I want to talk about making the hard choices. Battling depression is really all about making hard choices and then following through on it.
Choice number one for me: to sleep or not to sleep. Sleeping was my drug. It was so much EASIER to just lay down, cover my head up, and sleep. When I slept I wasn’t feeling. I wasn’t hurting—emotionally or physically. Sometimes I would escape into a dream…sometimes I would pray that God would let me just die in my sleep, because I was at the bottom of this pit and I couldn’t see a way out of it.
Choice number two: to trust or not to trust. When you’ve been so hurt by people, the easy thing is to shut yourself off from people. You just decide you’d rather live alone than ever open yourself up to being hurt by anyone, ever again.
Choice number three: to believe that you’re WORTH something, or to just accept the negative voices in your head that keep you down.
I chose not to sleep. It was hard at first. Sleeping is much easier. I didn’t FEEL like getting up and going to class. I didn’t FEEL like doing laundry or taking a bath. I didn’t FEEL like dragging myself downstairs to eat. I didn’t FEEL like going to work. I was exhausted by just breathing. It literally hurt to breathe.
I discovered life cannot be lived based on feeling alone. It doesn’t matter if you FEEL like taking a bath. Take a bath anyway…and you discover it feels better to be clean. It doesn’t matter if you FEEL like doing laundry. Do it anyway…and you remember how nice towels feel straight out of the dryer. The hard thing is DOING IT ANYWAY. You discover that your feelings lie to you. Your feelings are what keep you down in this never ending cycle of “I feel terrible and don’t feel like doing the things that, if I did, would make me feel better.”
It was like learning to be human, slowly, all over again. I chose to get out of bed, even if for the first month it was mostly a zombielike existence. Yes, it was hard. Yes, it was exhausting. Yes, there were days I slipped up and went back to bed. It was Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill.
DO IT ANYWAY.
You’re rebuilding yourself. If you need to start with something small, like making your bed every day, start with that.
I chose to trust people. This was difficult. I could never trust people who said nice things to me. I never believed they really meant the things they said. I didn’t FEEL like I was any of those things they said, so I always assumed they were lying to me. Not because I thought they were terrible people, but because I thought it was perfectly obvious to everyone else how worthless I was, but because they were polite, they’d say something nice to cheer me up. As I’m writing these words, I realize how ridiculous that sounds…but depression really twists your thoughts.
I started believing that maybe people were talking to me because they WANTED to be my friend. Instead of having my defenses up and lashing out first so I wouldn’t be the one hurt, or looking for the slightest sign that someone wasn’t who they seemed on the outside, I began to relax and just let people BE.
I began to realize that people aren’t perfect, and that people aren’t thinking about me half as much as I thought they were. Depression can be very self-centered sometimes. If I heard someone in a restaurant near me laughing, I assumed they were laughing at me because I was fat and eating. Slowly I began to accept the fact that perhaps they just found something funny, and hadn’t even noticed me. Now I’m at the point in my journey where, even if they are laughing at me I don’t care. It shows THEIR worth, not MINE.
I don’t want it to seem like I never got hurt. People still suck sometimes. But I learned that I didn’t HAVE to let it take me back to square one. I didn’t have to retreat all the way down to the bottom of the pit I had come from. This was an excruciatingly slow process, and it’s directly tied into choice number three.
I choose to believe I am WORTH something. I say all the time, “It’s as easy as that, and it’s also as hard as that.”
There is nothing more to it. BELIEVE YOU ARE WORTH IT. The actual practice of believing, however, is the hardest thing. There is no quick road to this step. It is a decision of the will, wrapped up in ALLOWING yourself to be vulnerable enough to let people in to show you. It comes with great risk, because people will still hurt you.
Ultimately for me, it was a matter of faith. I am a Christian. When I say that, I mean my life would be nothing without Jesus in it. When I was at my darkest, He sat with me in the pit and waited. He was at my side for every step out of the mire, and when I would get scared and retreat back into the shadows He would walk back and speak lovingly to me. He coaxed me back into the light. He sent good, loving people my way just when I needed it.
And then one day I decided to take Him at His word when it says things like, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:18)
It says in James 1:17 “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”
EVERY good gift? Does that mean EVERY good gift? Well, I like butterflies. So I asked God to send me butterflies. I chose to LOOK for gifts. I chose to believe there are no coincidences. ANYTHING good happening to me was God telling me “I love you. I LOVE you. I love YOU.” Soon there was wonder all around me. There were butterflies flitting across my path every day. I saw and felt so much love it was unbelievable.
I CHOSE TO BELIEVE.
That was where healing really began. Allowing the miracle of the Creator of heaven and earth to love ME. Allowing Him to show me I am NOT garbage. I am NOT worthless. It doesn’t matter what I look like. It doesn’t matter what I can or can’t do. It doesn’t matter what others think or say. I ground my belief of who I am, of what I’m worth, in what the Almighty says of me, and nothing else really matters.
That’s the real secret.
