Following Jesus is Putting on Pants or “Structured Depression”

This past summer, I waited on tables for a bit. And, except for the excessive weight and sleep loss, it was a really good experience.

One thing I learned from it is that one crappy table does not make for a crappy day. It makes for a crappy table. Your next table might be the best table ever. Check in with me every 45 minutes or so, and my day assessment would be completely different each time.

That principle is the same with my current struggle against my depression. A morning of exhausted defeatedness doesn’t resign my whole day to the same. It’s hard to maintain that perspective and not sit down in my grief and stay put.

I thought, being home, I would be better, that I would leave this dampered state in Ireland or in Arkansas, but I didn’t.

And I see my siblings and their kids and my parents and I want to be engaging or ecstatic to be with them, but I can’t get there. I feel trapped. I so want to be fun and chirpy or even pretend to be, but I can’t even manufacture that like I used to be able to.

I’m frustrated with myself.

I’m frustrated with who I’ve become, and I don’t want to talk to my friends or “my people” because I don’t want to be such an unending killjoy. Or I don’t want to talk to them because they hear my semester’s story and miss the point. They hear only the superficial struggles, easy to fix and apologize for or only the parts which are congruent with their own delusions of reality, but they don’t hear my heart.

And then, out of nowhere, the plexiglass that stands between me and everybody else melts, and I can hear them and feel happiness and have fun and let go! So wonderful!

Then one comment or well-meant question trips me off again. “Oh you live in Ireland? So jealous. You’re so legit.” You couldn’t be more wrong, but you so don’t want to hear about it.

This was not the plan! This was never the plan! The plan was I go to Ireland and have adventures and the experience of my lifetime, then spend a few days alone, then reunite with people I love for a while, and then come back to my rose-colored life on the emerald isle.

Extended and strangling anxiety was not in the plan, nor being forgotten, nor hatred for almost every moment of my life there, complete aloneness, rejection, replacement, depression, constant misunderstandings, a worry to my family and friends, a worrier for friends who are broken and breaking themselves and, finally, being sent home in disgrace and failure because I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I’m not supposed to be here yet! This was not the plan. I failed. I failed and I’m not getting better. What is the big picture? What is my “why”? And when will I see it?

Being alone, you can be in bad shape and know it to a certain extent, but it’s when you’re surrounded by people that the mirror of reality is shoved in your face.

For instance, I knew I had lost some weight, but I didn’t realize just how much. I’m currently two pounds under my thinnest weight of my thinnest summer, and this the result of “I gained it all back I swear”. No telling how low I got this past semester. Food and I aren’t getting along.

Neither are sleep and I. My sleep schedule has been all kinds of everywhere, but not until I’m around people with normal sleep schedules did I see how odd I’ve been allowing mine to be. 4.5 hours here, 12 hours there, never a pattern, never the same.

Following Jesus is putting on pants; it’s building a steel structure of normality for my fog, and forcing my will and body to cooperate. Like sleep and food. Like making some progress on my looming papers (oops…) or leaving the house. Following Jesus means giving up the last piece of my dignity and self-dependence and getting some help.

I pray so dearly that I never again become so self-important and callous that the Lord has to bring me back to this place.