Anxious Hope (2/3)

I’ve dealt with anxiety in one form or another since high school. Back then it took the shape of deep sadness and loneliness. It was the inability to get happy, no matter how hard I tried. I didn’t recognize it at the time. I thought I just had a desperate need to escape the suffocating protectiveness of my parent’s household. When I was a bit older and came to the conclusion that my parents were not the enemy, the sadness grew deeper still. I used to try to force myself to see how privileged and blessed I was but the anxiety and depression wouldn’t let up. It wasn’t a constant thing, the feeling ebbed and flowed over years, I’d say I came across as a pretty happy person, but often times I simply projected what I desperately wanted people to see, what I myself wanted to believe. Somehow I still always ended up there, in place of anxiety and deep sadness, as if I was unable to hold on to the joy long enough to make it stick to me, as if there was something about me that repelled peace.

I was genuinely confused about my anxious thoughts because I didn’t realize that although nothing was very wrong, nothing was quite right either. Although I’d grown up as a believer, there was a gaping hole where my purpose and identity belonged. I thought something was wrong with me but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I hoped it would fade away in college, I figured that joy would come with the freedom to be myself and express myself, but that doesn’t quite work when you don’t know who you are. So, of course the anxiety followed me into college where along with depression it wreaked havoc on my mental health. I suffered from anxiety attacks and depressive spells…I’ll get into that experience more deeply in a future post but just know that it was bad. My parents got involved and put me in counseling. They covered me with the word of God in the only way they new how. After seeing their concern, I felt like I had no choice but to take my faith more seriously, I desperately wanted to be happy and I had no where else to turn. When I finally traded the religion that had been passed down to me for an intimate personal relationship with God, I began a life-changing journey that moved me out of that very dark season and into a place of hope and light.

Over time, as I fell deeper in love with God and rediscovered my identity, the anxiety attacks abated. I had a very brief stint in therapy but I began to feel better so I figured I didn’t need to go anymore. (yeah I know that wasn’t smart) I wish someone had told me that being far from God wasn’t the only reason for my anxiety. I wish someone had let me know that mental health challenges and faith could coexist. I wish I’d known that salvation and healing are not synonymous. The problem wasn’t that I lacked the tools to get to the root of my anxiety. The problem was I thought I’d reached the bottom so I stopped digging. At some level I know that I leaned on God to get me through that dark time but as I think back I realize that I also self medicated with busyness. I didn’t have time to feel anxious because I was constantly involved in activities. I pridefully assumed no one could really understand the depths of what I was going through (after all I didn’t completely understand it) so I made up my mind to deal with it alone.

I was an expert at pretending to be okay. I kept going so I could keep on going. Too much time to slow down and think would have been my undoing but I was just postponing the inevitable. It’s funny how we can come into relationship with God but still be functioning so confidently in our brokenness. 

My friend Amarachi posted a Tik Tok the other day about high-functioning anxiety and it truly read me for filth because I never called it that, but it described me to a tee. I’d found God but I was still searching for something. I was much happier, but when the anxiety came, it came hard and fast. I dealt with it when I felt lonely, insecure, and out of place during my transition to college. I dealt with it during my junior year when a failed attempt at the LSAT led me to question everything I thought I knew about myself and my future. I’ve dealt with it in small and large ways for much of my life. However, If I’m being honest, after going through so much spiritual growth during college, I thought it was a thing of the past. I thought my faith was strong enough to permanently banish my anxiety. But Christianity is not a magic wand that we can wave over the issues that we don’t have the time or capacity to deal with in the hopes that they’ll go away. I’m not sure why I was so convinced that I was free from anxiety when I never entirely got to the root of it or identified all the cycles that triggered it. I’m only now realizing that even though I got through it I never got past it.

It sounds really strange but, on some level I believed that I was entitled to a life where I didn’t have to fight with this mental health struggle.. I thought that anxiety was something I just had to get over, I didn’t realize it was something I had to deal with. Every time I’ve struggled with anxiety in the past, it was in a season where I felt shaky in my faith. The anxiety brought me to a place of such vulnerability that I had to press more deeply into the presence of God in order to be okay. Each time my anxiety moved from a fleeting emotion to a consuming condition, I got so low that I had no choice but to surrender completely to God. On the other side of those periods of anxiety, I felt stronger physically and spiritually. I found peace and hope but, I think that on some level I took it for granted that because I hadn’t taken the time to discover the causes of my anxiety. Salvation is free but healing requires a lot of hard work and I simply hadn’t put in the work…..

Recently, the world has been on fire but I thought I’d been dealing with it pretty well, all things considered. However, when some really difficult situations in my family over the past few weeks caused that familiar feeling of anxiety which I’d managed to evade for years, to once again rise up in my chest, I felt like my body was betraying me. I felt like my head and heart were disconnected. I knew the depths of darkness anxiety had dragged me down into before and so more than just being anxious about the situation I was facing at home, I began to feel anxious about the return of my anxiety. I wasn’t expecting it to hit me like that so before I knew it, I was flat on my back, seeing stars.

This time, however, was much different than any other. I had this warped and prideful thought that I shouldn’t still be dealing with this level of distress. After all the bible tells us to pray and not worry. I’d been praying. I felt like God and I were closer than ever before. I had done all the right things, so somehow I thought that I was supposed to go through challenges anxiety free. I think more than anything this most recent battle with anxiety shook me, along with the very foundations of my faith because I didn’t see it coming. In the 2 years since my last anxiety attack I had faced plenty of challenges and frustrations. I leaned into my faith, I’d practiced the strategies I’d learned like deep breathing, journaling, and intentional movement and I was fine. So what happens when you think you’re doing everything right but your body still betrays you? What happens when you lose control of not just what’s around you but what’s within you as well? What happens when you find your heart disconnected from your mind?

What I had to understand very recently was that God brought me through earlier seasons of anxiety because of his grace and his grace alone. It wasn’t because I prayed the right prayers or meditated the right way. Anything that I’d been able to do to break though the anxiety was simply a mercy given to me by a loving father. However, God won’t heal what I don’t reveal. There are still parts of me that are so hidden in darkness, I don’t even know they are there. Therapy always seemed like a nice option for me but I’m beginning to realize that it might actually be necessary for me to walk in the fullness of the freedom God has called me to. I’m realizing that I need to get to get to the bottom of this thing, not necessarily so I will be “fixed” but simply so that I won’t be surprised. Timothy Keller said in his podcast that it’s not the trauma of life that takes us out, it’s the surprise. We don’t expect the punch so our feet aren’t grounded when it comes and it knocks us out. Life happens to us all. (John 16:33) My faith doesn’t make me immune to mental health struggles or any other kind of trauma, but it does give me the tools to face it head on. It also gives me the wisdom and humility to know that I can’t do this alone, I need the help of the Lord and sometimes that can look like him sending me a really great therapist or simply placing praying friends around me.

It’s taken me years to come to this realization because I have such a deeply rooted pride that constantly leads me to believe that it is my actions that are at the center of my healing and not simply the mercy of God. “I was the one who learned that I needed to lean on my friends for support. I was the one who learned how to control my breathing. I was the one who figured out I needed to take breaks from social media and create time to rest.” And yet I’m still the one that is caught off guard by anxiety because I haven’t taken the time to really deal with the underlying issue. I was simply addressing the symptoms, and even that was only possible because of God’s mercy. I always say sometimes God will allow you to feel just well enough to keep going, but leave you in the sickness as a reminder that there is still work to do. I was so focused on doing better that I never thought about what it would take to be whole.

Recently God has been teaching me that My anxiety isn’t evidence of an absent God. It is simply proof that I am a broken person in a fallen world. Sometimes life is hard but our faith isn’t some big secret to the perfect existence or a blanket that we can put up to pretend suffering doesn’t exist. It is a strategy and a resource for getting through the hard times. God could have taken my anxiety away completely, through his divine power.  But, instead he chose to sit with me in my anxiousness, until I finally stopped clinging so hard to what I thought I could control and started leaning on him. If there wasn’t this anxiety that was too much for me to bear, I wouldn’t have turned to God in such a desperate way. I don’t think he wanted it but he allowed it, even better he is using it to mold me into who he designed me to be. I can’t say I’m happy that I’m going through it but I can say that I’m glad about who I’m becoming because of it.

So when it feels like my mind and heart are disconnected, I am learning to hand them back over to God. He cares about my spirit, soul AND body. As an image bearer, he is concerned with my entire personhood. He is not insensitive to my pain just because he hasn’t immediately take it away. He has a reason for allowing me to remain in my brokenness until I do the real work to get to the root of the problem. The honest truth is that prayer is great and necessary but no matter how much I pray, I still need to work through the root of some of my issues in therapy. Just because it isn’t a spiritual solution, doesn’t mean God can’t use it to heal my spirit.  I am currently in the process of looking for a therapist (recommendations are greatly appreciated) but a lot of reflection and the amazing friends God has put in my life have helped me to realize that when I feel like my world is being shaken anxious thoughts, I have permission to loose control in the arms of my savior. I don’t have to pretend to be okay. I can allow myself to feel my feelings. My doubts don’t shake God. My anxiety doesn’t mean that something is wrong with my faith. My struggles simply present me with an opportunity to grow a deeper dependence on him. (2 Corinthians 12: 9-10) They serve as a reminder that I still have heart work to do on the path to wholeness. It checks my pride by helping me realize I’m not supposed to do that work alone. There is room in my life for Jesus and therapy. When I can't trust how I feel, I can stand confidently on what I know because faith is not the absence of doubt. It is the presence of God in the midst of the doubt.