Dedicated to Mrs. Gail Barnard – who shared with me and many others her sweet spirit and beautiful gifts, and who I know now rests in the presence of our loving Creator.

A few days ago, I tearfully said to my sponsor, “I don’t know why I have this brain. I hate it so much sometimes.” You see, in addition to being a recovering alcoholic, I’ve also dealt with depression since the ripe old age of 15. In the chicken vs. egg debate, I can tell you that mental illness was present before alcoholism showed up. Fun facts: according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 37.9% of adults with substance use disorders also had mental illnesses, and 18.2% of adults with mental illness also had substance use disorders.

In the past year or so since I quit drinking, I’ve come to know my brain even better. And let me tell you, living with this thing would drive most people to drink! So, as I’ve sobered up, I’ve been on a quest for knowledge about how to live my best sober life with this overactive brain of mine. At times, I’ve cursed it. I even got a tattoo to remind myself that I have been made on purpose and for a purpose – something I’ve always had a hard time believing. Five days after I got the tattoo – which says “I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” – I got an ADHD diagnosis.

I started making so much more sense to myself! This was the answer! Now I could figure out a plan of attack (which for me, involved trying meds, therapy, and reading ALL THE THINGS about ADHD).

In the rooms of recovery, I often hear people talk about how they always felt different and like they didn’t fit in. They said that alcohol made them feel “normal,” and that was the same for me. It helped quiet the incessant thoughts and helped me loosen up… until it didn’t. The crazy thing about alcohol is that it’s a depressant – not exactly the best medicine for someone who gets depressed.

I never liked talking about my depression. I felt like it was a conversation-killer. People don’t really know what to do with it. Some people feel like they have to say something (which oftentimes isn’t helpful!). One of the most unhelpful ones I’ve heard: “what do you have to be depressed about? You have a great job, a house, a good family, and you’re smart!”

Responses like that are what keep many people from speaking up about this illness. We know it doesn’t “make sense.” We can’t make sense of it, and we live with it! If we talk about it, we’re probably hoping someone will know how to help us, because we can’t figure out what to do on our own. It’s too much for us to carry alone usually.

When I was in the deepest of my depressions, the thought that played over and over was “the world would be better off without you.” I shared that thought a few months ago with someone close to me (as I was talking about it from a healthier place), and their response was “that’s a narcissistic thought. The world would keep going just fine without you.” Are they right? Most likely. It’s a logical answer. How many people have lived and died, and the earth continues to turn? A whole lot!

But this person missed my point entirely. What I knew was behind that thought was “you don’t bring anything good into this world. In fact, your darkness overcomes others’ light. They would likely be relieved if you weren’t draining their energy so much.” Was I right? If I look objectively at the impact I’ve made, I know that the thought “you don’t bring anything good into this world” isn’t true. But in the past, my mind has latched onto that soundtrack and played it on repeat. Can you imagine how many times someone could listen to that message before deciding that it’s true and that they should do something about it?

Do you have any idea what the statistics are regarding suicide? I’ve heard about two this week that have affected people I know.

Here are a few stats I pulled during a quick search:

Did you read that?? 10% of adult Americans have thought about suicide. It is the 4^th leading cause of death for people my age. And it is the SECOND leading cause of death for people ages 20-34. This is a serious problem, and I think it can only get better if we start to have more open conversations about it.

I have to go back to that statement I made to my sponsor: “I don’t know why I have this brain!” Well, I still don’t know why exactly, but what I do know is that some of the things I’ve expressed during my sobriety journey have helped others. And so that is what I am choosing to do concerning a topic that so many shy away from. Maybe God made me with a mind that thinks so much and a heart that feels so deeply so that I can experience pain in a profound way and express it in a way that helps others to understand that they are not alone.

If ONE person finds hope in what I share, then it’s worth the judgment of others who can never understand what it’s like to walk this path. I have been fighting tooth and nail to get healthier, and YET – I still had a flash of a thought this week: “this is too hard. I don’t want to do this anymore.” Then thankfully, a quick thought: “Whoa! We cannot go down this rabbit hole. Time to call someone!” Later, I saw that my revolver had fallen onto the floor, and another flash of a thought passed through my mind: “that would be a fast way to do it.” Immediately, I thought, “what is happening??? I’ve been doing so well! Why did this just pop into my brain?? I need to ask someone to pray for me!!”

Before I got into recovery, I would’ve isolated myself. I would’ve sat with my thoughts. I may have even started making a plan – much like I did in 2014. The gift of recovery has shown me that it is not just ok to ask for help, it is imperative. It has shown me that asking for help doesn’t mean that I’m weak. It has shown me that needing people to walk alongside me doesn’t mean that I should be ashamed. It has shown me that I am human.

As I share my story more in depth, please note that I am not advising people to do exactly what I did to address my mental health issues. I am not an expert. I’ve just lived with depression for close to thirty years and am still here to tell the tale. I don’t know what would work for someone else, but I know what has helped me and what hasn’t helped me. Perhaps some of those things could help you or a loved one.

My depression showed up around the age of fifteen. I had struggled with terrible self-esteem at least since puberty, if not before (I had a unibrow at age 8, and I’m pretty sure a kid made fun of my hairy arms in kindergarten).

During those teenage years, as my body morphed into a tomboy’s nightmare, I started really hating myself. As I dealt with my ever-growing boobs and butt, tried to make sense of my frizzy hair and thick eyebrows, and transitioned from homeschooling to Christian school, I started feeling like everything was too hard.

I never thought “I want to kill myself” … I just thought over and over “I wish I’d never been born.” I had been told from a young age that people who chose suicide were “going to hell.” Apparently, they would be in the company of those people I saw at the grocery store with beer in their shopping carts and people who smoked cigarettes. Never mind the drug addicts, thieves, and probably homeless people too. Everyone was going to hell, you see. I was even raised to believe that you could “lose your salvation” (there was mention of the mysterious “unpardonable sin” – something I was constantly in fear that I had unknowingly committed). We didn’t tell ghost stories as kids, but instead would repeat stories passed down about demons we’d heard people had actually seen. Oh, and the rapture. People were always talking about the rapture. Gotta get saved before that happens, or you would be like those people in the “Left Behind” movies (these terrifying movies were shown for our apparent “spiritual education”).

Are you wondering if I was raised in a cult? I’ve often wondered that too. Apparently, there was a very slim chance of going to heaven, and if you decided to take your own life, you were definitely not getting in. (I’m glad I was able to establish how hard it is to get into heaven. There are a lot more rules, but I need to move on now.)

So, in my 15-year-old depressed brain, I wondered why in the world God would create us in the first place. I had been raised to believe that God knew everything, so I wondered what He was thinking setting all this in motion when we could all see how things had turned out. I decided to pose the question to our Sunday School teacher. He asked the class, “who wants to have children?” I’m pretty sure everyone except for me raised their hand. I had thought this through quite a bit. Why would I bring a child into this world when I wished I had never been born? I didn’t have a choice, so I wouldn’t put that on someone else.

So began my years of feeling like no one could understand my thoughts. I thought my brain must be broken, so I just tried to soldier on and figure out how to be “good enough.” I learned that if I could be “good” at things, I could at least feel better for a little bit.

At age 17, I experienced a trauma that turned that thought of “I wish I’d never been born” to “I don’t think I can do this”. I remember lying in the back seat of my car crying and wondering what concoction of over-the-counter pills I could gather from the store to just go to sleep and never wake up. But after I had my pity party, I sucked it up and soldiered on. There were people to be taken care of after all. I had to stop thinking about myself.

The next several years were spent finding my identity in a new city, working a lot, getting married, and figuring out how to be a wife (do they make manuals for marriage? I apparently never got one….).

In my mid-twenties, I started a new type of birth control. It promised appealing benefits, but what I didn’t know is that it would send me into a pretty serious depression. I’d come home from long days waiting tables and immediately go outside to sit on the balcony just to avoid having a conversation with my husband. I felt like I was drowning and didn’t know how to pull out of it. I kept working, kept doing, but I couldn’t shake it. I finally got some relief when I changed birth control, and then there was the divorce to get through and the new life to build.

Depression struck again a couple of years later. This time, I had started going to college and was working full-time. And when I wasn’t doing either, I was sleeping. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I remember just wanting to hide away. Somehow, I pulled through. I’m not quite sure what shifted, but it probably involved something like moving or some other life change that helped me to focus on something other than my sadness.

A few years after that, I was still in college. I was taking summer classes, going to school year-round, working as much as possible, and feeling completely overwhelmed. Ever concerned with being independent, I didn’t want to waste time or go into debt. I needed to prove myself, and I couldn’t wait tables forever. I took on so much and then felt like I couldn’t go on as my mind constantly yelled, “you’re not good enough and you never will be!”

A phone call to my mom one day caused me to realize that I might need to see a doctor. She had tried everything to help me and realized it wasn’t going to be solved with “mind over matter”. I started thinking that maybe medication could help. I was so nervous to make an appointment. It was at a place that had “psychiatric” in the name. I thought those places were only for mentally disturbed people. I didn’t know if I was really mentally disturbed… I just didn’t really want to be here any more. I answered questions, talked to a psychiatrist, and left with a diagnosis of depression. That was 2010. They started me on sertraline, and I took it pretty faithfully until 2013. During those three years, I navigated a death in the family, two big moves, a job loss and a breakup – all with no spiral. It was a miracle considering my history!

2013 was the year everything started looking up. I went on a juice fast, then started eating “whole food, plant-based”, lost weight and felt great! I had been single for a few years, but that November, I met someone. I was so excited. My “clock” had started ticking a few years before, and this guy seemed like “the one”. A serious romance ensued. I felt great and decided that the meds weren’t necessary anymore. My new diet was the solution to my problems and the new relationship had me feeling great! At least, it had me feeling great until it didn’t. The new guy dropped a bomb on me one day. He broke up with me and cited a few reasons, though the only one I heard was that we didn’t share a sense of humor. I thought, “Huh?? What does that have to do with anything??” I never thought he was funny, but it wasn’t a dealbreaker. Apparently, he thought he was hilarious and that I just didn’t get him.

What followed was quite the opposite of funny. I was devastated. I went to work of course, but I drowned myself in tears and vodka in the months following. I started to sink lower and lower. I had a thought that perhaps I should get my thyroid checked. I’d dealt with this for nearly twenty years at this point, so I wondered if there was some underlying cause I hadn’t discovered.

Between the time that I scheduled the appointment with a general practitioner and the actual appointment, Robin Williams died by suicide. I remember sitting at my house thinking “If HE didn’t think he should be here, what in the world am I doing here?” I was back to the soundtrack of “You don’t bring anything good to this world. They’d be better off without you.”

This time, I started making a plan. I won’t go into the nitty gritty details, but I’ll just tell you that I thought it through pretty thoroughly. When I went in for my appointment, I was fragile. I was hanging on by a thread. I remember telling the doctor that I was depressed, and she asked if I had a plan. I told her I did, but that the thought of my nieces kept me from doing anything. I figured everyone else would either be relieved or would get over it in time. She looked at me with such concern, gave me resources, and had me sign something that indicated I wasn’t planning to harm myself.

What happened next is unfortunate in ways, but I think it’s important to share. I’ve been called “sensitive” by people who meant it in a critical way, so I always hated that label. The fact of the matter is that I AM sensitive. I am deeply sensitive. When people say something careless, I often take it deeply to heart. I’m already harder on myself than most others ever could be, so when people speak critically and carelessly towards me or about me, it can send me into a spiral.

Another thing that is true about me is that I often overshare. I think I’ve always done so because I have a deep desire to be known and to be loved. I just haven’t always used the best discernment concerning who I share sensitive information with, and it has sometimes been used to hurt me deeply. One such thing happened after I shared with my boss about my mental health struggles. I had already had several conflicts with my boss, but we had worked to patch things up, so I thought it was something I could share with them. Instead, it was shared with the staff in a malicious way.

Thankfully, I had started seeing a psychologist and a psychiatrist around the time that this all happened. The general practitioner had given me their information, so I started going shortly afterwards. If I hadn’t had them to help me through the depression and the sharing of my information, I’m not sure what would have happened. I’ve never been so close to taking my own life before or since.

That was nine years ago. I’ve been through a lot in those nine years – a miscarriage, divorce, battle with alcoholism, job loss, major accident, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting.

The fact of the matter is that when I look at my life, I’m kind of amazed that I’m still here. I probably shouldn’t be. But here I am, fighting to live a life I can be proud of.

Will my brain ever be “normal?” I doubt it. The psychiatrist I started seeing in 2013 told me, “This is a neurobiological disorder. You cannot eat it right away, pray it away, exercise it away.” Do all those things help make it better? You bet! Having faith, going to therapy, watching my diet, and incorporating exercise have all had a positive impact on my mental health. But the truth is that I will likely always struggle with this, and so I will likely always also take meds.

If you’re wondering how to help people like me when you see us struggling, here are a few suggestions:

1. Ask questions. I just heard something today that I thought was powerful: “when you ask someone what they need, they become visible and valuable.” That doctor asking me if I had a plan was an opportunity for me to be honest and let her into my pain. I wouldn’t have offered that information up without being asked.
2. Show genuine care. When someone answers your questions honestly, do your best to withhold judgment or offer advice. We probably already feel shame around our depression. We probably feel like a burden, and we’ve probably tried to think of every way to just “be like normal people.” (This isn’t the time to say “what do you have to be depressed about??”)
3. Offer to spend time with them. When we’re in the depths of our depression, leaving the house is usually hard. We might be open to you bringing us a pizza and a movie and just hanging with us in our pajamas. Knowing someone cares and actually wants to spend time with us helps us to have a little hope that maybe people wouldn’t be better off if we weren’t here.
4. Share resources with them. There are suicide hotlines and affordable therapy. There is help available, but depression usually steals that person’s energy or desire to seek help on their own.
5. Tell someone. If you have a concern that your loved one may harm themselves, don’t keep it to yourself.

And if you’re struggling and don’t know how to pull out of it, here are some things that have helped me:

1. Carefully cultivate what you allow to influence your thinking. I traded drama-filled reality shows and trauma-filled crime shows for compelling and inspirational movies. I stopped watching so much TV and started reading books about the power of positive thinking (check out Soundtracks by Jon Acuff. I can’t recommend it enough!). I started listening to inspirational podcasts while taking the dogs on a walk. I swapped songs about sad stories for music that made me want to sing and dance. I unfollowed anyone who threatened my new mindset, and I looked for accounts to follow that inspired me. Like an old boss told me once, “feed the good, starve the bad”. Trust me, it works!
2. Find reasons to get out of your house. When I’ve been most depressed, I’ve isolated myself. I often didn’t want to leave my house unless it was absolutely necessary, so I realized that I needed to force myself to get out of the house. If I didn’t want to be around people, I would take the dogs on a hike (the AllTrails app is a great resource for finding new places to explore, and it even rates difficulty levels!). And if I wanted to be around people but wasn’t into having conversations yet, I would go to the library. Pro tip: headphones are my secret weapon when I want to be around people but need to “stay in my bubble.”
3. Connect with people in person rather than through the phone. I am often tied to my phone as I send messages to many people, but what I realized I was missing out on were real, in-person conversations. I don’t know about you, but it’s not exactly easy for me to unburden my heart over a text message. For me, the most authentic conversations happen in person, where I can allow my loved ones to actually see me. I started making coffee dates, and I think it’s something I’ll continue to do for the rest of my life!
4. Think of a way to help someone else. In this season of limited employment, I got creative and decided to invite people over for dinners. It motivated me to tidy the house, and the planning kept my brain busy and excited! If that sounds too ambitious for you (or not your jam at all), I have a few other ideas: bake something and take it to a friend or neighbor, volunteer with an organization you admire, or ask your friends if there’s anything they need your help with. You’ll be amazed at how much better you feel when you give back!
5. Try to remember the things you loved as a kid. I started coloring, sketching, playing the piano, learning the guitar, spending time outside, and going to the library. I realized that I had somehow forgotten how to “play” as an adult, and making time for that regularly has helped me immensely. I had to give myself permission to rediscover the things that bring me joy, and I recommend that you do the same!

Here is something I know: I have a gift worth giving – a gift that only I can give. I didn’t always believe that, but I do now. That’s what keeps me going, even on the hard days. And I want you to know that you do too! Depression doesn’t have to win. You just have to fight for yourself. And I want you to know that you’re worth it!

The biggest piece of advice I can give to anyone – the person suffering or the ones who love them – is to accept that this is a part of your life. But just because it’s a part of your life doesn’t mean that there is no hope. In the wise words of my dear Grandpa, “there are no problems, only solutions.”