January 17, 2021- one year ago.

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

---

“Today was a really bad day. My depression is manifesting in uncontrollable anger and rage. I am always preaching about minding your mental health and self-care, but it’s so easy to not realize where you are until you’re bawling in your room deciding if you want to take all of the pills that are dumped onto your carpet. It is dark, and it is black, and it is empty."

This memory from my notes app, had me reflecting on all that I would have missed if I hadn’t made it through that day. The joy I wouldn’t have experienced, the healing I wouldn’t have found, the support I would not have been able to provide others. The memories my family would have with a gaping hole in them that was meant for me.

In truth, I never imagined that I would type this out for someone other than my notebook to see. Not just because I never imagined going 365 days without hurting myself, but because I never imagined ever feeling comfortable or safe to tell the world that I did self-harm and that I did attempt suicide.

Before now, I could count on one hand, the people who knew about my struggles. I didn’t tell anyone for the usual, sad reason: shame. I was ashamed to be someone who hurt themselves. I was ashamed for being weak and useless and an attention seeker. I felt I just needed to keep it to myself, stop being silly, ignore it and eventually it will stop.

So let's go back to that day. It was a cold, rainy, dark day. My emotions were all over the place, literally. The day before, I had got a message from someone who I wasn't familiar with and the conversation took a bizarre path and led to miscommunication. I had spent the rest of the evening feeling terrible about myself, and how I allowed that person to make me react in such a negative way. I eventually fell into a self-esteem spiral. All of that on top of a lot of recent change in my life. Not the necessarily the things that changed, but just the familiarity that was taken away in those moments. That rainy, and stormy night, with a few friends, I turned to alcohol to bring me some sort of escape that I was so desperately seeking. However, that only made the situation worse. Mixing alcohol with the medications I was already on, made for clouded judgment. I felt invincible, immortal, immune to hunger and thirst and the incessant demands to slow down, to sleep, to recharge. My mind was a colony of secrets and schemes. But it’s an unfortunate law of the universe that what goes up must come down. Blinded with tears, I started ransacking the bedroom medicine drawer and rifling through buckets. I decided it was time to quiet that steady hum once and for all. I wanted the shadows to disappear and the chaos to stop, and I believed that death was the only way. I had flirted with death before, but just enough to blow my hair back, just enough to make me feel the tiniest bit alive. In that moment of desperation, I cried out to God: I never asked for any of this!

Never did I imagine that God would answer me. But he did. I found myself silenced, barefoot and open palmed, splayed like an offering across the floor. I was ready to take my own life and instead found myself laid out by God—physically knocked to the floor and flooded with a peace that to this day, I cannot fully describe. I felt the resuscitation of grace. The door to my bedroom sprung open, and a dear friend came flooding in. They provided comfort, but also concern. It wasn't easy for them to see my like that.

After that night, however, I began to make excuses. Maybe God reveals himself to desperate girls on chipped linoleum floors in the middle of a monsoon and says, “You belong to me. I have loved you with an everlasting love. You are mine.” But that was all too much for me to fathom. I wanted something to explain away the very real and terrible possibility that God wanted something from me. I thought perhaps it was my body’s response to all the stress hormones and my legs had just given out. But even with all of my justifications, I couldn’t deny that I felt something I had never felt before. I felt God.

As I read my Bible, I was confronted with questions and fears. I’d lie in the dark with God and whisper prayers into the void, hoping someone was there answering me back. Like Jacob wrestling with God through the night, this grappling changed my identity and renamed me.

In the Book of Genesis, when Jacob first prays for protection and deliverance from Esau, he prays to the God of his father Abraham and his father Isaac. After he wrestles with God and his prayers are answered, Jacob erects an altar with his new name, Israel. He names it El-Elohe-Israel, which means “God, the God of Israel.”

When I wrestled with God, he brought me to that same place of weakness. This weakness didn’t leave me more vulnerable before my enemies, real or imagined. Instead, it taught me that, even though we all walk with unsteady feet, we can rely on the God of our fathers and more than that, on the God who reveals himself directly to us, a God unmasked, a God who lets us grab hold of him in the darkness. In these times of wrestling, we might find ourselves transformed. We might feel the touch of God as dawn breaks. God might take us to the ground.

I am not healed in the ways one might imagine. I still have anxiety, and I still take medicine for depression. Sometimes I still struggle with suicidal ideation. I take anxiety meds and antidepressants to help keep me alive. These, too, are ways that God meets me on the floor, meets me in the darkness, and lets me grab hold of him.

I came back to life in that home that wasn’t a home. It was the place where I met Jesus and the place where I learned that I’d always been called.

Some people say suicide is a selfish act. That’s simply not true. But suicide is a torturous act. The soul who has been tortured for however long, before suicide and leading up to it, finally giving in to the despair, the depression, the demons, the fear, the voices, the shame, and whatever other intrusion… and then it eternally tortures the mothers and fathers, the sisters and brothers, the husbands and wives, the children, the friends. The pain of suicide, in my experience, doesn’t get erased. I’d never say this to someone to guilt them out of a choice so permanent, but instead to recognize that the pain doesn’t go away. It’s merely transferred to others. It’s intensified, it’s multiplied, and it’s spread. And THAT pain is a contagious disease. Grief and loss, trauma, anxiety, addiction, depression. They don’t just go away because someone tells us to stop it, to grow up, to knock it off, to do better, to be stronger, or to make better choices. I believe fully that they only heal through the careful, methodical, courageous ripping off of the bandaids we use to deflect and distract, stare ourselves and our angels and our demons in the face and go in deep. The work is hard. The path is narrow. Not many want to walk that road. But on the other end is healing. On the other end is hope. On the other end are loving, compassionate, understanding individuals who almost made the same decision you might be contemplating right now. Individuals who were hurt. Who were left to wonder ‘why me’ and blame themselves. Individuals who, for whatever reason, made it through that hell by the grace of God and the countless hours and sacrifices of others to help them inch along that path. People like me.

You are not alone. You are not the only one. You are loved. You’re needed. You matter. And there are ways out of the place you may feel you’re in now. Please don’t give up. Please don’t try to do this alone.

"I am raw and I am real, and I will never not share my story. My depression might lie to me, but I will never lie to you about it. " -Trinity Hammons