Dealing with those Depressed Days

I prefer to be honest. It doesn’t always serve me well. Like the jobs I feel I miss out on, when they ask for honest responses to questions like ‘have you ever been depressed or suicidal?’

How are you supposed to answer those kinds of questions?

If you’re in any kind of helping profession, it’s frowned upon that you might at times be unhinged. But I can tell you now I think you would prefer a pastor or a counsellor who can empathise with your depression and loneliness and anxiety. That is, without direct, first-hand experience it’s hard for those in the helping professions to serve well those who are suffering. Of course, competence should never be underestimated. It is a nonnegotiable. But there is a kind of X-factor in a trained helper who has been to hell and back, who healed along the way. And we know that it is up to us as helping professionals to show up to our duties fit for work. We just need to accept that sometimes, and it may only be a few hours, we need respite.

Having been to hell and back on several occasions
for months at a time, I can tell you there is life beyond it.

Nowadays, which is pretty much normal for me, I am in a monthly kind of cycle.

As I looked through the pages of an old journal from 2008, I was astounded as to how many red flags there were. Green flags for good days. Red flags for bad days. Some days are so bad there is nothing written in those pages. Like I’d vanished from my life. Other red flag days I was overwhelmed, swept up in busyness, fury, complaint, and the need to escape. Other red flag days there were external issues I couldn’t handle, perhaps the struggles my children have had. Still other days I was just unsettled in my spirit and confused beyond belief, full of a mental fog that would not lift for hours. Of course, some days were full of fear-and-frustration-intuiting conflict. And some days I was just so sick of myself for one or a couple of many reasons. There were so many red flag days in that year, but there are so many red flag days in every year, just as there are very many green flag days, but we hardly fear those. We are more likely to take those for granted.

In a monthly pattern of life these days there are at least two single days where I feel depressed. Where there is no hope nor life nor reason, and all vision of positivity simply vanishes. I put these experiences down to a mix of spiritual warfare, an unbalanced focus on my desires, and perhaps the return of past hurts and disappointments, as they fleetingly dare to dash across my psyche from my memory.

Some of these days it’s just a few hours. And some of these days are consecutive, but rarely more than two in a row. And still I hate smiling and lying about how I feel. It makes me more depressed, and yet if I know the person well enough who is before me, I aim to trust them in being honest about how I feel. I cannot add to their burden, of course, but I do recognise that many people are encouraged to know, that as a helping person, I have my own fragilities. We all do.

No matter what you do,
and no matter how you feel,
what you do and what you feel are okay.

Let no one take this away from you.

But try not to attack people because you, yourself, are low. Have the courage to be honest. Be vulnerable. We never know when our vulnerability will be an encouragement to someone. It’s always a good surprise to discover that. We are more likely these days than ever before to experience the empathy of friends and strangers alike. If you share with someone and they do not get you, try not to allow that to be license to spiral further downward. Adjust your expectations. In rejecting your invitation to know you more, which is a holy trust, they are the ones with the problem, not you.

If we have issues with our mental health, we have more community around us than we know, for we are all ‘normal’ until you get to know us. We don’t know who is struggling in our midst. And even those we look up to do not have the dream life that we often think they have.

Embrace the fact that life is an up-and-down exercise of endurance. It is easy for no one. Everyone finds life tough occasionally. And there is much more anxiety in the normal run of life than we ever realise.