Depression and Anxiety 101

I am one of many that suffer from anxiety disorder and depression. I’ve been told by friends and family that this is something you don’t talk about, but I am going to talk about it. I am tired of the forced shame from others who don’t understand what it’s like.

I love birds. I think they’re beautiful and graceful and fun and cute, but I would never want one as a pet. How can something born to fly be truly happy in a cage? The ones whose owners shower them with love must be content, but I always imagine they know something is missing. That beyond those bars is a wide open space where they could spread their wings and feel fresh air lift them to the home they truly belong to.

When my anxiety is at its worst, I feel like a bird in a cage. It’s like I’m a prisoner within my own body, trapped where I’m forced to watch the world move, breathe, and interact without me. Depression is very similar. I’ll wake up with the inexplicable feeling that I am incapable of living today, or sometimes with the wish that I wasn’t living at all.

I spent years doing “the natural thing.” I read books on what to eat and not to eat. I cut out processed sugars, caffeine, and white flour. I tried just ignoring how I felt. (That should have worked because I wanted so badly to be well. I hated everything about how I felt and how it made me behave.) I went to pastors and preachers who encouraged me to “find my joy in the Lord” and exhorted me that anxiety is sin. All I needed to do was confess my sin and the Lord would heal me. Some of my panic attacks took place facedown on the floor, screaming aloud for God to forgive and heal me. Spiritual leaders would shake their heads and say, “You’re not truly letting go.”

I avoided medication like poison. People told me, “You can’t go on medication! You’ll get addicted and live the rest of your life doped up.” I was even trained to mistrust councilors and psychiatrists because they would just tell me it was, “all your parent’s fault.”

By the time I turned 27, my life was pathetically reduced to a sort of weary day to day drudgery. I never spent more than 10 minutes by myself. I refused to go anywhere without my husband or my mother beside me. Some evenings I would wake up choking with tears, unsure when they could have even started. My husband would hold me while I screamed and shook, rocking me gently until my body gave out and I dropped back into an exhaustion induced sleep. My friendships dwindled and died because I couldn’t give them quality time and was too ashamed to tell them why. I had an imaginary bubble of protection with a 45 minute radius from my house. Anything outside it was impossible to perform.

I was a bird in a cage.

I hated it. I hated my body. I hated what I was doing to my husband and my marriage. I hated being a burden to others and constantly demeaned myself for how selfish I was behaving. I hated being friendless. I hated the secrecy and shame. I even stopped trying to get council from other Christians, especially when I moved to a church where if someone mentioned anxiety and depression, allusion was often drawn to pill popping sinners who escaped conviction through medication. I gave up, and sat down to silently watch others live through the bars of my prison.

I was very sick. But I got sicker.

Because that’s when the depression hit, doubling in force after my miscarriage. I now hated living in general. I was too much of a burden on others. I wanted to set them free. I wanted die. I told my husband this, over and over. That I wished he hadn’t married me and had married someone normal. If it hadn’t been for my relationship with Jesus Christ, I would have attempted suicide. God and my husband’s never-ending, patient love were the only things that held me back from believing the world was better off without me.

My husband convinced me to ignore the voices and get help. I went to a councilor. I went on medication.

That was a little over a year ago. Since then, my life has filled and blossomed, slowly but beautifully. I have driven three hours from my home with my husband. I’ve seen and done things that I never dreamed I’d have the courage to experience. I’ve spent lovely long hours at home and rested in the blessed peace of being entirely alone to read and write. I rediscovered my love for life because I had the tools I needed to participate in it with everyone else.

I am not ashamed of those tools. I was sick. I am getting better now. People with Cancer should not be ashamed of chemotherapy. People with diabetes should not be ashamed of insulin.

I still have bad days and weeks and months, but they are so much better than the bad days of before. And frankly, I would rather spend the rest of my life on Prozac then crawl back into that wretched ever shrinking bubble. God gave me life to use it, for him and others. God made me because he loves me and wants to give me true joy.

This post has two audiences.

For the first: I understand how you feel, but please don’t wait to get help. Talk to someone who loves you enough to support you and just do what you have to do. Don’t wait. Never wait. Take it from someone who waited far too long.

For the second: Don’t fight against people like me getting the help we need. You don’t realize how flippant comments like, “SSRI’s are the real reason for gun violence,” do more than sting. They can tear gaping wounds into the spirit that fester and bleed for years. You don’t know who your cruelty and ignorance is preventing from getting help. And if you claim to be a Christian, it is flat out ungodly to deny help to the suffering and needy.

I would give anything to have those 27 years back, to have gone to Chris and Sarah’s wedding, to have toured Israel with my father, to not have cancelled the original plans for my honeymoon. I can’t change the past, but NO ONE is going to prevent me from living the rest of my life.

I am a bird who tasted freedom from its cage and, as God is my witness, I swear I am going to fly.

© Rachel Svendsen 2015