I have been here forever. In the midst of this season of sadness. According to the calendar its been 3.5 weeks, but depression lives in its own time warp. A Newtonian fluid of fast and slow – where you feel as though you have always been this dark, and yet surely it hasn’t already been more than three weeks since you first began to cry at the sight random daffodil blooms.
One Full Year
I’d like to pretend that when I think back on the past year, that eventually I’ll think first of these silver linings - but I doubt it. I’m always the girl that remembers the sad, the hard, the hurt. But writing them down makes them tangible, helps me remember.
Maybe It’s Grief
The life we had a year ago, the easiness we enjoyed, the routine and the normal and lack of fear, has died a thousand times. Sometimes daily, sometimes hourly. The tiny ways we work to rebuild normalcy, to find new dreams and goals, have been forged in a raging, hurried fire, and then broken again and again.
Holy Week: Love to the End
He Loved us through our fears. Through our uncertainties and doubts. Through the times that we’ve turned away and cursed at Him. Through the times we have failed to love others. He loved us through all of those things, through His own pain and exhaustion, to the end.
Into the Unknown
It feels like a roller coaster right now for everyone. Every day is another announcement, another fear, another new normal to navigate. Each moment where we think we have something figured out, where we think we can breathe, is interrupted by a precipitous fall toward the unknown.
Self-Care
This fragile balance she has created, this magic teeter-totter of support and outlet, of mental work and physical strength begins to wobble and finds herself walking a tightrope no longer securely anchored.
Weary and Well
I don’t know what best describes this space I’m currently occupying. It’s easier to laugh, easier to see beauty, easier to breathe. But I still live in that weary space, waiting for the shoe to drop, expecting the gray to roll back in, the walls to begin to smolder and burn.
Rest. But Do Not Quit.
I’m so glad we are talking about it, so relieved my children live in a world where therapy is normalizing and stigma is being removed. So unbelievably grateful to attend a church where counseling and medication is not viewed as a flaw in my faith.
And I’m so tired of being that woman who is still talking about it. Still fighting it.
Voices
Her voice made so much sense. Everything she told me sounded true. And no one else was saying anything to me to contradict her. And so I listened as she told me that I was unworthy, unlovable, broken, wrong.
Prayers of the Graduate’s Mom
Remind me that this is a celebration, a milestone of achievement and happiness and success, and not a moment to be mourned or feared. Give her the grace to tolerate my moments of tears, and give me the strength to let those moments be few.
Faith, Hope, Love, and Therapy 