Still Alive.

 

This morning I woke up, laid on my bathroom floor for an hour and a half and dragged myself to the doctor’s appointment I made last month. I spent nearly two hours there, crying and getting blood drawn and picking up medication.

While I sat in the pharmacy waiting room, I started thinking about the date. April 6th. I tried to figure out why that day stood out to me. Then it hit me.  One year ago today, my life took a drastic change at the hands of another person. I’ve honestly never felt so betrayed or hurt or abandoned by anyone in my whole entire life, and it seemed so out of the blue and out of character and every part of me ACHED from the pain of confusion.

I spent the summer months following April 6th of last year in an sugar rush. Do all the things, stay all the busy, enjoy all the sun. and then I crashed. hard. I started noticing it in November, and it’s been getting progressively worse. We’re talking… I care about nothing. I just want to stay home and watch TV and sleep. Existing is exhausting and tiring and I am ultra-irritable and I’ve gained a lot of weight back and yet… nothing seems to motivate me to change any of it.

and it’s killing me. Emotionally, at least. I’m just not doing well. 

So today I went and finally took care of it. At one point, the doctor (who I had picked out very carefully) asked me if I am a spiritual person. To which I responded yes. She said “I want you to know that this can make it hard to pray. But God is still listening and God is still at work.” and I started crying.

She also told me to stop being so hard on myself. As I sat thinking about this past trip around the sun, I realized that God has done amazing things in my life. I’ve been binge watching New Girl and there was this line that I loved – “expose your cracks and love will fill them.” That pretty much sums up what has happened to me over the course of this past year. My cracks were exposed and a lot of people poured love on them to fill them.

As I left the doctor with the first ever antidepressants I’ve been described, I felt a weird relief. Not because I think the blue little pills will change my life or anything but because my doctor described them as sending a message through my nervous system to my body to say “it’s okay. calm down.”

The first song that came on when I got in the car was my friend Ernie’s song, Still Alive. and – no joke – I just cried, for a variety of reasons. Partially because throughout the course of my journey with mental illness, Ernie’s voice (in song and otherwise) has shared some of the most encouraging, supportive words. Partially because I remember a day almost a year ago when I drove home  from Seattle with that song on repeat after seeing Mary-Keith and experiencing divine orchestration that reminded me who is in control.

Mostly because I remember thinking a year ago that I honestly was not going to be able to ever regain my footing.

But here I am.

Still alive.