Hey everyone. This blog is going to be a little bit different from all my other blogs. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure I was ever going to write this blog. However, after praying about it, I felt like the Lord was telling me He could use my story to encourage some of you. So bear with me if it is a little all over the place. I will do my best to make it easy to follow.
Anyway, a big part of my life story up until this point has been my battle with depression. The reason I decided to write this blog now is because the Lord has recently helped me beat my depression, and I feel like I can better share my story with all of you now. So here it goes.
First, I want to explain in brief what depression actually is. Now the dictionary definition of depression according to the Merrian-Webster Dictionary is: a mood disorder; marked especially by sadness, inactivity, difficulty in thinking and concentration, a significant increase or decrease in appetite, and time spent sleeping, feelings of dejection, and hopelessness, sometimes followed by suicidal tendencies. That definition is probably the simplest and most accurate way to define depression in one sentence.
Now that I have defined what depression actually is, I wanted to share more of my story with all of you. So I guess I should start off with when I first started to struggle with some of the things listed above. I was 13 or 14 years old and I was in eighth grade. I started to lose the desire to do most things I really enjoyed doing before, like riding my bike, exploring nature, or going over to my friends houses on the weekends. Along with that I started to have a lot of trouble focusing on my school work, and tasks that were once easy for me became really hard for me to do. As a 13 year old I didn’t really understand what was happening to me, so I would just get really frustrated with myself. I didn’t understand why the simplest of tasks where now 100% harder for me than they ever used to be. I didn’t want people to think I was weak or that I was unable to do things on my own, so I decided not to tell anyone that I was starting to struggle. I just kept trying to push through daily tasks on my own even though I was slowly falling apart. As time went on things only got worse. When I was a freshman things really started to escalate. I could barely keep up with my school work, (basically I stopped doing it all together at one point) somedays I couldn’t stop eating and other days I couldn’t eat at all, and I started to sleep more and more. I literally couldn’t focus on one thing for more than 5 minutes. I started to feel completely useless, and like I shouldn’t even bother trying anymore. I didn’t understand why I was feeling this way, or why everything seemed to be slipping away from me. However, the whole time I still had one lifeline keeping me afloat. My relationship with the Lord, and the Godly community He used to keep me from drifting away from Him all together. I wanted help, but I didn’t know how to even begin to explain what I was struggling with. Shout out to my amazing parents, mentors, and friends who stuck with me through this season, even though I was a compete nightmare to be around pretty much the entire time I was dealing with all this stuff. So anyway, for the next year and a half I continued to suffer in silence, never really sharing how bad off I actually was. Which lead to a few thoughts of suicide. I didn’t want to die, I just didn’t want to keep living with all the mental pain that I was feeling at the time. Then something happened. The Lord used a rockyouth summer camp I went too, to give me away out of this incredibly toxic place I had been stuck in for the past two years. The summer camp was all about laying down things that you were struggling with/the things that were separating you from a good relationship with the Lord. One night during this camp I broke down to a cabin of my friends. I told them everything. I told them how badly I had been struggling. I told them about the suicidal thoughts. All of it. They came around me with prayer and encouragement. The next day I told my parents everything because of the council of my cabin the previous night. That was the hardest things I have ever had to do. How do you tell your own parents that you had actually thought about killing yourself? Anyway, after all this had happened, things started to get better. I never had thoughts of suicide anymore, even on the days where my depression was still bad. As senior year approached the bad depression days started to get fewer and fewer between. I got to a point where I would only feel bad like 1 to 2 days a month. Then just like that I graduated highschool, finished my job at Culvers, and left on this really amazing journey called World Race Gap Year. Since being on the Race I have had 4 bad days. On those days I let my team in on how I am actually doing, and they always come around me with overwhelming support. Well we were in Thailand my team recorded a Words of Life session for me. Words of Life is basically a time where people call on the Lord on your behalf, and see what He wants to say to you. It truly is the best, and its one of my favorite things we do here on the race. During this time, my amazing teammate Lauren Stecker got something really interesting from the Lord for me. She told me He had used my episodes of depression in the past year to teach me a lot and bring me closer to Him. However, she felt like God was saying sometime in the future I would have a bad episode, but it would be my last one. At first, I was like WOW that would be great, but it’s NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. I just thought it would be something I would have to live with the rest of my life. I mean I had dealt with it at different degrees for 4 years, why would it change now?
Then one day last week the Lord did something. I was having my 5th bad depression day of the Race , so after I got home from teaching I went up to the roof to be alone with God. I was trying to have a time of worship, but I couldn’t shake how bad I was feeling. So I sat down… and my mind started to race in a million different directions. I wanted to scream, cry, and laugh all at the same time. Which is usually how I feel on these bad days. Then the Lord said something, He said listen to the words of life from Ban doi. So that’s what I did. I instantly started to cry when I heard my teammates proclaiming truth over me. It got to Lauren’s part, and the Lord said THE MOST WILD THING HE HAS EVER SAID TO ME TO DATE. He said THIS, THIS is the last one. A peace I haven’t felt in a long time washed over me, and I got off the roof feeling completely and totally in shock. Last night I told my team, and we had a mini celebration of the Lord’s faithfulness. A week later I still have an overwhelming feeling of victory. Anyway that’s it. That’s my story. Sorry it was so, so long. Thank you for reading my blog and for following my journey! Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already to get updates whenever I post a new blog!
