me the greatest desire of my heart twice over. Every time I see them they remind me of the depth of His love for me.

I kept going to school and working and eventually as my grades began to falter I quit working and focused on school. Until I just couldn't anymore.  I took a medical withdrawal and went and travelled. I spent 5 weeks in a little apartment on the sea in Greece and rested and then spent another 3 weeks touring Israel. How amazing it was to walk where Jesus walked. My faith deepened and I went back both joyous and determined. Going back to school I took 2 courses thinking it would be fine. Midway through the semester I had a major episode and ended up in bed for two weeks. In the end I managed to rescue one class but not the other. By this point I was fed up. I was going to finish this degree. I was so close, only 11 credits or four classes left. So I enrolled in four courses. Midway through the semester I had another episode and ended up in bed for two weeks. This wouldn't do, so I went to the doctor. She decided to change my medication. The first one I only ended up taking for half a week as if made me more depressed than I already was. The second made me quite ill for the first little while but eventually worked. However at that point it was too late. I'd spent the last month depressed, ill and barely able to even think. Not one of those classes could be rescued.  

At this point I gave up. Nothing was working and I was so tired all the time. I proceeded to spend the next year in bed. I was so lethargic all the time. My doctor eventually sent me to a psychotherapist (I think she'd run out of ways to help me) who diagnosed me with Major Depressive Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and borderline Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

Truthfully I barely existed at this point, I didn't care about anything. I couldn't care about anything. Every effort to do anything often left me in bed for days unable to even get up. A good day was one where I was able to spend the majority of the day sitting up. My mom was frustrated and started dragging me to any specialist she could find. First a naturopath which didn't help much and then to a blood specialist. 

The blood specialist was where I finally found some answers. She took some of my blood blew it up to cellular level (still one of the coolest things I've ever seen) and asked if I smoked, drank or did drugs. Mildly bemused I replied that I'd never smoked, didn’t drink and the only drugs I took were prescription. She said prescription drugs counted and pointed to these funny almost silvery things in my blood. “These are toxins that have built up in your system because your liver isn't processing them which is causing your fatigue,” she told me. I left with a recommendation to get off the medication and supplements and vitamins to help my liver. I went home and talked it over with my parents. I was skeptical. As bad as the fatigue was I wasn't really depressed anymore and I remembered how awful the depression was before the medication. It was a tough choice but eventually I decided to leave the medication behind and live with the depression. This isn't necessarily the right decision for everyone- it just was for me, at this time. (Please don't go throwing out your meds because of me!) I spent a month getting off the meds, slowly, so slowly. I had a bit more energy. But that revealed more problems. At this point I had been depressed for five years, a time in which I had been mostly sedentary  I had to carefully start to build muscles again- being very careful for if I did too much I would end up back in bed for a week or more. 

It took a lot of trial and error, tears and days in bed to figure out what I could and couldn't do. There were two major changes I made that were key to my improving health. The first was a pillow I put on the floor at the end of my bed. Every night it was there to remind me to kneel on it and pray. Somehow that act of kneeling reminded me of who I am- a servant of Christ. It gave me motivation to get better, something I truly hadn't had in a long time. The second was to find community. I'd lost pretty much all of my friends through the depression and so I went to Bible Study Fellowship (BSF) in hopes of studying the Bible but also to re-learn how to have friends. 

I'm not saying things were perfect. I went on to spend all of last January lost in a fog of depression. I barely remember what happened that month. But I made it through and February came. I struggled and with the help of God, a counselor and my family managed to pull myself up again and keep moving forward. It is now December and I have spent a few short periods already this Fall lost in a fog and I anticipate that this winter will again be a difficult season for me. But I have a reason to pull myself out again. I have friends again. I have hope again. I have a purpose again. It’s amazing how much I took these things for granted before but how precious they are to me now.

Things have improved but it’s still not easy living like this. There is so much shame in being depressed. People wonder why you can’t just feel better, control yourself- and let me tell you, you can’t! It’s so far out of your control it’s not funny. There are people who believe that my depression is because of my lack of faith, that I deserve it somehow because I’m doing something wrong. These are horrible things to have people think about you and they’re not true. There’s also shame in being a 27 year old that hasn’t finished her schooling when she’s been sitting 11 credits from it for years. There’s shame in not being able to work, living with my parents at my age and on their money. The culture I live in says these are things I should have achieved at my age. I often remind myself that regardless of what this culture says I am part of a different one. When I accepted the gift of forgiveness from Jesus I became a citizen of a different place, Heaven. The standards of Heaven are different than the standards of Western culture and in them I am accepted and loved for who I am and where I'm at. The Spirit of God who lives inside of me always encourages me to do better, to be better and often speaks sternly to me when I am doing wrong. However He always forgives immediately and loves me unconditionally. He never judges or blames me for things out of my control. So much of those things our culture says I should do or be are out of my control. I can't make myself better, I'm certainly working at living a healthier lifestyle and that absolutely helps but depression is made worse by lacking sleep, unhealthy eating and other poor lifestyle choices, not caused by them. 

The reality however is life is rarely easy, even for those who aren’t depressed. We were never meant to live in a world as broken as this and it shows. We were created for so much more! But this is the world we live in, it’s broken and it’s hurting but we don’t have to be alone. For those of you who are depressed, you who are suffering - know you are not alone. You are never alone. God is always with you and if you talk to Him, He will always listen and sometimes talk back, if you are willing to listen. I am here to listen as well, commiserate. Though I’d recommend talking to God first, I am willing to pray for you and to chat as much is in my limited capacity to do so.

With Love,

Jacine