If you don’t already know this about me, I have battled depression for most of my life. I can remember even in 6th grade just having this weird dark feeling following me around. I had trouble sleeping, sometimes trouble eating, and I just couldn’t shake this dark cloud no matter how much I tried. I had lots of anxiety and fears. I became very quiet around people, I didn’t want to be in school, I just didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t understand it, until my freshman year of high school, after I was self harming, after my mom noticed, and after my therapist told me those three words: “You have depression.”
Depression, anxiety, maybe ADD too… great. At the time I had no idea how to overcome these obstacles. I was only 14 and had no real relationship with God at this point. My therapist then prescribed me some medicine to help me get out of the funk. The medicine helped me initially get out of my darkness, but then I discovered something that I thought worked even better than medication, distractions.
I didn’t want to have any alone time where the negative thoughts could come back, so I began to distract myself with anything I could find. After school activities, boyfriends, TV shows, sleepovers, I did everything I could to get out of the house and away from any quiet space for negative thinking. I made sure I never had enough alone time to sit and dwell on negative thoughts. At this time, I didn’t know that I had worth in God, and so I was trying to find my worth in work, the amount of friends I had, my grades, and boyfriends. The distractions worked for me, so I thought.
In college I discovered that alcohol and drugs would help me forget my thoughts all together. I even stopped taking my medication because I wanted to replace it with partying. When I wasn’t out on the town, I was involved in every volunteer/job/school activity I could get my hands on. I even had some friends express concern for me that I needed to slow down. If I ever started to have negative thoughts, I would go out, if I was feeling unworthy, I sought male attention, and if I had too much down time to think, I signed up for another job.
After 3 years of heavy partying I tried to stop for fear of my safety. I was having too many close calls of getting arrested, killed, and hurt. When I gave up my lifestyle, I had no more numbing and no more distractions. All the bad thoughts started flooding my mind again. I fell into a really bad depression… again. I cried most of the day, spent a lot of time in my room, skipped homework assignments, and slept most of the time. I saw a therapist who prescribed me medicine to help me get out of my depression. I started to feel better. I was more of myself. I also began my relationship with God around that time and started finding my worth in Him.
After training camp in July, I began to hear God tell me to go off of my medicine. I brushed that voice off though because I did NOT want risk the chance of falling into depression again, especially as I was getting ready to leave all my comforts behind. However, the voice didn’t go away, it got LOUDER. I protested what God was saying by thinking that “my therapist said I need the medicine” and “I can’t have depression on the race because I’ll waste my time being sad”. But God kept asking me to trust Him. He told me He has something better in store for me. He wanted to go through my past wounds and my negative thoughts with me.
It wasn’t until month 2 in Nicaragua that I brought up what God was telling me with my team. They encouraged me to listen to God’s command. I told my leaders about it and they encouraged me to listen to God too. After a lot of inner debate and processing, I took the leap and decided to go off of my medication. Going off of the medicine is about a 3 month process because you have to slowly wean yourself off and then the medicine takes about a month to leave your system. So I didn’t start to notice the difference of being off the medicine until last month in Vietnam.
The change was subtle. At first I thought I was going to be perfectly fine off my medicine. But then, slowly and surely, my negative thoughts started to creep in. On the medicine, I would have negative thoughts but would then brush them off and forget about them easily. Now, I noticed that any negative thought would start to stick and fester a little. It would start to effect my mood and my day.
Vietnam was the first month with my new team and I shared my testimony at the beginning of the month. I was so happy to be vulnerable with my team, but it also opened up a lot of past wounds and emotions. I needed to process these things with God. So I sat down at a local coffee shop and started to write.
I started to write down and hash out all the hurt in my past. I started to analyze my story and noticed a pattern throughout my life. It went something like this:
Bad event – negative thinking – distraction – bad event – negative thinking – distraction....
When I took out the distractions in my life, the circle turned to:
Bad event – negative thinking- depression – more negative thinking – more depression…
What I found out was that my depression came from my negative thinking. I believed so many dark lies about myself that I used to think were true. When a boyfriend would break up with me I would believe the lie “I am not good enough, I am not beautiful enough, I am NOT ENOUGH.” When I would mess up in school I would believe “I am not smart enough, I am not good enough for a job, I am NOT ENOUGH.” When friends would hurt me I would believe “I am not funny enough, I am not good enough for them, I am NOT ENOUGH.
It all boiled down to that dark lie “I AM NOT ENOUGH.”
Most people will feel that they “are not enough” at some point in their life but they can usually move past it. For me, I could not. I would wallow in these lies until they sucked me into hating myself and who I was created to be. This would then spark the worst lie “you are not good enough for anyone, so why are you still alive?” It was a dark place to be and the enemy tormented me with it.
I wrote down everything, all of the bad events and all the lies I had believed for so long. It was hard to face those demons head on. But then something amazing happened. In all the darkness I was uncovering, God urged me to do something. He asked me to write down the truth, His Truth, next to each lie.
Next to “I am not smart enough” I wrote:
“God created my brain, He created the way I process information, and He loves me the way I am”.
Next to “I am not beautiful enough” I wrote:
“God created me in His image, which is perfect in every way. He knit me together in my mother’s womb and I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).
Next to “I am not lovable” I wrote:
“God loves me so much that He died for me. His steadfast love endures forever” (Psalm 136:25).
Next to “I will never escape my depression” I wrote:
“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. (Romans 8:37)
And next to “I am not enough” I wrote, in big bold letters:
“GOD SAYS I AM ENOUGH!!!”
All of a sudden, the lies that had haunted me started to melt away. I felt a weight lifted off of me. I have a God who loves me, who finds me worthy, and who created me to be exactly what I am. How can I say I am not enough when the God of the whole universe says that I am.
I wish I could say that I never had a negative thought after that but I have. They usually creep in during times of uncertainty. The past couple weeks in Cambodia we have been teaching at a school. Now… teaching is not my forte. I have a very scattered, all over the place brain and it can be difficult to communicate directions to a bunch of children who also have scattered, all over the place brains. During these times, the lies can creep back in:
“You are not a good enough teacher”, “you are not good enough for this ministry”, “you are not good enough”.
But God has been encouraging me to take ALL my thoughts captive, especially the negative ones. When the thoughts creep in, I have to catch myself in that train of thought and ask “wait, is this true? Is this what God would say about me?” And every time it’s
“No, God says YOU ARE ENOUGH!“.
