December found me lying silent, and in that season a blanket filled with quiet I fell into a thick darkness that I know all too well.
A war was waging, a fire blazing, and I could hear the gunfire in the background of my bleakness. Sleep couldn’t come fast enough, and the thought of leaving my house left me paralyzed with a desire to black it all out. All the goodness, the light, words, and song that usually consumes me was diminished to a dismal singular flame flickering on my bedside. Barely keeping me…here.
That is depression, the enemy, a stillness that can black out a once active and fertile mind and consume it with…black.
Recently, the silent enemy of depression knocked on my door, as it does periodically in my life for no particular reason. Finding it extremely difficult to explain this kind of struggle to the world has been a challenge my entire life. It seems simple for people to understand a disease that is medically coherent.

Heart disease, a wrecked knee, cancer, lung disease…all things that are tangible.
But mental illness it isn’t visible through my smile.

My hug.
Or in a peppy attitude that is saved for the hour you may see me.
What consumes me the moment I can let my guard down, is a desperate plea to my God who knows my pain. My suffering, and the reality of an imbalance in my brain that in unseen to the naked eye. The disfiguration of such a struggle is beyond words, metaphors, and enlightening.

The reality is black yet the tangible feel for people who haven’t walked in its ugly shadows is sadly gray.  Unforeseen. And misunderstood.
I’ve fought my entire life to hide the demons that wage within my mind. For, I do not want you to see me as weak.
I know this more than I know most things, I am anything but weak. What I’ve seen and been through in my life, yet still risen above proves so. God has given me a precious gift of an armor that has shielded me, kept me, and built me up despite horrid and unforgiving odds.
Yet…a child is only as strong as she can be. The mind can only take so much, and the body will eventually have an emotional response to repeated toxicity. Hence, my lifelong battle with depression and anxiety.
It’s hard for me to write when I’m struggling in the brinks of the darkness, therefore I have been silent lately. So this will be brief. It’s difficult for me to breathe, walk, get dressed, so the manifestation of the love of my life, my words, leave me as well.
But one thing I’ve learned in this past year of returning to my faith after a seventeen-year hiatus is that I am LOVED. I am not alone, and that I am capable.
My voice, though it may be small, is needed in this world. God told me so, on a cold February night last year when I re-dedicated my life to the Lord. He spoke through the pastor, into the music, providing a spiritual army as a portal into my soul. I will speak of mental illness as loud as it is needed. To normalize it, to forgive it, and to bring peace and hope to my fellow sufferers of such a hell.
The army has always been fighting. Praying, fasting and praying again. Now in the throws of my faith, I know this. I was never alone. WE ARE NEVER ALONE. And when I feel as if I am, somewhere deep inside me I know they are there, fighting when I am too weak.