An honest look at depression: the struggle & healing.

My mind is clouded. Big weighty clouds that I can feel behind my eyes, resting inside my cheek bones. They sit, unmoved and no amount of caffeine can dissolve their weighty, foggy density. My mind awakens but the clouds remain.

There are ideas but they swim - eccentric, half-finished inside of me. Each has the potential for some kind of accomplishment or at least an attainment of some slightly valuable thing or other. But this requires their completion. And this is something my mind cannot do with its barrier of clouds.

I am drained by my own hopefulness and my inability to sustain it. I must choose one or the other between hope and despair but I cannot. Or I do choose hope, but somehow always end up occasionally leaving the door slightly ajar for anguish. On these occasions it will make its way in and drown me in tormenting bleakness. On these occasions I am reminded of the place I would be without my saviour.

I know that it’s okay that I am weak, unpredictable, unsteady without him. Really, I know in my head that he loves me regardless. That it is irrelevant because ‘greater is he that is in me’. But deep down I am hugely insecure about this. Because there is something within me that I feel doesn’t quite make the cut. I don’t know what invisible standards I am unconsciously measuring myself against, but they are imprinted now into the back of my head which is prone to constant calculations. There is a blur between character traits, physical appearance, upbringing, life choices. Bad hair on this chart can equal a lack of integrity and despite this distorted connection, my mind subconsciously acknowledges it as cast-iron truth. This does not come from God, and I know he is the only source of authentic, real truth. Despite this I struggle.

It nourishes me to sit and write about God; about his powerful, ferocious love and how he is the only passage to real, abundant, authentic living. I do believe this entirely and with conviction. I hadn’t seen the light side of life until I acknowledged him into mine, nor its rich, heartfelt beauty. He hasn’t just brought brightness but illumination, depth, vigour, intensity. I believed at first that this powerful charge of hope could diminish the fragile gravity of my mind. Some people suggest this.

I think it is time to instead let him into that space. It is not just my despair that sits there but my contemplative, wondering thoughts. It is tender and it is intricate but it is coated in a translucent hurt. By this I mean it is almost unnoticeable yet quietly dominant.

I invite him inside rather than merely rejecting this chamber of mine. Because there are distorted connections that only he can put right. Because they won’t go away without his touch. Because there is also devotion, passion, imagination, vision, peacefulness inside that delicate place. But mostly, compassion has found its home there. It was knitted in place in his likeness and cultivated here by both struggles and exultations.

And perhaps there is the reason for the pain. But maybe now is the time for him to come in and blow away that sore cobweb hold.