Christmas, Church, and Mental Illness

Christmas Eve seems like a weird day to post about mental illness, but since this season is often a difficult time for those dealing with mental illnesses, there really is no better time.

This is a season of faith and hope, but they cannot alone remove the heavy burden of mental illness.  Mental illness is complex and for most people the treatment of mental illness is also complex.  Although prayer and other practices related to an individual's spirituality can be helpful, they are not sufficient for most of us.  Necessary treatments might include medications, dietary adjustments, lifestyle adjustments, counseling, and/or other services provided by mental health professionals.   If you or someone you love is suffering today, please take the time to explore these resources (and the additional links that you find within these.)  They help explain some of the common misconceptions about mental illness and it's treatments that we encounter in religious communities.

https://www.lds.org/topics/disability/list/mental-illness

https://www.lds.org/ensign/2005/10/myths-about-mental-illness?lang=eng

https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2013/10/like-a-broken-vessel?lang=eng&query=mental+illness

If you sincerely want to help someone with mental illness of any kind, read this:
http://rationalfaiths.com/sad-souls-happy-valley/

And this from Chelsea Weidmann:

Am I still welcome here?
Are you sure?
What if I don't get better within 3 months?
Can you accept that this isn't guilt and repentance isn't the solution?
Can I be just as worthy as you?
Will you please stop saying "forget yourself and get to work," "count your blessings," "the best way to forget your troubles is to serve someone else," and/or lecturing on all the ways my being mentally ill is ruining my children?
Will you trust that I am seeking healing in the best way for me, and stop suggesting doTERRA oils and berating antidepressant meds?
Can you go the rest of forever without telling me how much worse someone else's trial is?
How about we never, ever say that to anyone ever again?
If I open up to you and admit that today the demons are winning and I'm scared, will you be brave enough to return the email/text/phone call?
I will be a daily reminder "that but for the grace of God, go [you]." Can you stand to look at me?
Are you sure?
What if I can never serve as much as you ask me to?
Am I still welcome if all I can do is not die?
If I cannot help perfect the saints or preach the gospel, can I still be yours?
Can you love me for who I am, not what I bring to the table?
What if I try to get better every single day, but I never do?
Can you still love me?
Will you?
Are you sure?

Music, Poetry, Religion

Poetry is a framework that allows us to explore the depths of who we are as individuals.  Poetry is distilled truth.  One of the things I love about poetry is that it can mean different things to different people, or even something different to the same person at different points in their lives.

Last night, my voice was tired, so I decided to work with some easier English songs rather than my physically demanding Strauss. I found myself exploring the poetry.  In any song you sing, there are really four interpretations taking place.  First, the singer should try to figure out what the poet was trying to say.  Knowing more about the poet's life--their relationships, passions, and pains--helps you to understand the origins of these words.  Then, through examining the music--the phrasing, dynamics, harmonies, etc.--you explore possibilities of how the composer might have interpreted the ideas presented by the poet.  Your life experience brings it's own interpretations to the table.  And finally, the truth you convey through the song reaches the listener where she or he again filters it through their own history and hears the truth that they need at the moment.  

What Would I Give?

I immediately love the melody of Vicki Tucker Courtney's setting of Christina Rossetti's poem, "What Would I Give?" but I didn't find any connection at all with the words.  It was about someone who couldn't feel and didn't have the words to express what they were feeling.  I feel too much and I write to process that, so this song and I just weren't connecting.  Then I did a quick review of Rossetti's life history and remembered about her religious experiences and her struggle with depression.  Suddenly, I found my connections to the song.  These ideas may not in actuality resemble anything that Rossetti or Courtney were thinking, but it gave my a direction for my own explorations.  I now have three different lenses through which to filter the truth of this song:  depression, religion, and the two of them entwined. 

Let's start with religion.

What would I give for a heart, 

a heart of flesh to warm me through, 

instead of this heart of stone ice-cold, whatever I do?  

Hard and cold and small, 

of all hearts the worst of all. 

Feelings and manifestations of the spirit are often intertwined.  We speak of a burning in the bosom as confirmation of a spiritual truth or experience.  We talk about hard hearts, closed to truth and light.
We don't talk about large, warm, open hearts enough, but they are implied as the opposite of those hard hearts we are warned about.  

Imagine someone desperate for spiritual guidance sitting through a church experience (which everyone later describes as incredibly spiritual) and feeling nothing, except how defective they must be to not feel what everyone else seems to be experiencing.  

What would I give for words, 

if only words would come?

But now in its misery

my spirit has fallen dumb.  

O merry friends, go your own way,

I have never a word to say.  

Imagine sitting in a church meeting and hearing words that instead of inspiring you, hurt you deeply.  And in that pain, you can't find the words or the courage to speak up and speak out.  The conversations after the service are all bubbly and positive, but you walk away because you don't want your pain to pull them down.  Plus, they probably wouldn't understand anyway and would just try to fix you.  

What would I give for tears?  

Not smiles but scalding tears, 

to wash the black mark clean,

and to thaw the frost of years, 

to wash the stain ingrain,

and to make me clean again.  

Again, imagine that you've been told that there is something wrong with you and that it must be because of sin and the only way to be free of that is through "godly sorrow", but you know that all the tears in the world can't change this, because it is part of who you are.  

Let's shift gears slightly at look at this from the perspective of clinical depression.  

What would I give for a heart,

a heart of flesh to warm me through, 

instead of this heart of stone ice-cold, 

whatever I do?  

Hard and cold and small, 

of all hearts the worst of all. 

Some people think that being depressed is about being sad and crying all the time.  Sometimes it is that, but there is also a kind of depression where you just become numb.  You don't feel anything.  You no longer enjoy activities, and you also can't muster the energy to care about it enough to grieve those lost experiences.  You just feel nothing.  Dull, empty nothingness.  In those moments you wish for something, even pain to break you out of the spell.  

What would I give for words, 

if only words would come?

But now in its misery

my spirit has fallen dumb.  

O merry friends, go your own way,

I have never a word to say.  

Words feed my soul.  Words help me clarify what I feel.  But sometimes, in the depth of depression, there are no words.  It's not writers block, which to me is about a lack of inspiration and direction.  It is total emptiness.  I can't speak of where I am and I can't write about it.  

What would I give for tears?  

Not smiles but scalding tears, 

to wash the black mark clean,

and to thaw the frost of years, 

to wash the stain ingrain,

and to make me clean again.  

At this point, you'll take anything, even if it is tears that are required to break the cycle.  Can you cry away the emptiness?  Can this defect be removed?  Can I be whole again?

Now take a moment to explore what depression plus religion might feel like by going back and re-reading.  Read the stanza of poetry, then the possible religious interpretation, and finally the view from depression.  Together, it is dark and not completely without hope, but close.  

The composer chooses to repeat "What would I give?" as the last line of the song.  The singer ends on the tonic of the minor key, so we know that things didn't improve immediately (which might have been indicated with a Picardy third).  We are left to wonder and wait, in much the same way the subject of the poem does. 

I haven't decided yet exactly what this song means to me, but living with those questions and options keeps me open to discovering even more depth.  

I Am the Wind

With my initial reading of "What Would I Give?" I didn't understand the words, but I was drawn to them somehow.  When I first sang Courntey's setting of the Zoe Akins poem, "I Am the Wind" I didn't experience that pull, from the text or the music.  But last night, that changed.  Again, the song is in a minor key, so maybe that is what pulled me to it last night.  The basic idea is of the poem is that you (whoever it is ) and I (whoever I am) are opposites.  I'm not big on black and white thinking, which is what this seemed to me at first.  

I am the wind that wavers,

you are the certain land; 

I am the shadow that passes

over the sand.  

I am the leaf that quivers, 

you the unshaken tree; 

you are the stars that are steadfast, 

I am the sea.  

You are the light eternal, 

like a torch I shall die; 

you are the surge of deep music, 

I but  a cry!

I first read this thinking of someone talking to their love.  "I am" and "you are" seemed an invitation to declare one good and the other bad, or one strong and one weak, but based on the way she set it, I don't think Vicki Tucker Courtney was thinking of it that way.  "I am the sea" is strong and powerful; it is really the climax of this song, so I doubt that Courtney read "the sea" as wishy-washy or the opposite of steadfast.  

Again, because I've been thinking a lot about religion lately, I saw this as possibly a description of a relationship with a church and/or God.  

I am the wind that wavers,

you are the certain land; 

I have lots of questions.  Maybe I'm unsteady or unreliable.  The church sets itself up as certain and solid and unchanging.  

I am the shadow that passes

over the sand.  

Maybe my questions darken the way of those who think they are on solid land.  But sand is not one piece of solid land.    It is billions of individual pieces that move and shift with the wind or the tide.  

I am the leaf that quivers, 

you the unshaken tree; 

I am part of the whole.  Yes, I shake and move with the wind, but the tree stays rooted and never moves.  

you are the stars that are steadfast, 

I am the sea.  

Stars give light and direction.  We think of stars as steadfast and unchanging, but in reality, they too are moving and changing, just at a rate much slower than we are.  "I am the sea."  I am alive with change.  I am the crystal clear water through which you can see to the bottom of the sea hundreds of feet below.  I am also the rolling and surging water of the waves.  I am a powerful force for change.  

The first two stanza's begin with what I am and how that is different from what you are (in this interpretation, from the church.)

For me, that changes with the last stanza.  The church is neither "the surge of deep music", nor "the light eternal."  It's no longer about the church.  It's about God.  Like God, I am a light, but my own individual influence will pass.  God's light will continue to shine.  The "surge of deep music" again is bigger than anything I can accomplish or do.  This isn't about torches or cries not mattering, because they do.  But there is something bigger and grander in play.  Bigger than me, and bigger than the church.  

The beautiful thing about poetry is that it doesn't matter if the poet or my high school English teacher see the same meaning in the poems that I do.  The point is that it makes me think and that I find my truth.  Will I see the same things in these poems 20 years down the road?  Who knows?  But for today, I found something of beauty.  That is what matters.  

Finding Light and Hope: Elder Holland Talks about Depression

With this post I begin a new series (that hopefully I'll actually continue) sharing moments of light and hope.  My friend Stephanie at diapersanddivinity.com shared this list of quotes from General Conference and inspired me to make my own.  

When I shared my idea with a few friends, someone pointed out Michael Otterson's quote in this article.

General Conference is not to be understood through sound bites, especially when people take a sentence here and there and try to justify their own political agendas. That reflects a very poor level of spiritual maturity.

To Bro. Otterson and others who may not approve of my list, I say this,

Sometimes it takes a tremendous amount of spiritual maturity to find the little nuggets of good, hope, and beauty and to not become weighed down by those things that hurt our hearts or don't sit well with us.  

Sister Camilla Kimball spoke of putting those difficult concepts on a shelf. At this point in my life, I'm choosing to focus on the good.  I'm not putting things on a shelf.  I'm just letting them go and looking for the things that feed my soul.  

I didn't get a chance to watch any of conference this year because I was busy having another incredible experience with my tai chi family.  (I'll try to write more about that later.)  Luckily, all the conference talks are posted both as videos and written transcripts, so I can catch up on my own time.  And since I can watch them in any order, I'm starting with the talk that received the most positive response from my friends.

You can read Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's talk here or watch it now.



My spiritually immature favorite quote is this:

We are infinitely more than our limitations or our afflictions!

Another favorite sound bite:

Believe in miracles. I have seen so many of them come when every other indication would say that hope was lost. Hope is never lost.

I especially appreciated these words to both those who suffer and those who help them. So often the message at church is "Do more." I love that he acknowledges that some times we need to do less and "be still."

When you face “depletion depression,” make the requisite adjustments. Fatigue is the common enemy of us all—so slow down, rest up, replenish, and refill.

If those are only small victories, be grateful for them and be patient. Dozens of times in the scriptures, the Lord commands someone to “stand still” or “be still”—and wait.6

Thank you, Elder Holland for the talk that so many of us needed to hear and have been waiting far too long to hear.  

What were your favorite parts of this talk?

Dealing with Depression

A conversation today got me thinking about what I am really thankful for this Thanksgiving. I am thankful that I no longer live each day in the depths of depression.

Do you know that there are a lot of "d" works related to depression? Debilitating, despondency, despair, darkness, dejected. I was really tempted to do the longest, most obnoxious alliteration ever, but as I mentioned on FB awhile back, overdone alliteration cheapens the message. And I want my message today to be one of hope. And hope is one of the most valuable things we can have. The hope that perhaps there would be something better in my future helped me survive a lot of really dark times.

Until you have lived with it, you can never really understand depression.

It's one thing to be feeling lazy and not want to take a shower. It's something else entirely when you don't feel like you have the energy to shower or when you've gotten to the point where you really don't care if you shower.

It's one thing to feel blah and sorry for yourself and not want to do anything. It's something else entirely when you feel totally numb and can't make yourself do anything.

It's one thing to think that you could do better. It's another when you think that you will never be able to do enough or be good enough.

But the good news it that I know it doesn't have to last forever. Don't misunderstand me. It's not as if I never get depressed anymore. I just know how to deal with it now and how to not let it consume my life. I will be on medication for the rest of my life to deal with this. I also work to adjust my diet, exercise, meditation, and outside commitments to help me get through the minor bouts of depression that still pop up occasionally.

The paths that lead us out of depression are as unique as each individual that suffers from depression. I found my path, but there are a lot of really wonderful people in the world still looking for theirs. But it's there. I know it is. Have hope and know that you are not alone.

My life today is so different from where it was several years ago. Every once in a while, I'll have a bad day and then I'll remember when everyday used to be like that. I am happy. I am really happy. And all things considered, that's pretty amazing.

Looking Back

Tonight is my last night before a milestone birthday. I'll let you guess which one. Many people dread this birthday, and I've known some to actually become depressed over it, but I'm kind of excited. I'm looking at it as the beginning of the next phase of my life. But that's tomorrow's post.
Today, I want to write about where I've been, the things I've done, and the experiences that brought me to the place that I am today.

My mother says that I was born 50 (or she might have said 40). The point is, I was very much an adult in a little kid's body. My mother was very young when I was born. She also tells people that sometimes she was the mother and sometimes I was. I was often far more comfortable around adults than other kids my age. I did very well in school and was always one of the favorites, mostly I think because I always obeyed all the rules. OK, there were a few times I didn't, but they were so traumatic for me that I just went back to doing what I was told. I couldn't understand people that didn't follow the rules.

High school was tough for me. I did well academically, but emotionally, I was a mess. I very clearly remember times when I could hardly wait for school to be over so I could go home, and then at home, I could hardly wait for the time to go to school, so I could get out of that situation. Don't get me wrong. I didn't have a horrible home life. My family did the best the could. I just had no skills for dealing with conflict, and there was a lot of conflict in our home at that time. Often after school I would take a nap until dinner. I do think that part of it was that I was tired. I also think that part of it was that I was avoiding having to deal with people.

College provided some of the best experiences of my life, but also some of the worst. I met people that opened my eyes and mind to things I had never considered. I also saw hypocrisy that appalled me. I met people who claimed to believe certain things, but their actions seemed completely opposite. Still stuck in my "obey the rules" thinking, it really shook me.
During college, I also met people and had experiences that helped me to discover who I really am and what I believe. Through music, I learned how to trust and to be open. I can't always apply it in other areas, but this was a start.

All my years in school also took a toll mentally and physically. The depression was finally diagnosed, but it would be many years before I really understood it and gained some control over it. Depression, hormonal imbalances, allergies and fibromyalgia all played a part in making my life miserable during those years. I believe that the allergies and fibromyalgia were present then, even though it was much later that they were finally diagnosed and I began treatment for them. But even in those dark days, there were moments of brightness, when I felt joy. I had some amazing experiences and loved the intellectual challenge of all of that.

Ten years ago, I was in the middle of a DMA program in Vocal Performance when I realized I just couldn't do it any more. I couldn't keep doing what everyone else thought I should be doing. And I couldn't keep pushing myself to such extremes physically. I quit school and took every little part time job I could get to get by. And I think there were a few years that I actually pushed myself even harder than when I had been in school. But I also paid off a huge amount of debt. And I started to learn about what I wanted and who I was.

I still have a huge balance to pay off on my student loans, but over the last few years, I've cut back on work to take care of myself more physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I've learned to say no. There is still a lot of guilt, but it doesn't feel as bad as when I push my body too far. I've learned to listen to my body, and most of the time, I'm able to adjust things to get the rest and care I need so that things don't get really bad. I had even lost a lot of weight and was happy most of the time. When I started letting the world tell me how to live my life and spend my time, that started to slip. I've gained back all of the weight, plus a few pounds, and I'm about 50-50 for good days and bad days. But, now I know what I need to do, and I'm starting over again. I've completely cut out the foods that I know I can't manage with moderation. And I'm going to the gym more regularly again. I'm also taking time to just be still.

This is a good time in my life. I'm not a little kid. I'm not the trying to figure out what I want in life. I'm not trying to prove to the world how successful I can be. I'm finding what makes me happy, where I want to be with my life, and I care a lot less about what other people think of me. Yes, it's true that what the world thinks will never be completely removed from my mind, but it bothers me a lot less these days.