Writing.....

Take Pride In Your Pain. You are stronger than those who have none.

~Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue

November 2016. Almost 19. Lying in bed sweating I twisted the covers around my seemingly frail body and moaned in wordless agony. They were coming again. They tried to take me nearly every night and every night I had to fight them. As I felt the night close in on me a silent and invisible fist clenched at my throat. I grabbed my quilt and sweat soaked my clasping hands.

Sweat poured down me and I stifled back a scream of desperate agony and fear. Knowing others would hear me, I buried my face in my pillow and silently sobbed, tearlessly cried, noiselessly shook. Fear was sweeping madly over my entire frame.  I wanted nothing more than to scream til my throat was hoarse.

It was night and I was alone.

In August  2016 I stepped onto my dream campus to start my freshman year of university studies. I was 18 and even though I had battled with anxiety and depression for years, suffering from panic attacks, no stranger to self-harm, and struggling with suicidal thoughts and even plans, I thought I had recovered. I was on new meds and I had my life under control. I thought.

The same week I began school, I was in an orientation where safe relationships and sexual harassment and assault were described and outlined to the incoming freshman to establish the school’s standards. I went from jokingly half-listening to sitting on the edge of my chair, hands sweating, biting my lips. They were describing what had happened to me.

I hadn’t wanted to accept the fact that I had dealt with sexual harassment or abuse. I recognized the places and times in my life where I knew for a fact that emotional and verbal abuse had occurred and the ways in which it had influenced me for the worse, but I was trying to walk around the fact that I had been sexually abused as well.

The next few weeks were torment. In one week (six days) I suffered nine panic attacks, (on a scale from 1 being mildly terrified to 10 being in a state of screaming and shaking and blackness and utter terror with no hope) most of which were a 9 or 10 on my scale. I stopped being able to cry. Tears simply would not fall or release from my eyes. Everything felt both full of wild emotion and utterly shut down. I was breaking again and here I thought I was done.

Shift back to November, 2016. Up to my neck in flashbacks, severe anxiety, severe depression, and an extremely busy schedule that made me try to mask my pain even more, I was desperate. My counseling had been unsuccessful. Having seen pastors, counselors, and professionals across the board, both at school and off campus, I was facing what seemed to be a completely hopeless situation. I was in the ground and feeling entirely dead.

Having been told by the powers that be to stop talking about my struggles to my friends, the very people who could help hold me up, I was facing possible disciplinary action from my school and all the while my trust in people was shrinking. I was fearful all the time, paranoid of the very people who, while they were admittedly ignorant and inconsiderate, were supposed to be helping me. I was deeply lonely and felt as if the bottom had dropped out.

Yet here I was, cheerful, always laughing, known by at least 50% of the campus, and already identified by a warm and embracing personality and marked by a big smile and open arms. Those who looked closer could see the dirt beneath the seemingly pristine surface but many chose to instead abandon the words they had once spoken to me and walk away, not knowing what to say or what to do or how to help.

The sense of loneliness increased and I turned to the ones I knew would treat me lovingly and consistently, but I was so filled with shame for what I felt I had done and who I felt I had been that it was difficult to reach for help from even my closest friends. So I declined. Forcing myself to function, I slid off my lofted bunk each morning, put on some form of clothing, walked to class, poked a few bites of something into my mouth, downed some coffee, and kept going.

Feeling completely and utterly shut down by everyone (with a few exceptions who still stand out as beautiful gems), I sank into a deep depression. Afraid to reach to my family, who wasn’t handling the abusive situation as well as they truly could have, I gave up. After being berated in a rehearsal by one of the actors, I went from the theater to my room and frantically swallowed a triple dose of pain medicine, followed by a double dose of my depression meds. I was done.

That night I woke up, constant screams in my entire body. In a state of out-of-control panic, I grabbed my neck. My fingers tightened across my throat and I held my breath, trying in that awful dark moment to cut off my breath forever. The blackness increased and I suddenly let go. Suddenly terrified beyond belief, I began shaking uncontrollably. I almost died.

I almost killed myself. Swallowing hard and trying to stop my shaking breath, I grabbed my cell phone and called my friend. “I’m not okay,” I whispered. “I almost died and it was my fault.” After a fearful night, I fell asleep. I knew, though, that nothing would be the same after that. Ever. I was right. My life, continually marked by a strange pattern of suffering while holding my head above the water, was out of my hands.

November 4th, 2016. Afternoon. In my friend’s room, sitting on her floor, I finally cried. Tears, real, wet, salty ones, were streaming down my pale face as I whispered in agony, “I don’t want to keep hurting. There has to be something else. I almost died and it still hurts!”

I curled up on my friend’s bed, trying to stop crying, waiting for our other friend to come help us rule in on an executive decision: whether or not to take me to the hospital. I was scared and I couldn’t stop the tears. I kept trying to laugh at something, keeping up my defense mechanisms, trying to think of something funny, something to keep me happy, but it simply wasn’t working.

I’d already faced friends leaving me, friends who were so scared for me that they told the wrong people in an attempt to make it better for me, friends who took away any trace of medications or possible destructive elements I had in my room to try to keep me safe, and even though I still loved each of them as hard as I ever had, I didn’t want to let myself fall and get hurt again.

Yet I recognized that in this instance I needed to take one more step. It would truly never get better until I took the next step and if this was it, I’d just have to take it.

With strength that wasn’t my own, held up by the tough and gritty love of two friends, I got in the car with my fleece blanket around my shoulders for comfort and rode to the hospital. Within minutes of entering the emergency room I was lying in a cold bed in a hallway wearing a thin gown, shaking and trying not to cry, not knowing whether I would even be back in my own bed that night. Needles in my arms looked for signs of harm from the overdose. Men in medical uniforms were always near me or around me, watching me. Trying to stay calm I wrapped myself up in the fleece and laid in my friend’s lap, scared. Blurr, buzz, cold, chill, sharp, sting.

In those terrifying and life-altering moments the word “courage” became full of new and beautiful meaning. Courage didn’t mean doing something macho. Courage didn’t mean ignoring the pain and trying to solve it myself, trying to make it go away, silencing myself to the reality that I needed out and needed help and needed love. Courage meant crying. Courage meant honesty. Courage meant doing the hardest thing to accomplish the greatest good. Laying in that hospital bed with bracelets around my wrists and needles in my arms and the panic attacks still coming and going at intervals for two and a half hours, I tried to both calm my overworked brain and think about my life at the same time. I would never be the same. This was the change; this was it.

January 2017. Thinking about the New Year and the old one, I couldn’t help remembering the radically life-changing events of the past 4 months. Hints of tears came to my eyes and I processed a little. Wherever my relationship with God was, it needed to grow. I needed to reach out to people who could pour into me and stop stretching myself so far, spreading myself too thin. I needed to rest in the knowledge that even things dark and seemingly beyond my control were not truly enough to override Jesus’s tender love, his gentle touch, the caressing of his hand across my tearstained cheek, his arms picking me up and holding me close. Whatever my relationship with my family was, it could get better, it truly could. I was thankful that God had given me the grace to treat them with respect and the light heart to have a good time with them during my month off from school. I knew that nothing was perfect. I was still hurting. But I knew that if I would allow Jesus to touch the wounds, I would be healed.

Even though I face the possibilities of STDs and medical issues like infertility, processing more traumatic memories, fighting with new levels of anxiety and depression, and dealing with bleak prospects for specific aspects of my life, I pray for the strength to release my tiny and broken existence to Jesus. He will pick up the shreds and,  restoring my womanhood one little painful piece at a time, he will continue to perfect the good work he began in me. My life is not a mistake. I’ve tried to end it and I can’t. His strength and his will for my life are bigger than my hurts and my scars. Oh, Jesus, that I would relinquish the control of the details each day when I wake up, leaving my aches and pains in your utterly loving and capable hands for good. You’ve got me. Your love is so beautiful, so infinite, so mind-blowing, so comforting, and so sovereign. I will be okay no matter what happens to me or my friends or family; your security is for good and for always and fear has no place in my heart. Though it may come, I can say with confidence that it will never overcome my soul. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, thou art with me. Soli Deo Gloria.