It has been a while since I’ve allowed myself to write publicly. Not for lack of thoughts. I have LOTS of thoughts. So many thoughts, in fact, I pay someone to help me sort them all out. Counseling has become a vital aspect of our family, and we would not be here without it.
A couple of years ago, I hit my emotional bottom. I mean, 2020 was a hard year for all of us. The whole year of 2020 happened and it was just more than I could manage. So I sat in a lady’s office and told her how broken I felt. Well, actually, I’m pretty sure that I told her that I didn’t know why I had anxiety, denied being depressed, and said that my life wasn’t “that bad” so I shouldn’t be anxious or depressed. But it turns out, I had every reason. To hear the reasons why I was feeling this way was shocking. There was a lot of conversations where I had to face hard truths and my reality. Yet it was also comforting to know why I had anxiety (turns out, if you didn’t know, you can have two conflicting feelings at the same time).
There’s a lot of work involved in this process. Talking, journaling, thinking, listening. I’m big on journaling, so I spent a lot of time doing that. So for one day, I was instructed to write down my thoughts for the whole day. We were hoping to discover the narrative that I played in my head. You know, the constant ticker of thoughts that streams through your head? If you know me well, you know that I live in my head, so the thoughts in my head needed to get out. What should have been a simple task, well it took me over an hour and 8 pages. I was only able to write down the first 3 hours of my day. Three hours into one day and I’ve already hammered enough judgement on myself for a lifetime. And that’s only what I could remember. More on that in a little while.
In my counseling, I began to discover that I, generally, had been living my life in fear. And I don’t mean living in fear due to COVID and whatever 2020 was. That was a normal amount of fear. For longer than I even know, I have always been afraid. Afraid of my thoughts and emotions. Afraid of my past. Afraid of anxiety. I stopped trusting myself. I stopped listening to myself. I stopped allowing myself to feel. I learned to suppress my thoughts before I knew what they were. I began to believe that I had become untrustworthy and unreliable. I didn’t like myself. And I for sure didn’t love myself.
As I reread that and as I feel that all over again, my heart breaks. How did I get to such a place? How did the lies wiggle their way in to so much of my life and my mind? Where do you even begin when you realized that the whole way you think is a lie? The list of lies that I told myself was absurd. It was a constant barrage. I was comparing myself to people, mentally berating myself for not meeting unattainable standards. My thoughts, fears, and condemnations were happening so fast, I couldn’t even acknowledge all of them.
How does that even happen? One of the biggest fears I faced was “I’m a terrible person so I don’t deserve anything good”. Because of this core fear, I would suppress most of my thoughts before I could even notice them happening consciously…so that I would not prove myself right by having a thought that I could label as bad. Anyone else think that is super messed up? I suppressed my thoughts in fear of them potentially being bad. But as I kept pushing these thoughts down instead of dealing with them, I subconsciously ingrained the lies deeper and deeper. You can’t take a thought captive if you don’t even know what it is.
You might be wondering where the comforting part is in any of this. My brain was BROKEN. I had so many deep lies rooted in my thinking that I didn’t even realize had entered my brain. And honestly, I still don’t have a lot of answers to when this all happened. Anxiety is terribly complex. There are chemical, environmental, and circumstantial variables that all come into play. So hearing that my thinking was fundamentally flawed? That gave me a reason to have anxiety. It gave me a reason to be depressed. I needed a reason. A reason to be broken. Because when your life is, by all outward appearances, considered “good” while you feel all messed up in the inside, it makes the messed up feeling feel even worse. Even today, I don’t have a “reason”. There have been some difficult memories to face and I had to become okay with them being a part of me, but there is not one big glaring reason. It’s just who I am.
But if I can say anything to someone reading this, someone that is thinking that this sounds a little bit like you – You may never find that one huge thing in recesses of your brain that explains the feelings you have. However, while that may not be what you want to hear, what is more important is to stop looking for a reason and allow God to show you His reality. The biggest thing that has helped me? Learning who God says that I am, and learning who God is. The exceptionally good news is that God loves you right where you are, and the you before now, and the you in the future.
I think a lot of us are just not okay with reality. There’s a picture of the world we believe we should have, and that often doesn’t line up with what actually is. The complicated yet beautiful mess that our life is. Once we stop trying to make our life what we think it should be, and stop running away from what our life actually is, we can breathe. We can rest in the truth that the Lord is good and He loves us.
If I go back to the first time I wrote on this blog, I see what God started to stir in me. The gentle nudging toward growth and letting go of what I thought my life should be. I loved the start of it. But if you notice, there is a lot missing. Somewhere in the beautiful process of discovering my writing voice and sharing the ways that Jesus was sanctifying me, I threw up a stop sign. I said nope, we are done here. And I turned it off. It was just a strange time. And if I’m really honest, it is an embarrassing time. It’s hard to admit. It was a span of several years full of beautiful but empty journals, purchased yet unopened books, and an unread Bible full of the truths I needed.
That time was marked with a whole lot of striving. I didn’t know how to deal, cope, or manage. I don’t know when or where or why exactly it all started, but I was just surviving. It was a hard time. It was a hard time that I am now on the other side of.
What I find myself doing now as I slowly unravel the mess that was necessary to survive, is to look back and see it all from a distance. I think this is important to point out. Because, depression and anxiety are not just moments in time. It takes time to get there. And it takes a really long time to undo the damage. 2 years in, and there are more good days than bad. But I’m here to share with whoever will listen, that there’s no shame in where you are, but you don’t have to stay there.
mrsbdholloway.com 
Ohh Brit this is amazing. In those thoughts that you just shared, opening up and allowing others to hear you testimony you have opened up the eyes of at least one. All my younger life I was taught to push past the pain, no pain no gain. So that is what I have done. I was taught that you didn’t show pain you kept it to yourself. You just smile when someone asks how you are and say I’m fine when really I wasn’t. And not alot of it was physical pain but emotional. I have questioned my worth my ability. You have opened my eyes to the fact that it is okay to not be okay. I have recently been faced with that reality all to well. My body has betrayed me so where I can’t put on that smile and say I’m okay. I’m not okay and I can’t hide it anymore. I have felt guilt over this that I am letting people down. I am trying to stop that way of thinking because the only way I will truly let people down is if I don’t surrender and say I’m not okay I need help. I have done that now because my body betrayed me and has let everyone see what I have been hiding for years. I know I ended up having a word fit but I felt like I needed to say this. Ya not just my body has been hurting but my heart and my mind has. I got a perverbial fist in the gut. It has made me question myself over and over. I am not good enough. But why am I not good enough I try hard. I try to be better I try to be one of the best and to know or to be told so to speak that you are not good enough has been hard for me to come to grips with. These are the things that run and wrap around my mind….your not good enough, you should have done more, you should have been better. I try hard to tell myself that these are bogus thoughts but it is hard. I fight this evil daily now. To wrap up was supposed to be just a thank you and has turned into a 5 page book report. Thank you for letting God work through to help me to say I’m not okay and that is okay.