long journey

You lock the door; wish for deadlocks.
You wish for the satisfying clunk of knowing the world has been turned out.

You stand at the window. Night steps from behind the gnarled trees on the far side of the road, watching you. The moon brandishes its white grin, admiring its reflection on the black, gleaming mailbox.

Your phone chirps. You turn it off, not looking at the message.

This is who you’ve become lately.
Weary. Isolated. Paranoid.

Just a man padding around his house on wooden floors that creak in the silence.

You sit on the edge of the mattress, check the locks on the window one more time, slip an Ativan under your tongue and wait for sleep to overtake you.

The demon’s slow whisper becomes the wind outside, and the wind becomes a breeze, and the breeze becomes your breath, in and out, in and out, and you’re riding this Serotonin hit into the depths of night.

---

This is the first thing I notice, always, when my mind starts to get sick.

Paranoia.

My body instinctively shuts down, shuts out the world, and it’s a terrible thing because in shutting out the world, I shut out the beauty right as I’m shutting the pain. Like cancer, mental illness attacks my life cells, the ones that make a person smile and hug and laugh. And I kill them off, one by one, watching the way they shrivel, this dance of death and life just withering away.

But tonight, although I may not smile, I am safe.

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It’s hard for the church to separate spirituality and mental health. Instinctively, we assume these two points correlate on a graph somewhere next to our names in the Book of Life. Like maybe God, in his spare time, has developed an algorithm to chart the dedication one has to His plan. Thus, if someone becomes depressed, surely their enthusiasm for God’s plan must be waning. If someone struggles with anxiety, surely their trust in God isn’t intact. If someone struggles with guilt, assumedly they don’t believe in the repentant plan of Salvation.

And the someone steps up and points out that cortisol, dopamine, serotonin and brain mapping can be used to diagnose these things and the algorithms are briefly consulted, and we assume God puts an asterisk on the bottom of the chart which reads: Tread gently. Love carefully. Question everything. Not all is as it may seem.

But what I think God means is this: The ground is always level at the foot of the cross. Grace abounds there for everyone who might reach for it. Love first. Understand maybe. Do your best. It’s okay. I’ve got the rest.

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Then you find this friend. Maybe two.

You find this person who wears Jesus on their sleeve, and when you show up at their door, they pull you in and find a Kleenex box because they know by the look on your face that you’re about to destroy their living room with your grief. But none of that stops them. They give you a steaming mug of coffee and you cry into it and tell them how you wish you could be healed, and you beat back the paranoia and try on this new cloak called Trust because these people have only and ever shown you love. Love without judgment. Love without, even sometimes, answers. Just the kind of love that listens. And you weep together and not once do they tell you that Jesus is lacking in your life or tell you that you’re doing it wrong but they just keep pointing to Him and it’s all you can do from just pulling a throw blanket over yourself and falling asleep on their couch because this, right here, is a safe place.

And the next day, you can’t text anyone, and you turn off your phone again, and it makes you sad because you remember how it felt to be heard. You remember how it felt to be loved and it makes you ache somewhere between your soul and your head.

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The following day, you send a text message and thank them for being there for you, and it feels good to have a friend like that.

But you don’t stop there. You hug a coworker you know is hurting, and your world is a little bit better.

You’re out snowshoeing with your dog, and you’re staring up at the sky when you trip landing on your knees, and it’s then that you pray: Help me, Lord, you pray. “Help me to trust others a little more. Help me to love others as You’ve loved me. Help me to listen to the hurting world first, to never be critical because a critical spirit will never help a critical situation. Help me to… you pause… well, help me to always and forever look in your direction. Because the road to the cross isn’t a highway but instead, a narrow footpath of faith. Help me to remember, each night, to lock up the world away from me but never before inviting you in first.” You get distracted then because your dog has found a possum that’s still, curled up in the path with its tiny hands resting on its chin and you wonder if it’s really dead. And since you’ve lost your train of thought, you murmur, “And God? I don’t ask for a miraculous healing, but I do ask you continue to show me sure steps toward living a better life of service to you. And since we;re on our knees anyway, Lord, could you heal Ervin’s back hip and make it easier to lose this belly fat and thank you, dear Lord, for making dark chocolate and cheese.”

And you laugh. And it’s the most honest laugh you’ve heard in a longtime, and the sun is setting, dripping all this contentment over the western sky and you suddenly think that it might be the last sunset you’ll so you just take it in… And the beauty is so raw and real that your breath catches in your chest and you wonder if this is the last breath you’ll take, so you just breathe it in…

And you are grateful. Grateful for trust. Grateful for friends. Grateful for the church of people and couches and shoulders to cry on and all this messy grace that blankets your life. You’re grateful for healing, even in minuscule amounts and you’re grateful for second and third and fifty-seventh chances in spite of yourself.

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Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish’s belly, and said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice. For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me.

Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple. The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God. When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.

They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy. But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord.

Jonah 2:1-90, KJV

 

“Yet why not say what happened?” – Robert Lowell

There’s two of them, this session, in the room with the couches and their practiced smiles that try to convey this: trust us. Please trust us. We won’t hurt you. Let us help you.

“We’re both in agreement and we’re going to start you on two medications,” the psychiatrist says. “One for depression; the other a mood stabilizer.”

I scan the small room. The windows, four stories high. The door, closed. I imagine sinking into the couch, then, until I am one with it, this inanimate object and I hold my breath, willing myself to stop living, to stop existing but then my chest rises without my consent and I live on in this new reality.

“You’ve been brave, telling us your life story. We know this isn’t easy. There must be some part of you that knows you need to get help,” he continues and I want to hate him, want to but I cannot because I know he’s somebody’s grandfather and he’s being kind to me too and then he asks, “Are you going to take these medications?”

I nod, trying to force the words out I so desperately want to say but cannot, as if my body has been rendered useless in this new world I find myself in and for a horrifying moment, I imagine myself on the coffee-stained floor, then, at my parents, having to learn to crawl again, to form words, to walk and eat non-pureed foods.

“How long…” the words jerk unsteady from of my mouth. The room is silent, then, only the soft shuffling of one of the psychiatrist’s feet against the floor. I give up then and imagine myself as a caged animal, imagine the restless, lazy walk of the bobcat I saw at the zoo, how the front of the cage had a worn path around a small tree, past his food bowl, this trajectory caused by paws going up and down, up and down and how I knelt then, put my hand against the glass and felt only sorrow even as the excited banter around me continued, and I wondered how long he would walk until his spirit longing for freedom was crushed. I wondered how many times his nose had to bump glass before he stopped trying to find home, and I cried then, there in that crowded zoo and I’m crying now too, here in this tight room and I wonder if I, like him, will ever find my way home.

“How long…” I ask again and the doctor sighs and shakes his head. “Likely all your life but that doesn’t mean you won’t learn to live above it,” he replies and since that day, I’ve wondered if he wasn’t trying to tell me something: acceptance towards today’s trials is not synonymous with giving up hope for tomorrow.

In an instant, I snatch the prescriptions from the doctor and exit quickly, head bent low as if against a bitter wind and all I want is to go home.

But what is home? Does home still exist? Will my wife, when she finds out, stay? I imagine myself buying her a plane ticket, a one-way ticket home and begging her to escape this person, no, this monster I’ve become. I have heard if you love someone, sometimes you have to let them go but our love isn’t like the usual love. It doesn’t sit idle with cliché statements and it breaks down walls that supersede the imagination and if I were to give her the plane ticket home, she would march straight to the shredder and be done with that notion and she would wrap her arms around me and tell me that sometimes, when you love someone, you have to stay and fight.

That night, it’s just us against the world and we find each other while the moon lands in stripes across our bed and eventually, we lay in the gloss-edged darkness listening to the hum of the fan and I say it, trying to whisper the words but they come out loud, as if forced into a world not yet ready for them.

“I’m bipolar.”

“Really,” she whispers.

And then she does the most remarkable thing. She yawns as if bored, curls herself into my arms, tucks her iceberg toes under my legs and falls asleep.

I’m left awake, then, alone and yet not lonely and I know this place, next to her, will always be home.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 38:8-9)

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To read part one and two of the “long way home” home series, click here and here.

To read part one of this series, click here.

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I went to jail when I was nine years old.

The day started just like any other horrifically normal day, the day I went to jail. I ate my mini-wheats, soaking them just long enough to make them smoosh but not long enough that the white frosting slipped silently into the milk. Then I brushed my teeth, remembering to scrape my tongue because, as I had learned, that’s where the stinky bacteria lived. I gagged but did it anyway. Then, before tucking in my shirt, I lifted it to make sure no lint was stuck there, in my belly-button.



Once I had found lint there and that day was an awful day because things hadn’t been right, right there from the beginning so I sassed someone in charge and broke a rule or two and everything just was wrong all because of that one piece of fuzz from who knows where.

So when I went to jail, that day, on a day that no lint was found, on a day that I had brushed my tongue and eaten the perfectly sogged mini-wheats, I couldn’t figure it out.

“That’s enough,” the teacher had said, then plopped this box, probably something a washer or dryer had come in, right over my head, right over my desk.

I remember wondering what happened to my daydream bubble, the kind that was always in the comic strips above people’s heads. Did it squish through the cardboard bars only allowing me to see the chalkboard and nowhere else? Did it hover above my head, smashed, flattening toward the corners of the box? Why didn’t the teacher care about the daydream, haphazardly throwing that box over its head and why couldn’t she have given me some notice so I could’ve released it back to the other clouds, back to its friends in the sky?

I’ll have to be its friend, I thought, and I liked this box, instantly, the way the lights glaring were cut out and I wanted a candle to flicker across the paper in front of me, to cast a cozy glimmer across the picture I’d been drawing for the cloud above my head.

“I suppose that was the first memory,” I tell the therapist, this bald, shiny foreheaded man with kind eyes. “That was the first memory I know of where my reality couldn’t be seen by others.”

“Do you remember what was happening before that?” he asked.

“I knew my spelling words. The teacher wanted us to write them five times each. It was such a waste of time. I remember talking a lot, goofing around. I was the life of the party. She kept telling me to be quiet. I couldn’t. I laughed at her. She got mad. I didn’t care. I kept going, going. Everyone thought it was fun.”

“Did you have many days like this?” he prompted.

“No. Not until I got older.”

“What made you realize you needed help?” he asked.

“My wife. It had been a good day at work. I remember wishing there was more to do. I remember how happy I was; how my coworkers became incredibly interesting and I poked fun at them. I had the perfect comeback for every joke. Colors were bright, flying at me. Thoughts came even faster than the colors. I couldn’t keep up; couldn’t sit still. On the way home from work, that night, I saw a man standing by the road. I thought maybe he needed help. So I pulled my car over onto the gravel shoulder and yelled at him. He just looked at me, sad-like and walked into the woods. I screamed at him. Screamed loud enough that he could hear over my car’s engine. But he just kept walking. So I shut my car off and stumbled after him, using my flashlight on my phone the best I could but I tripped over some twigs and some viney thorns ripped at my pants. I wasn’t scared. I stared up at the sky trying to make sense of where I was but the trees had covered all the stars. I couldn’t find my way back to my car. I suddenly shivered and it was like I woke from a horrible dream. I started shaking and crying and I wondered if maybe I wasn’t dead and this was hell, being alone in the woods at night. I eventually found my car and drove home. When I got there, I went straight to the shower and threw my clothes in the washer when I was done. Climbing into bed, I wrapped my arms around my wife and imagined giving her a one-way ticket back home, begging her to climb on a plane headed away from me, away from whomever I was becoming but I knew she wouldn’t take it. That girl loves me something fierce. I don’t deserve it. Never have. I vowed to myself that I would get help, that night. For her, mostly. So here I am.”

And that’s the magical, craziest thing about love; someone else can hold us together when we’re undoubtedly falling apart.

“You have to tell me something is wrong with me. You have to. Everyone has their limits. What if this happens when she’s around? Worry is killing me. I can’t sleep. Can’t eat. I won’t be able to hold it together much longer,” I told him. “Pretending is horrible. I’d rather be dead.”

And I thought about the swerving of a car, sudden, into a concrete underpass or walking slowly into a field, the corn tall, letting my arms hang loose by my sides and the sharp edges of their leaves cutting at my arms, reminding me of what I’d come out here to do…

“Something is wrong,” he replied, as if everything I told him didn’t scare him and this surprised me about him, how calm he was in the face of a monster and I thought maybe he was a little like God in that way, unafraid of even my darkest secrets. “But it’s not something wrong with you. It’s something wrong with your brain…”