People Need People

In another post I talked a bit about my depression. Well, it’s time to talk a bit more about it. In high school I was severely depressed from my sophomore year onward. In college I have been less severely depressed. Let me give you an idea of what “severe” and “less severe” means. In high school starting from maybe halfway through sophomore year to the end of senior year suicide was not a monthly thought for me, it was a daily or hourly thought. I would dream of ways to end my life. Ways that would leave as little mess as possible. Ways that I could disappear completely, vanish into the void like a light mist under the hot Alabama sun. I always tell people that God saved my life, and I mean it. God saved me from myself in high school. I cannot tell you how many nights I sat in bed with a knife in my hands, trying to work up the courage to cut myself out of this world. Thanks be to God I never tried. I could tell you about the night in college when I tried to tie a noose with my computer cord, but thanks to God, I never quite worked up the courage to tie the final knot. Let me assure you, I am an efficient and thorough person, if I had made an attempt, there would only have been one. God’s love saved me all those years. He was the only reason I stuck around. I bought into the lie that no one loved me, that everyone was faking it, but I could not buy the lie that God did not love me.

In high school severe meant laying in my bed every other night, drowning in a pool of despair and my own tears. It meant curling up in the fetal position around the stabbing ball of loneliness in my stomach. It meant sobbing the word worthless through the tears until I at last fell asleep. Less severe in college meant that this happened only once a month or every two weeks.

I could tell you a thousand stories of how deep the depression was, and how close I came to the edge night after night, and maybe someday I will. But in high school I never told anyone. I can remember telling only a few people about my depression in high school, and when I told them I dressed it up in a nice little package. I said, “I’ve been pretty depressed lately. Not about anything specific. Just pretty sad.” I never said, “God is literally the only thing between a knife and my throat right now.” Even in college I talked about my depression as if it was a thing of the past. As if I still didn’t have those nights where I looked at the pretty glint of the light on a knife blade. As if it was over and done.

This past semester I went to a counselor for my depression. I told him something had happened and I had started planning my suicide. He said that was bad and then we talked about things and in 7 weeks he said I was alright. I never told him how deep my self-esteem issues run. I never told him that I had only started to be glad I was alive at all in the past year and a half. I falsely proclaimed myself cured and painted over the still rotting wood with a happy bright yellow color.

Through all the years I always hoped that someone would notice. That someone would push back the curtains of “I’m alright.” But no one ever did. I had gotten an early start in hiding my emotions in middle school. In high school I perfected the straight face. We would have “no laughing” contests, where two people stare at each other until one laughs. I never lost once. All I had to do was set my mind on the hopelessness in my heart and I could not bear to smile. I have become a master of hiding myself. I can put on a smile at the drop of a hat. I can perfectly send out the “I don’t want to talk about it” vibe. I can deflect and defer any question. The only one who has ever pursued me enough to break through the myriad of masks, is God.

So for years I lived with just him. People say it’s hard to rely on God. It’s not. Not if he’s the only thing that’s kept you from killing yourself for the past seven years. Not if you wake up morning after morning with all your energy drained from despair and you have to pray for the strength to simply get out of bed. For years I’ve been living with God. But it hasn’t been immeasurably more, it’s been a starvation diet. God gives me enough strength to do his will for the day. Like here, he gives me energy to do my work, play with the kids, and pursue my teammates, but no more. He leaves me nothing extra, nothing left for myself. This is the way I have been living for years.

Last week God finally brought that to an end. I had been feeling used by my team here. God has revealed in me a talent of writing poems, so I have been writing poems for everyone, but no one has written anything back. I give people snacks every day, but no one shares their food with me. I pray for people all the time, but no one prays for me. And the dam finally broke last week. God told me I had to tell my team about it, and I had to share a poem I had written with them. The poem is below

Grasping at Straws

I draw in a nice, cool, breathe of water.
Cold
Dark
Bolts of lightning illuminate the ocean. Glinting off the toothy smiles of the sharks that surround me. There is a gleam in their eyes. The assurance of victory, as they wait for me to stop struggling.
Cold
Dark
Water blasts into my ears. Pouring in the screams of all the other lost souls who have drowned in this ocean. Filling my head, begging me to join them.
Cold
Dark
My throat burns with bile and salt water as the ocean forces itself on me. It batters my body with crashing waves. Beating me into submission.
Cold
Dark
My arms and legs burn. Bones creak and sinews scream as I fight for the surface. My right arm stretches out of the maelstrom, grasping for anything. Hail is the only thing that deigns to touch my hand.
Cold
Dark
I am drowning. Sinking in a sea of despair. I try to lift my countenance to the furious sky, but my eyes burn with sea water. I try to cry out to the raging heavens, but my vomit gags me. So I pray the only prayer I know.
Same me.

Save me. Two words I had cried out to God so many times throughout the years, but never to anyone else. And last week God told me it’s time to cry out to those who love you. I had to pray that prayer to my team. I have been tired and burned out for half of this trip, but instead of asking my team for help, I only asked God. Some say that all you need is God, and this is true. However, God is not just inside you, He is in other people as well, and in nature, and art, and so many other things. God is not limited to the inside of our own heads. So God showed me that people need people. If I need help, I need to cry out for it. I waited all those years in my arrogance for people to see what I was deliberately hiding from them. If I had simply let them see what they needed to see, they would have helped. This is a new thing for me. I knew I needed Christian community, and I knew I needed vulnerability, but I didn’t know I needed vulnerable Christian community. We need to be open with each other about our faults as well as our strengths. We need to show what we lack along with what we have excess of. This is something that will be hard for me. It’s still hard for me to ask for help when I need it. It will be hard to go home and have to change relationships because I need help from people that I have only ever poured into. But I know that the God in them will rise up to help the man in me. I have never had much faith in people, but I have faith in God, and I guess I can learn to trust the God in other people as well as the one in my head.