A Quiet Milestone

September 1, 2020 marks the official date when I became medication-free.

Having been diagnosed with depression and anxiety as a teenager, I have been taking some form of mood stabilizer for basically 12 years. The exception to that was when I was off medication for almost a year in 2013-2014, but needed to start taking it again. For the last several months now I have been feeling I reached a point where I no longer need drugs, so with the guidance of my doctor I have been weaning myself off my mood stabilizer. I took my last dose on August 31, 2020.

A combination of life experience, therapy, and personal growth I believe has led me to this milestone. I will not say I’m exactly “happy” all the time, but I do feel safe, and content, and strong. And when that’s not the case I have systems in place for taking care of myself and remedying the issue at hand. I still experience stress (and have had a lot of challenges this year), but I no longer feel crushed by my circumstances. I have the power to keep myself safe and healthy, and I’m immensely grateful for that.

This feels like a bit of strange thing to announce, and I’m definitely not as vocal about it as I was, say, when I finished paying off my student loans – I guess because to announce no longer taking medication is also announcing I was taking it in the first place. I am not anti-medicine, especially since I have first-hand experience on how beneficial it can be in keeping one well. But in my specific situation the medicine has served its purpose and I no longer need it. And after years of that not being the case, it feels pretty good.

Excerpt from September 2015: Ugh, Money

Lately I have been looking at what is involved in becoming a freelance writer, and it seems that the most commonly available jobs are those involving marketing and advertising. This makes sense, considering that companies need to promote themselves, but it’s difficult to sell stuff you don’t believe in.

It’s not that I don’t believe in stuff; there’s plenty of material items that I find useful. But I hate the idea of spending money, and would instead love to help people spend less money and become happier within themselves. However, I have no expertise in this field other than my own experience, and I hate doing research. That is why many of my posts are little more than glorified journal entries. Man, that sounds narcissistic.

Why Anxiety Is Not a Sin

You’ve heard it before: “fear not,” “do not worry,” “be not anxious for tomorrow,” and Christians will say they struggle with anxiety, and they need to pray more and trust God. If sin means doing something bad, and worrying is something bad to do, then yes, I supposed worrying or being anxious would be a sin. But the equation is not that simple, because people are not that simple.

An anxiety disorder, while linked to many causes, can be an indication that parts of the brain are underdeveloped due to stunted growth caused by verbal or emotional abuse. And so to say that I just need to stop worrying because it’s sinful is like telling me to use a part of my brain that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t make sense. What that shows is a lack of understanding of how the mind works as well as a lack of understanding of what sin is.

Sometimes, basic worrying can stem from truth. It’s natural and healthy to be afraid of getting too close to the edge of a cliff. Being anxious can also be an acknowledgement of our lack of control. When anxiety overwhelms us, we can reach out to another person for help so they can assure us we are safe, or if we’re not then we will get to a safe place.

Beyond that, when you have full-blown disorders where you can’t breathe or stand or see, telling a person they are sinning is not going to make them less anxious. It may even make it worse. So what really is sin?

Too often we think of sin as doing bad things. That’s part of it. Murdering someone is sin. But the origin of the word sin means “missing the mark,” as in aiming for a target but not hitting it. In a broader sense, I tend to think of sin as a curse. We are cursed with missing the mark. Limiting sin to a definition of doing bad things only perpetuates shame and reasons to hate oneself. Because if we’re really as sinful as the Bible says we are, we must be doing bad things all the time without realizing it, including existing. And it is a dangerous thing to tell someone their existence is a bad thing (but that can be a conversation for a different post).

To tell someone they are sinning because their brain is underdeveloped is wrong. It may be more accurate to suppose that any abuse, disorder, disease, negativity is a result of being under a curse. It’s not someone’s fault that their brain didn’t fully develop since they were abused, so don’t tell them to “stop sinning.”

The idea behind Christianity is that Jesus broke the curse. And until everything is restored, we are on earth learning how to live in a new reality. Just like in the show Once Upon a Time the people of Storybrook entered a new life, yet were still under the results of the curse; Christians still live with disorders, disease, and many other bad things just like everyone else. But the brokenness isn’t the end-all-be-all. Because one day everything will be made right.

When Self Awareness Is Really Rumination

Many have complimented me for my self awareness, my ability to understand my personal growth challenges and identify my weaknesses. However, what many do not understand is that not all of my musings are a result of self awareness, but rather rumination.

Like a cow chewing its cud, I regurgitate my thoughts and turn them over and over in my head. Unlike a cow, I can never seem to fully digest them. They keep coming back up to haunt me. While I have done this for almost as long as I can remember, some periods of time are worse than others. My obsessing over various topics has kept me awake at night, trapped me in bed in the morning, and made me late or absent to scheduled engagements. Sometimes I can distract myself long enough to be productive; sometimes I can’t.

In trying to dig to the root of my struggle, I think I may have begun doing this as a self-soothing tactic to remedy my loneliness. I know that my thoughts are not logical, so instead of communicating them to others, I allow them full reign in my head. I don’t really think of it as anxiety as much as a means of comfort, much like a child sucking on her thumb.

I have tried to process these thoughts with people I am close to, but what I have discovered is I reason them away. I may acknowledge that they are illogical feelings, and almost apologize for them to the people I talk to. In recent reflection, I realized I still talk to my friends about the same thoughts and feelings I was having a year ago. The obsession is relentless.

So what do I do with all that? I have tried reasoning my feelings away, because I am a huge fan of being a person of reason, but there is no reasoning with feelings, no matter how convincing the argument. I think what I crave more than anything is for someone to enter into the worry with me, to cry with me before helping to bring me out of it. To help me realize that my feelings, however illogical, are valid.