My Mind: From Prison to Playground

My mind has always had wanderlust.  No matter where I was… I wasn’t.  My report cards all read the same thing.  They all spoke of how I was respectful, obedient, a great kid, yet one that could not stop daydreaming.  My poor teachers just couldn’t compete with the playground in my mind.  My narrative and visual capabilities have always been off the charts.  That vividness of imagination gave me so much freedom.  I would fly like Peter Pan, score the winning touchdown, save the day, create fantastic worlds all at my whim.  Every night I would love going to sleep, as it gave me the freedom to visit that playground in my mind unabated.  It was bliss.  My mind was my constant escape, my favorite place to go…

…until it wasn’t.

In the blink of an eye that playground got turned into a torture chamber.  Depression ravaged my mind, heart, and soul.  If you haven’t experienced it, I’d like you to try to imagine your thoughts not really being your own, nor your emotions.  Imagine the sensation that someone else is picking your thoughts and feelings, and they are choosing only the worst ones you could have imagined.  That mind that gave you freedom now was a prison you could not escape.  You took your torment with you everywhere you went.  Everywhere you were… you weren’t.  You were never able to feel the emotion of the moment.  The best thing in the world could happen to you, but all you don’t care.  You are screaming inside the prison in your mind.  No one sees it.  Most don’t care.  Worst yet is that you come to believe the prison is inescapable, that it is your fault, that you built it, only adding to your torment.  If you built it then you should be able to tear it down, right?  I hated my mind, for it had believed it had betrayed me in the worst of ways.  How I wished to be able to go anywhere else.  It was my least favorite place in the world…

…until it wasn’t.

Some years ago things changed.  The slow slog back to health began.  To this day I am still unlearning things taught to me in my pain.  This last year has seen the resurgence of myself in a way I once thought completely impossible. My mind is once again a playground, and I am struggling to even know how to use it.  I feel like I had my legs cut off, and they’ve been reattached.  It is hard to fathom that this mind of mine was once a place of torture.  The pain is not forgotten.  I have to sometimes remind myself that it is safe to go, that I no longer have to fear my mind, have to try and constantly distract myself.  The bonus is that, unlike before, I cannot take for granted what I have.  The scar inside me will never let me forget.  If memories are wrinkles in the brain then that memory is a canyon.  It is my belief that pain is necessary for the highest good, for it is in the face of true pain that true joy is felt, and do I ever feel it.  Oh how I feel it.  My mind is once again a place of awe and wonder, love and life.  Praise be to God.

God is a God of redemption.  He has brought me out of the abyss.  He has restored my mind when I thought that it was impossible.  May you find some hope and peace in my story, and may God show you the joy felt on the other side of tragedy. 

A Beautiful Mind by: Laning Photography

Nicholas L. Laning

Post-Depression Life: An Introduction

 

Job 42:12-17

12 The LORD blessed the latter part of Job's life more than the first. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys.  

13 And he also had seven sons and three daughters.  

14 The first daughter he named Jemimah, the second Keziah and the third Keren-Happuch.  

15 Nowhere in all the land were there found women as beautiful as Job's daughters, and their father granted them an inheritance along with their brothers.  

16 After this, Job lived a hundred and forty years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. 

17 And so he died, old and full of years.

 

Again and again, the same scenario played itself out in my life whilst depressed.  Some song, such as Coldplay’s Fix You perhaps, would be blaring through the speakers of my car, sparking my recurring fantasy.  Though the means always changed, whether it be a hidden tumor, some rare disease, some pill, being struck by lighting, or simply just hitting my head, the end result of my fantasy was the same… healing.  I would go from my state of horrific, torturous emotional paralysis and involuntary negativity, and would return again to a normal heart.  The lightning would strike, BAM, and somehow, as if by magic, the hell would be over.  I would be alive again.  I would look in the mirror and see myself.  Not just the physical body, but me.  I would feel me, and everyone around me.  I would be normal, whole again.  

Some five years have gone since my depression subsided.  It has been absolutely wonderful to no longer be under the thumb of such torment.  My heart is overwhelmed with gratitude, joy, and excitement over no longer “living” as I once was forced to.  However, it has looked little like my fantasy. 

One of my best friends just had half of his liver taken out after they found a cancerous mass in it.  As of right now, it looks like he is going to survive completely.  There is great hope that the surgery was the last of it, that the cancer is gone.  Praise God!

However, things will never ever be the same for him.  The surgery may have saved his life, but it also left him with an enormous scar.  He will carry it for the rest of his life.  Not only that, but that surgery was painful, and so is the recovery process.  Think about that for a moment.   Even the process by which healing came hurt, still hurts, and will leave it’s mark on him, both in body and in spirit.  His life will never be as it was.  Every doctor’s visit will be met with a hint of fear of recurrence.  Every decision made form here on out will be made through a lens of cancer.  Can I eat this?  Should I do that?  Can I drink this?  The doctors have given him a list of new guidelines by which he will have to follow in order to ensure he continues.  He will live every single day with the fear of recurrence in his mind.  Over time that fear will be assuaged, but at each occurrence of his body acting up, the fear of recurrence will jump straight to mind.  He may live to be ninety, and never have cancer ever again.  He will still live with the residual scars of it until the day he dies.

Guys and girls, so it is with depression.  In my fantasy, the catalyst would come and wake me up.  Life would go back to the way it was.  The truth is that there is no going back.  I know what they may make you feel.  I know that hurts you.  That is not my intent.  There is life, love, hope, and goodness on the other side.  It is just going to be different than your life was before.  Life is still good for my friend, but it has changed.  My desire is to give you so much hope, but a hope based on what is real.  I want you to thrive in your post-depression life, and that means not being set up for disappointment by not being told what is true. 

Like my friend with his cancer, you will have to change things in order to live fully, things others may not.   You will have scars, big ones.  There will be an enormous healing process that goes on long after you are depression free.  Your mind and heart has been twisted by pain.  That doesn’t come undone overnight.  It takes faith, hope, love, courage, patience and much more.  You will live the rest of your life with a fear of recurrence.  Over time it will get better, but it will always be there. 

Now, go back up and read that passage on Job again.  Feel the hope in those words.  One of the most famous sufferers of all time.  So famous is his suffering we are speaking of it thousands of years later!  After his suffering, Job was given back what was taken.  Now, at first look we just get excited.  With further thought it hits us that what was taken from him was people.  His children died.  Are those people replaceable?  You know they aren't.  Nobody is replaceable.  You can refill an emptied roll, but you cannot replace a person.  Job was blessed.  His life was good!  However, it was not the same ever again.  He was given new life.

So will you be given new life. It's not that what was disappears completely.  There will always be links to who you were.  Our lives are a whole, not just of the moment.  You are no more you now than you were in the past.  You will simply grow and change.  It is only logical.  Let’s start looking at what is ahead, after you are healed.  Let's let go of the parts of the fantasy that are not real... the instant healing, the return to your old life one hundred percent, the miracle pill, and replace it with the truth.  You are in the fight for your life, and even after depression is defeated, your healing will take a long time.  In some ways (some bad, but some GOOD) you will be forever changed.  You will have new insights into the world.  You will have experienced and survived a torture and torment that is daunting.  In many ways I struggle with feeling like a failure, as most of us do.  I have not achieved much of what I wanted.  However, when I reflect genuinely upon what I have come through, when I remember the true depth of the hell I survived, I know that I have already achieved something great.  Every breath, every wondrous emotion, every time I feel love, sadness, wholeness, it is a victory I once thought impossible.  Most people will never know it, and that's okay.  God knows.  He knows my pain, my struggle.  It has not been lost, nor forgotten.  Nor has yours.  Nor has yours.

Break Over

Nicholas L. Laning

I apologize for my absence from this blog.  It is not that I have forgotten this blog, and those I have been writing to, or intending to encourage.  My struggle is a human one, and I have needed to rest from the attack a bit.  Bit off more than I could chew for while, and got bitten in return. 

Not but a couple of months ago I set out to write book on encouraging people in depression.  My parents welcomed me at their house, a get away to focus on writing.  The plan was to hammer out the outline and a couple of chapters, enough to send out to a literary agent.  After one day, the truth hit me.  This is not a novel.  It is my life.  Talking about the concepts of depression is easy and painless enough.  For the most part, I can discuss it at great length with little or no relapse.  However, writing the book called upon me to do something I never do… not just recall and discuss the concepts, the ideas of depression and how to apply them, how to fight depression, but to recall my personal, actual, struggle with it.  Since I never do this, I was taken by surprise when, after just one day of inundating myself with recollection of the horrors of my stint in depression, I relapsed terribly. 

In the month or so since, a great many thoughts have arisen.  Can I do this?  Can I keep trying to fight this publicly?  There is surely a reason almost no one ever writes first hand stories of depression.  The battle has been left largely to outsiders, which is sadly, part of the reason why so many people struggle as I did to believe they are depressed.  I can’t put my finger on what it is exactly, but there is a certain language that only depressed people speak.  It isn’t our words, but the ideas behind them.  It is in the sharing of those ideas that the first trap of depression, that what we feel is completely unique, and thus to be fought alone, and without hope of recovery, continues on so strongly.  I read tons of books describing depression.  And while the words had some vague nearness to them, they rang hollow to me.  The person writing the description was writing because they had a PhD in psychology or counseling or bio-chemistry, or theology, or whatever.  What they couldn’t convey was that another person, chiefly themselves, had ever experienced, had shared my pain.  And so I went on, falling into that classic depression trap of thinking that my pain was SOOOOOO unique.  No one else had ever felt how I did.  It justified so many things.  I could mope, whine, be angry at God, whatever I wanted, because I had been given a burden no one else had.  Every person I have ever talked to who is depressed has thought this, and had to overcome it.  The number one way they were able to do so was through someone else connecting with them, revealing their shared bond through a pain that is not only not unique to one person, but shared by hundreds of millions across the globe.  The irony is that almost all of them are doing so in the shadows, trying to duke it out with the biggest foe they have ever faced, blindfolded, legs and arms tied, mouth covered, ears plugged.  They have nothing.

So, it is my desire to do what I can to return to the fight.  Pushing myself so hard in it that I relapse does no one good, as that doesn’t comfort anyone to know that I am not all that much better off than they are.  I am better off.  My depression subsided very quickly with a couple days of patient hope.  This is in stark contrast to the incessant hell millions face every day. 

Let us continue on in the fight.  We may not fight perfectly.  We may fall.  We may stumble.  Yet, we continue on in the fight.  We have hope in our redemption.  To God be all glory.  Amen.

Quitting Time

Nicholas L. Laning

I just turned thirty.  That is not old, but it is long enough for me to have learned some things.  One thing that I have learned is that you can never rest in this life.  God gives reprieve so that we can recharge for the next battle.  Death is when we get to stop, not before.  So it is that I tell you that I have struggled since early November.

What have I struggled with?  Many things, but what matters here is that I would say all of them are the remaining battle I have left with depression.  By and large, I am well.  I am so well in comparison to how I was just three years ago, that sometimes I forget that I am not whole yet.  Does that make sense?  That because it hurt so bad, that even though I still have some hurt left, it can seem like I am well because I am comparing it to the torture previously felt?  Call it "getting ahead of myself".

I have warred within myself, trying to fight my back to normal.  To simplify the issue, I have been fighting to be whole again, to struggle, but struggle with healthy problems, not ones stemming from the Abyss.  I want desperately to feel normal, this includes normal pain.  Don't think I am seeking perfection in this life.  I know that heaven is the only place I will find that.  No, I am seeking normal pain, normal sorrow, normal joy, normal whatever.

If you wonder what I mean by normal, I mean this... when something bad happens I want to feel sorrow.  When something good happens I want to feel joy.  It's not that simple.  There are shades, and sometimes you just don't feel right, but on the whole is what I am talking about. 

In this fight, as of late, I have found myself sinking into a pit of self pity.  I have been angry, angry at God for allowing it.  The whole time I am then angry at myself, for being angry at God is really really stupid.  I am wrong and I know it.  So, I have cried out to God, and He reminded me of myself during the midst of my depression.  It was like I could see myself back then, peering into me, seeing my current struggle and how I was reacting.  I could see that past me shake his head, for I was once a warrior.  I remember being in the midst of the Abyss. fighting off a seemingly endless waive of mental and emotional anguish, and in my mind, I made a resolve.  My resolve was this... that no matter how far I fell, I would never quit.  I could be at the bottom, I could STAY at the bottom, but I damn sure was going to fight, even it was in vain, even if it were forever.

And so it is, that I see myself again, now, and my resolve is renewed.  I will not quit.  I will fight for hope and faith and love and goodness for... however long it takes, period.  There is no point to which I can fall that I will stop.  I only hope you'll forgive me for taking so long, for sitting in my own you know what and pouting.   I don't know when I stopped seeing the battle.  I see it again.  By the power of Jesus' name, it ends here.

It is my sincere hope that you will join me, that you too will stop sitting, and regardless of where you are, no matter how far under the much you are, no matter how much you have messed up, fallen, been chewed up, beaten, tattered, whatever, that you would stand up, turn around, and start swinging like mad, and fight for all the good things.  

Living in Spite of Your Feelings

Nicholas L. Laning

What do you do when all your feelings are terrible?

We love to think that we are rational beings.  Atheism has flourished, somewhat, not upon its actual strengths, but upon the lie that it is devoid of faith.  So many Christians have fallen for the lie that they have figured out how to remove faith from Christianity, despite the fact that this is what is counted to us as righteousness, and have convinced themselves that they it is solely reason that pushes them.  I have been amongst struggled with both of those lies myself.  We love to feel that we make our decisions based upon nothing but rational ideas, but no ones makes their decisions based upon thought alone.  If we are willing to be honest with ourselves, and were to search our thoughts, we would surely find that emotion plays a huge part in why we decide things.  So many times I have talked with people who have claimed to make a decision based upon thought alone.  Yet, after asking the tough questions, they have come to offer up that they decided to... whatever... because they just... insert an emotional response to whatever the issue is.  I have had this happen to me many times, especially in my youth.

Christians surely do this.  How often do we make a decision, not based on any rational thought, but because, "We FEEL called to... change jobs, do missions in a foreign land, whatever?"  If we are honest, then the answer is... very often.  We get a good feeling about something, and we take that be the blessing of the Holy Spirit.  We feel bad about something, and we feel the spirit telling us to avoid it.

Well, what do you do when all your feelings are terrible?

One of the most terrifying elements of depression is that our emotions no longer follow a normal path.  They no longer follow life.  In a normal heart, you go see your friends, you feel something good.  Someone dies, and you feel sad.  Well, in depression, you just feel pain, no matter what, and it drives you crazy.  Part of our decision making process has been stripped.

So, how do we move forward?

We move forward by doing something that takes courage, and is not natural.  We have to make decisions based upon faith and hope.  We have to believe that goodness is real, despite the fact that we don't feel that to be true.  We hope that love will return to our hearts, though we haven't felt its glow in years.  We move forward in faith and hope of things to come.  We keep breathing, and one day, God willing, we will, in this life, be restored.

Have hope.  Believe in good.  Believe in love.  Believe that this current pain is true, but only a momentary aberration.  The ultimate reality is that goodness and love and joy and happiness are real.  Keep fighting.  You are in my prayers.  My heart goes out to you.  Write me if you want.  Always remember that God loved you enough to allow His only Son to suffer worse than you have on your behalf.  He does love you.  He really does.

God Responds to Job

Drops by Nicholas L. Laning

Job 41

1 And the LORDsaid to Job: 2 "Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it."

Job Promises Silence

3 Then Job answered the LORD and said: 4 "Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. 5 I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but I will proceed no further."

The Lord Challenges Job

6 Then the LORDanswered Job out of the whirlwind and said: 7 "Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. 8 Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be in the right? 9 Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his? 10 "Adorn yourself with majesty and dignity; clothe yourself with glory and splendor. 11 Pour out the overflowings of your anger, and look on everyone who is proud and abase him. 12 Look on everyone who is proud and bring him low and tread down the wicked where they stand. 13 Hide them all in the dust together; bind their faces in the world below. 14 Then will I also acknowledge to you that your own right hand can save you. 15 "Behold, Behemoth, which I made as I made you; he eats grass like an ox. 16 Behold, his strength in his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly. 17 He makes his tail stiff like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together. 18 His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron. 19 "He is the first of the works of God; let him who made him bring near his sword! 20 For the mountains yield food for him where all the wild beasts play. 21 Under the lotus plants he lies, in the shelter of the reeds and in the marsh. 22 For his shade the lotus trees cover him; the willows of the brook surround him. 23 Behold, if the river is turbulent he is not frightened; he is confident though Jordan rushes against his mouth. 24 Can one take him by his eyes, or pierce his nose with a snare? 

Job 42

1 "Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down his tongue with a cord? 2 Can you put a rope in his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook? 3 Will he make many pleas to you? Will he speak to you soft words? 4 Will he make a covenant with you to take him for your servant forever? 5 Will you play with him as with a bird, or will you put him on a leash for your girls? 6 Will traders bargain over him? Will they divide him up among the merchants? 7 Can you fill his skin with harpoons or his head with fishing spears? 8 Lay your hands on him; remember the battle--you will not do it again! 9 Behold, the hope of a man is false; he is laid low even at the sight of him. 10 No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up. Who then is he who can stand before me? 11 Who has first given to me, that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine. 12 "I will not keep silence concerning his limbs, or his mighty strength, or his goodly frame. 13 Who can strip off his outer garment? Who would come near him with a bridle? 14 Who can open the doors of his face? Around his teeth is terror. 15 His back is made of rows of shields, shut up closely as with a seal. 16 One is so near to another that no air can come between them. 17 They are joined one to another; they clasp each other and cannot be separated. 18 His sneezings flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn. 19 Out of his mouth go flaming torches; sparks of fire leap forth. 20 Out of his nostrils comes forth smoke, as from a boiling pot and burning rushes. 21 His breath kindles coals, and a flame comes forth from his mouth. 22 In his neck abides strength, and terror dances before him. 23 The folds of his flesh stick together, firmly cast on him and immovable. 24 His heart is hard as a stone, hard as the lower millstone. 25 When he raises himself up the mighty are afraid; at the crashing they are beside themselves. 26 Though the sword reaches him, it does not avail, nor the spear, the dart, or the javelin. 27 He counts iron as straw, and bronze as rotten wood. 28 The arrow cannot make him flee; for him sling stones are turned to stubble. 29 Clubs are counted as stubble; he laughs at the rattle of javelins. 30 His underparts are like sharp potsherds; he spreads himself like a threshing sledge on the mire. 31 He makes the deep boil like a pot; he makes the sea like a pot of ointment. 32 Behind him he leaves a shining wake; one would think the deep to be white-haired. 33 On earth there is not his like, a creature without fear. 34 He sees everything that is high; he is king over all the sons of pride." 

Somewhere Else

Just play the song, and either close your eyes or look at the picture or whatever you'd like, and imagine yourself somewhere else for just a moment.

Mark 4:39 ESV

And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.

Somewhere Else by Nicholas L. Laning