I woke up this morning to the smell of rain. It has been a long hot summer, and at first I didn’t believe what my nose was telling me. As I stumbled through waking up, I realized that my nose had been right. It was lightly raining outside. I giggled at my silliness in not believing my sense of smell, and continued giggling in delight of the rain. I need its cleansing power; its ability to renew the earth; its refreshing the air; and its welcome reduction in the heat.
Lately, I have been doing some very intense, productive, hard emotional work. I woke up a few weeks ago and realized that I was depressed. For those who know me, you know that is a foreign emotion for me. In recognizing that I was depressed, I had to take the time to find out how long I have been feeling this way. It was not a comforting realization to see that it had been several months. I had been depressed for several months, and hadn’t even been able to see it, name it, talk about it, or work through it. That scared me. I didn’t understand this new emotion. But, I made a decision not to ignore it any longer, and to dig in to the uncomfortable process of figuring out how I got there.
Here are some of the things that I have learned:
1) Time has been marching on while I have been experiencing a massive amount of change and loss. It has been 5 years since this particular season in my life started. 5 YEARS!!! I was a bit shocked by this realization. No wonder I feel emotionally exhausted.
2) I have a choice. I can choose to be a “victim” of my grief, pain, loss, and the resulting depression. Or, I can choose to name it, and put it in its proper place. For me, that proper place is not stuffing it inside me, locked away behind a bulging broken door. The depression that I was experiencing was a direct result of not dealing with these events, issues, and problems.
3) God’s presence and grace has sustained my during these 5 years. I am in awe of the fact that I am still living, breathing, and even thriving in some areas. It is a humbling fact that I have been leaning wholly on God’s strength, because I didn’t have any left of my own. In God’s grace, I have survived, and kept from literally falling apart.
4) God’s timing is always perfect. I wasn’t ready to face that bulging broken door. I wouldn’t likely have chosen to face it either. It has taken an act of God to let enough of it seep out to get my attention so that I could choose to open it up myself. I had gotten really good at compartmentalizing my fragmented life to the point that I found myself in a total identity crisis.
5) My identity crisis was a blessing. I know that it is a bit of a cliché, but I have been having a mid-life crisis. It was likely obvious to others, but I found this to be a bit of a surprise. Once I started to map out the 5 years that led me to this crisis, I realized that I had a very good reason (or reasons) for having a mid-life crisis. I had been so hard on myself for being in crisis, that I had gotten stuck. But the crisis validated my grief, loss, confusion, and pain. I had often articulated the “major” stress events that I have been experiencing, but I had not allowed myself to connect them to my emotional state. What major stress events?
Not in a direct chronological order (many of these events happened concurrently) : We faced a major crisis in our calling to a church that we had served for 9 years. We both had come to the realization that we could not continue in that particular place and calling. Mark was fired from that position prior to us having a solid plan as to what came next. Our daughter Sarah graduated from college. We sold our home, moved to a temporary rental in a new community, bought a home and moved again (same community). My mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and died 9 months later. We moved my grandmother and her spouse into assisted living, back “home”, and back to a different assisted living home. My grandmother died. Our daughter Sarah got married. I graduated from grad-school, and then Mark 6 months later. Our son Paul graduated from college. We started a business. I started a “new career” in the previously foreign corporate world. We changed church families four times. We faced the uncertainty of Mark’s chronic pain not having a definitive source and resulting lack of treatment outside of limited pain control.
6) Some of these events I had no control over. Some of them I had only a little bit of control. Some of them I hung on desperately to as a choice that I had made. A few were joyous events, but still stressful and exhausting. In recognizing my own helplessness in this compacted time of major events, I was finally able to celebrate some things, and face making decisions about how to process and move on with others. This has been hard but important work. Through all of the uncertainty, we had made the best decisions that we could with the limited information at hand. Some of those decisions have now been re-evaluated and we have made new decisions based on new information. I am finally able to reconcile our change in circumstances. While my life doesn’t look much like my life pre-major events, I am still the same person. I had lost sight of that for a while, but in choosing to process these events, I have found enough pieces of myself to know who I am again.
It is very much like experiencing the rain this morning. My new perspective on life is like the unlooked for rain after a long hot dry spell. I am finding my way back to joy again. I still have some work to do, but that broken bulging door that I had been stuffing things behind is open now. I am still leaning on God’s strength, but I have confidence that God’s presence is guiding me. Here is to giggling at welcome surprises.
Stacy
Interesting blog! Is your theke custom made or did you dolwnload it from somewhere?
A design like yours ith a few simple tweeks wouod really make my blog stand out.
Please let me know where you got your theme.
Thank you
I used a theme from wordpress. I am glad that you like it.