1:00 a.m. You’ve spent two hours trying everything, unsuccessfully, to relax and fall asleep.
2:00 a.m. Your body is exhausted but your brain is doing a marathon. It won’t shut down any more than the tight hold in your chest will release its grip.
2:30a.m. You’re counting the hours now until you have to get up and the thought of only having a few hours sleep makes your heart feel like its beating too fast. Sleeping pills. Which may or may not do a single thing to put you out of your misery.
The isolated feeling of moving slowly through a dark, oppressive tunnel that leads nowhere except to a deeper, darker separation from the outside world is common in depression. The depression cloaks itself in an inability to care enough to pursue relationships to relieve the loneliness of isolation. It becomes a hopeless condition that consumes life’s previous enjoyments, hobbies, and interests so that typical activities no longer hold any appeal. The pit of depression: many of us have felt its grip at some point in our lives and are closely surrounded by loved ones who are treating the symptoms of this seemingly hopeless condition with medication, or something else.
It takes courage to step forward, out of that isolated place we find a bit of comfort, to learn more or admit that we need help.
Finding hope in life’s difficulties is what we cling to– that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Without that hope, we become depressed and convince ourselves we don’t care. It’s too difficult to care.
We live as broken people in a fallen world, yet the desire for Eden, in its glorious perfection, remains a strong desire within us. If we lose hope, we lose perspective; without that constant focus, we become heavy-hearted and depressed. Relational brokenness often causes feelings of depression. Loneliness, loss, failure or rejection are often reasons we pinpoint as likely causes or events that cause this depression. This begs of me to ask a question of myself when I’m pressed in with these heavy-weighted emotions. “What is that loss I need to grieve?”
If we deny that there has been a great loss in our lives, we have not slipped through the door of hope, waiting for us to open our eyes to freedom. It might look like failure in your business, past abuse, death of a loved one, rejection of a spouse, parent, or child; accepting that life’s hurts and disappointments are worth grieving gives us a new beginning with hope for a new future. Refusing to grieve a loss is still hanging onto something that isn’t in your control anymore anyway; trying to convince yourself that you can not, and will not, let it go. (Please feel free to sing Let it Go here.) You will not give up. But it’s been taken. Our refusal to relinquish control is just putting a leash on what we want back and like walking an imaginary dog.
For me, it was parenting. First-time mom, opinionated as can be, confident that I would have the Gerber baby that cooed her confidence and admiration to me with toothless smiles. Introduce nightmare child. Misdiagnosed acid reflux. Labeled failure to thrive and ordered to feed every three hours, from the start of one feeding to the start of another. The problem was the pain from eating caused each feeding to take one and a half hours. Do the math. This is round-the-clock twelve out of twenty-four hours wrestling with a screaming child to get them to accept food. Then it coming back up. The child was only photographed asleep otherwise there would’ve only been crying child photos. “Sleep like a baby” was one of those crazy phrases that I never wanted to experience. I had no idea that a five pound human could be awake for so many hours all through the endless night and still had the energy to be awake and cry the next day. Little did I know that I felt rejection from this vocal child that could hardly have been blamed for unintentionally labeling me as an unsuccessful momma. But, the heart doesn’t decide when it feels rejection or failure. Oh, baby! I didn’t have one clue why I would soon wish I wasn’t going to wake up to another morning. Imbalanced hormones? Of course. But that was just tip of the bottle nipple full of reasons that I crashed hard.
It feels contradictory to grieve when we are already in emotional depths of despair, but losses that are left undealt with become compounded and create deeper depression. As I live and breathe…
How can we open that door to hope when we feel so incapable of doing anything but existing? When just crawling out of bed takes courage, putting one foot in front of the other–worthless effort?
Maybe it’s a feeling you can brush aside during the day, but at night, you can no longer block out the crazy merry-go-round of thoughts in your hyper alert mind and shut it down for sleep. And the longer it takes for sleep to come, the more anxious you become knowing that, with every hour you see blinking on that alarm clock, it means one less hour until you face another day that would be best spent in a semiconscious sleep. The hated bedtime and the beloved bed.
The things you once loved no longer interest you. It brings binging of anything that gives temporary pleasure or numbness. It can look like so many deceiving things but is recognizable by its overindulgence. Chronic shopping, alcohol, food binging, excessive zoning in the electronic world, sleeping too much or too little, sex addictions and anything that gives your brain a chemical boost, feel-good moment, or temporarily blocks out the unhappiness can be a symptom of the depression that almost everyone will at some point in their life endure. Almost everyone? Yes, that means that just because people don’t enjoy reliving these dark periods with you, doesn’t mean they haven’t lived them.
You aren’t alone. You are surrounded by people desperate to have a reason to choose hope that there is a way of life better than merely existing.
(Part 1…to be continued)