It’s the End of the World as We Know It…

And I feel fine.

I love that song. It’s seems so manic just by virtue of the speed in which the singer belts it out. It also makes me think about major life changing world stage events. Ok. Not really. Makes me look at events that affect the stability of my bubble. Like the tsunami warning yesterday. I’m thankful that it turned out to be a non-event… but there’s nothing like an impending natural disaster to make you rethink your life.

Our house is not in an inundation area. That means we wouldn’t have been swimming with the fishes even if the tsunami had hit. My housemate packed snorkel gear though (just in case). We are in a coastal town though… so we did evacuate just in case. We loaded up the stuff we thought we just had to have and headed upcountry to a friend’s house. We decided we’d bring all the fixins for brunch and just wait it (whatever it turned out to be) out.

In the past natural disasters were like hitting the big red Bipolar Button that is kept next to the Bat phone in that glass case in the Bat Cave. I do not handle even the mention of natural disasters well. I start to do a weird level of panic that is reserved for just such events. And once the panic gets good and toasty it’s just a few slides to full fledged depression where all I see are the fears in my own head. Not pretty. Which is why I avoid the news. I haven’t watched it on tv since 911 and I avoid newspaper because the only news they seem to report is all the bad stuff. I can do bad news all by myself. But yesterday it was kinda impossible (and actually pretty stupid) to try to avoid the news. So over a brunch of Mickey Mouse shaped specialty waffles, scrambled eggs, and bacon we watched to the tv  news to see if our island was going to be ravaged.

I am thankful that I was not home alone in my bubble. That wouldn’t have been pretty. Instead I was with my housemates and a good friend. We prayed a few times and generally just kept each other amused. The one time I started to feel like I was going to have a meltdown, I told Good Friend and she hugged me and then prayed. Bipolar Meltdown, deactivated.

When I got home I had a lot on my mind. Hawaii as we know it was not destroyed. The most amount of damage was probably done in the local grocery stores as people rushed to get provisions. It was good to know that in the case of a major disaster Hawaii is ready… but it made me think deeper thoughts. If my world as I know it was really going to end… how ready am I? Packing to leave our home I actually prayed and asked God what to take. If my treasures really aren’t supposed to be in things that can be destroyed… why take anything? Of course, wisdom says that if you’re going to be trapped for days at somebody else’s house, you at least take a few change of clothes and some food so as not to offend their sensibilities. And after all the drama I went through to get my computer fixed… I wasn’t likely to leave it behind. But I took very little. My possessions no longer own me. That was good to know. Even the stuff I thought I could never part with… was relatively easy to leave behind.

So much stress over the years has been caused by my stuff… how to maintain it… how to get more of it… how to pay for it once I got it. My stuff wasn’t going to save me yesterday and I was very much aware of it. I was questioning whether or not I’d have been equally as ready if it wasn’t a tsunami… but Jesus returning… and what I realized is going to have to wait until another post. I have to get ready for church. And after yesterday with the entire state being on the ready… mobilized for whatever disaster might strike… I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be than in my Father’s house thanking him for the fact that the world as I know it changed (predominantly in my heart) and as a result I really do feel fine.

Enlarging My Borders…

Mental illness put me in a very small box.

Just before my bipolar was diagnosed I lived on a ship and “worked” as a missionary. I don’t know what you know about ships… but ours was very small. Me and 79 on my not so closest friends lived, ate, and slept in very close quarters. Space, like time, in Bipolar World is calculated very differently than in the real world. There never seemed to be anywhere I could go to get away from people when my moods started swinging. Once, during my training course days on the ship I went outside during a storm. Big no-no… but I did it anyway. Maybe in my drama soaked mind I wanted my troubles (and me) to be swept overboard never to be experienced again.

Finding space to experience my mood swings was important. Imagine using a yo-yo in a confined space. Ka-thunk, Ka thunk, Ka-THUNK! People and things get hurt when  yo-yo doesn’t have enough space to do what yo-yo’s do. People and things got hurt (mostly me) when I didn’t have the space to ride out my mood swings.

Post ship life I was given a series of little colored pills that took the edge off when I hit a wall and went, “Ka-Thunk”… but the walls just seemed to get closer and closer as I lived in first a very small studio apartment, and then other communal living situations. Dealing with people and life just became so hard at times it was easier just to stay in my confined space. To clip the string on the yo-yo and avoid the “ka-thunk” all together. And for years I did that and watched life pass me by. Life in the box was only livened up by drama that would seep in through the cracks or by the few people I let know the secret password to get into the box with me.

My recent attempts at being a peacemaker has made me rethink the box. I did not enjoy trying to be a peacemaker. It created a load of stress that I had no idea what to do with and since God had said it was on a need to know basis and most people didn’t need to know… I had to wade through a minefield of emotions that I felt ill equipped to handle. Oh where or where was my box when I needed it?

People have gotten so used to me being outside of the box that nobody had a clue that something was wrong. I’ve become more visible… sitting up front at church, going to social events, happily talking about this new job that I love… that it was easy, for a while at least, to forget that I do have Bipolar Disorder and that some things are going to hit me harder than they would hit the average bear. I have felt decidedly mood swingy the past few days. And like being out on deck during that storm, there was nothing I could do with all the waves crashing around me other than accept them and ride them out. Of course, on the ship I just went back below deck. There was nowhere to go in real life… except for maybe back into the box and I just don’t want to do that.

All of which made me think of my book and this blog. Trying to figure out what to say and what not to say proved almost impossible… so when in doubt, I shut up. I didn’t blog much and I didn’t do anything book related over the past week even though it would have been prime schmoozing time. I started to question what I was doing with this book and why God would possibly want to use me of all people to put this particular message about Bipolar out there. It’s not like I’m the only person with bipolar. I’m not even the only Christian with bipolar… so there are books out there by people who have their acts a whole lot more together than me. And then God reminded me that he has called me to be a writer. I have a story to tell about what it has meant for me to be a Christian struggling with mental illness. Mine is not some great story of having overcome. I’m still in the overcoming stage. There are still more days than I would like where my mood and the physical effects it has on me cause me to be completely unproductive. I look at the number of people who read this blog and I doubt that I will ever get published.

And if I let my thoughts and my moods control my actions… then, no, I won’t ever get published. I just read the book of Joshua and now I’m reading Judges. Both books are about entering into and taking control of the promised land. I read about borders being enlarged and God giving the people all the land their feet touched… but first they actually had to get up and go there. Today my plan was to contact agents. I hate doing that. The inherent rejection pushes more bipolar buttons than you will ever know. I cried when I got my first few rejections. Rejection, like time and space, are calculated differently in Bipolar World. What might be a small slight to most people is an enormous crushing defeat to me. I almost gave up on my plan. Why not just stay at home in my pajamas? I didn’t have to get dressed and drive in town to a spot where I’d have a table and Wi-Fi. Then I started to have that internal struggle that I’m prone to having. “Lord… give me ONE good reason why I can’t just work at home?” And then I grabbed my bible and opened it randomly.

If I’d opened to the part where that concubine got raped and them chopped into a bunch of pieces… I would have tried for the best two out of three… but I opened (praise God) to Joshua. Enlarge my borders… take the promise land… getting the land that you are willing to claim… not letting fear or giants stop you. Ok. It was time to leave my box. If I stayed in my room (a very cozy box, but still a box) I might get something done… but I would learn nothing new. In order to move beyond my box I have to be willing to trust the Lord and step out of it. Too much of my life has been lived within the confines of my various bedrooms. It is time to enlarge my borders.

So the humor was not lost on me when I got out of my car, grabbed my laptop case, and locked me car. I looked at where I was… the place where I’d have a table and access to Wi-Fi: Borders. I have come to a bookstore to work on my book. The symbolism was lost on me until I got here. Yes, I want God to enlarge my borders. Yes, I want to be able to tell my story in plan language so that other people who are trapped in their own box of mental illness or depression can start to see that box living is not the only way to live. I’m not sure how much work I can get done today or if any of the agents I contact are going to even care enough to write back… but would it be grand for me to send out these submission packets with my manuscript and to FINALLY see faith open doors that fear has tried so long to keep closed?

All’s Quiet on the Western Front

The thing about having written a book… ok manuscript… is that I now feel the pressure to always have something interesting to say. So what do I do with the stuff that happens, but because the details are not mine to share… I can’t say anything about? Events of the past few days would have seen me blogging up a storm, especially given the fact that they were causing me to loose sleep, but old age or maturity (whatever you want to call it) has set in and I can’t talk about something that has been overwhelming my thoughts for the better part of a week. That also leaves me with nobody to talk to because I am feeling a really strong pull not to talk to this with anybody.

Bipolar Girl doesn’t handle bottled up stress well. Makes me wish I’d stayed in my bubble. At least in my bubble I don’t have to deal with other people’s drama. There is some comfort in knowing that I tried to do the right thing. There’s even some comfort in knowing that by not blogging all the dirty details, I’m doing what Jesus would have me do.

Those WWJD bracelets? Cute… but I don’t like them. What Would Jesus do? He’d say some nifty parables, walk a few miles on water, and then go heal a few people before multiplying a cracker to feed them all a bedtime snack. It’s a given that I’m never going to do exactly what Jesus would have done… but I can aspire to doing what he’d have me do. And in this, I opted for obedience even though every fearing bone in my yellow bellied body was telling me to bail out before the boat sank.What would Jesus have me do? He wanted me to play the peacemaker… to be the messenger. But didn’t Jesus know from first hand experience that people shoot the messenger? Ok. If I wanted to be obedient I had to put all thoughts of bullet riddled messengers out of my mind and be obedient.

People always assume that obedience to the Lord is going to lead to all kinds of warm fuzzy feelings or at least a few stanzas of Kumbaya being sung in a rousing manner. In the real world obedience often leads to grief, grief, and more grief. Which, now that I know that, is totally acceptable to me. In the past, I yielded to so much depression because I held the mistaken notion that if I obeyed God things just HAD to work out my way. When things would blow up I’d get mad at God. What kind of sucker punch was that after all. I had OBEYED. That was supposed to open the magic cookie jar in heaven, right? Besides the fact that there IS no magic cookie jar in heaven or anywhere else, I needed to disabuse myself of the notion that God owed me anything because I’d been obedient.

If Jesus is the “only” one I can talk to about events of the past few days… then that must mean he’s the only one I need to talk to and that should be enough. The western front is more quiet than my mind, but even that is going to settle down and be quiet when I accept that some details really are best left between me and God. I’m tense and stressed out now and have been for the past week… but I was obedient. In time, these feelings will pass. They always do and Jesus will give me another opportunity to be obedient and to trust him on all fronts so that more than just the western one is quiet. Tonight I want my mind to be quiet. I want to sleep and not be stressed out. But I guess if I had to lose sleep, I’d rather lose it because I chose to be obedient and am dealing with mental fall out and not because I chose to be disobedient and was dealing with a guilty conscience.

Remembering the Lessons of Cat und Mouse

Perseverance and endurance…

(*The rat is perched on the lamp)

If you missed the original post and the sequel… check them out.

Daring Peacemakers

I just finished reading an interesting book called Chasing Francis. It’s a fictional story that looks at the real life of St. Francis of a Assisi. The main character in the book has grown weary of carrying around a tired faith that masqueraded as the real thing and ended up going on a spiritual pilgrimage that brought him up close and personal with the life of St. Francis. One point that stood out for me and has had me thinking for days now is the notion of being a peace lover vs a peacemaker. I never would have thought there was a difference, but this book made me open my eyes to the fact that there is a huge difference and that I’d been rooting for the wrong team for a really long time.

Peace. Pretty much everybody wants it except for maybe serial killers and people who talk in movie theaters. Just the other day, I was driving my car and that old song about war came on and I started to rock out. Y’know the song, “WAR! Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely NOTHIN’, say it again..” Musically making my point that peace is what most people want. Since I hate conflict of any kind, I was belting that song out loud enough to make my tonsils shake.

In my peace loving attempt to avoid conflict I have remained silent, when I should have spoken up. I have stepped back, when I should have stepped forward. I have looked the other way, when I should have looked people squarely in the eye. And if you think that all this peace loving comes without a price tag, you’re wrong. Being a peace lover cost me mental health points that I can’t get back. When I think of all the dramas in my life that might have ended a lot quicker had I given up trying to preserve peace at all costs and just once stood up and gave the boat a really good rock… I have to concede that while peace loving seems good… but peacemaking is so much better.

It’s pro-active for one thing. Instead of biting my tongue tight enough to bore holes through it, I could have been taking active steps to work towards reconciliation rather than damage control and clean up.

So much of my stress and grief with my family over the past few years came from the internal struggle I was waging against myself. I had a lot of pent up bitterness and resentment towards certain family members for the roles I felt they played in creating my sexual addiction. When I would talk to them I wouldn’t say anything at all about what I was really feeling. Sometimes I just wanted to yell at them and let them know how their actions had really screwed up my life. Instead, I put on the good lil’ Christian girl mask and acted like nothing was wrong. I had created the illusion of peace where there really was none. As far as they were concerned, things were fine.

Of course, letting that much time go by before I finally spoke up did not help  the peace making efforts. In fact, peace making was pretty much impossible given the players involved and the amount of time that had passed. If I could do it all over again? I would have spoken up sooner. I did speak up, in part, to my mom the year I got saved… but because I didn’t want to rock the boat, I only said as much as I dared. Upon reflection, I should have dared more. As Chasing Francis points out, the Bible doesn’t commend peace lovers. It’s the peacemakers, the people who do the hard work of  bringing peace to hostile situations (whether they be on a global scale or family sized) that earn the eternal brownie points.

How does this relate to my Bipolar Disorder or neurotic people in general? The more unstable my mind was, the more I tried to maintain peace at all costs. The greater my love of peace and the more I tried to “maintain” it, the less peace I actually had. It created more depression and more unnecessary stress. I think most neurotic people love peace so much that they will put up with truly unhealthy situations and people because they don’t want to disturb the semblance of peace. But when you think about… is pseudo-peace really worth protecting?

I’ve been asking God to turn me into a peacemaker, so is it any wonder that a conflict is brewing on my horizon? I have been reminding myself that I did ask for this, so rather than donning the bullet proof vest of the peace lover, I’m going to grab the white flag of peace and stand up and rock the boat. I might get knocked overboard, but I will just remind myself that Jesus could have enabled Peter breathe under the waves if only he’d dared to ask.

Dreams. Dreams. Dreams. DREEEAMS…

I shouldn’t have surprised me that I’d do all that offloading of shame and guilt that is the Step 4 for Celebrate Recovery only to have lots of dreams. Considering that my dream life has been revving up lately, I’m just glad I didn’t have technicolor nightmares where people are trying to maim or kill me. Last night I dreamed that my stepfather died. To my knowledge, he’s still alive and kicking… and since I doubt the dream was prophetic, he’s got nothing to worry about from me or from God that I know of, but the dream was definitely symbolic.

My addiction to porn points straight back to my stepfather and for most of my Christian walk I resented him for the role that he played in igniting my addiction, no matter how unintentional. And before people get all hot and bothered and accuse me of blaming him, consider this: a carelessly tossed cigarette can start and immense forest fire and nobody really cares who is to blame once the damage is done. As long as I was still battling the fallout from the original fire, I was still trapped in bitterness and resentment no matter how faint. In my dream, I have no idea how he died. He just did. And the family was contemplating his funeral. My initial take on this dream: The roots of my addiction are dead now. As I’ve thought about it throughout the morning? I feel like I’m also free of my “father issues” that have made relating to God, the Father so difficult. My stepfather was just a man. A man, not God. Just a man.

In my dream I told my sister (his daughter) that I forgave her. She just walked away from me. It’s one thing to ask for forgiveness. It’s an entirely different kettle of chips to go to somebody and tell them that you forgive them, especially if they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. Nobody in my family is EVER going to admit that they did anything wrong or harmful to me. Doing that Step with my therapist helped me accept that… so my need to ever receive any kind of apology or acknowledgment or validation from ANYBODY in my family EVER… no longer owns me either. With few exceptions, I am likely to die without ever having heard from another one of my immediate family members again. That thought used to make me feel like I’d failed as a Christian and it created a whole world of guilt. Now? I can accept it. I can let it go, and still hope that God might someday bring about real reconciliation between any and all of us, but in his time not mine. Of course, it might only happen in my dreams, but at this point, I think I could live with that.

One Giant Step…

Yesterday I saw my  therapist (the one who’s Christian) for the last time. Technically, she’s a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), but after praying for over five years for a Christian therapist, as long as she didn’t get her degree from Cal State Cucamunga I didn’t care that she wasn’t a psychiatrist. I just needed somebody to talk to who wouldn’t think I was certifiable if I talked about spiritual attacks from Satan. This is where I preface this post by saying that, while I do believe in spiritual warfare, I do not see a demon under every bush. If I flip some guy the bird for cutting me off in traffic, it won’t be because the Demon of Road Rage made me do it. And the Spirit of  Lust isn’t making me oogle guys at the beach. I have to take responsibility for my own bad behavior. But something happened to me between 2005-2009 that was so intense that I have no choice but to believe that I was under spiritual attack and that my life was in danger. 

Of course, I wanted to have somebody to talk to while I was going through it all, but God had a different plan. I had to draw closer to the body of Christ and start letting people in. I had to confess some really dark things in my heart to God and then other people. I had to start making decisions to let go of certain thought patterns and certain sinful behaviors that were making my life prime stomping grounds for the demonic.

A secular therapist would have wanted to up my anti-depressants, and while I agree that spiritual attacks from Satan are pretty depressing… throwing Prozac or Paxil at Satan is not going to make him flee. How am I so convinced that I was under spiritual attack for four years straight? I was having almost daily suicidal thoughts. I was consumed by bitterness, resentment, and rage. I doubted God and his faithfulness and his willingness to help me. I was having increasingly violent thoughts.

Sounds like Bipolar episodes, right? I had a lot of other “symptoms” that I haven’t mentioned here that really seemed to suggest that more psychotropic medications might come in handy… but  had my doctor ween me off of the anti-depressant that I was taking at the time. My point? I got better. Things got a lot worse BEFORE I got better… but as I got prayer, wise counsel, and started to really wrestle with God over the tough issues of my screwed up life… I started to level out. I haven’t been on any anti-depressant medication since 2005 although I still take my lithium to control my manic episodes. Do I recommend that all Christians with Bipolar ditch their meds and rely solely on prayer? No, I don’t. I’m not relying solely on prayer. I do still take medication and if I ever feel that I’m having true bipolar episodes that are not related to spiritual attacks, I just might go back on anti-depressants, but for now, I’m good.

And yesterday was very good. I have only seen the LCSW for about a month. Evidently, God’s counseling schedule for me was the mega-condensed version. I prayed about what to talk about in the last two sessions and decided I would take my Step 4 (the fearless moral inventory) in the Celebrate Recovery program. I’m doing the program for my sexual addiction, not my bipolar.  And I must say, sitting across from an objective listener who is leaving the island in a few weeks was cathartic.

I knew that whatever I told her she was not going to judge me. It was also good knowing that I could include scripture that had convicted me and know that she’d understand. She also understood why all the sexual sin in my past and my not-so-distant past, would have created the kind of mental instability in me that it did. My spirit was at war with my flesh and my mind was the battlefield. The line between conviction and condemnation was never very thick in my mind, so even if God was trying to convict me about my sexual sin, all too often it ended up being condemnation. I literally couldn’t live with myself.

I’d written out my Step 4 just before Christmas and had planned to do it with my accountability partner, but God had a different plan. I realize now that the stuff I mentioned on paper took on a whole new light when I read it out loud to another person. I started crying in the therapist’s office. I hadn’t expected to cry, but it felt like I was taking out so much garbage that I kept pressing on. When I was done I couldn’t talk through the tears. I listened to her respond with words that no secular therapist could have come up with to comfort me. Yet, she also had words that no Christian Counselor without a background in mental health could have said either. She was the perfect combination of the two worlds I needed: therapy and faith. As far as I’m concerned, you cannot separate spiritual health from mental health. It’s like separating conjoined twins. Possible, but dangerous.

When I left her office my step was just a little bit lighter. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. I also had a splitting headache. The mental instability that my sexual addiction used to create in my life is over. Even if I have this addiction until the day I die, it no longer has the power to destroy my mental health and my life that it used to have when I tried to hide who I was from the world. Silence accomplishes nothing. I don’t recommend going to work and telling everybody that you have a sexual addiction or a mental illness or a drinking problem or that you like to wear women’s underwear…. but I do suggest starting with someone safe. I took a giant step forward yesterday. I’m now ready for Step 5. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but it has to be a whole lot easier than the last step.

Wherever you are in your adventure…. no matter how neurotic you are, the good news is that you can always take a step forward and into the light. Neurosis, mental illness, and fungus all have one thing in common: they all thrive in the darkness. What if you can only take a small step? Then do it. A bunch of small steps equal one giant step in Bipolar World.

Money Brings Out the Neurotic in All of Us

I became a believer in 1994. That came just after all the drama resulting from me quitting my nanny job with no real plan. When I hit the end of my money, that’s when I hit the end of the sanity I was holding on to like a vice grip. No job, no real home, no resources… I realized my life was out of control and that I was at the very bottom of whatever life held for me. Since the only way to look was up, I did… and Jesus was there to reach out a hand and lift me up.

This is where I would LOVE to say that all my financial worries were over and that Jesus and I went on to sing Kumbaya together as I took all my new found wealth to the bank. Unfortunately, I had to take a detour to the local Humane Society where I had the ignoble job of being a kennel attendant. Flight attendants think they get no respect. At least their clientele doesn’t pee on their shoes. I would also LOVE to say that I did that job with a smile on my face and a song in my heart because I was doing it as if “unto the Lord” but I was only doing it so that I could buy food and pay rent and make all my financial ends get a little bit closer to meeting.

Eventually, God moved me on to another, “better” job working for Child Protective Services where I had to deal with a whole different kind of crap. * I would like to point out now that I do try to keep my language clean, but there are a few occasions where I have never found a way to do that and still convey what I’m trying to say. If my language offends, please forgive me and keep reading.

That being said…. I got another job and then another job and then a bunch of other jobs over the years and they all came with their own load of hooey. I kept said jobs, not because I was inherently saintly or servant hearted… I just wanted the money. I needed to have the money to do all the things we’re supposed to do as functional adults, but somewhere along the way I forgot to keep God at the center of it all. Did I mention that when I did become a believer I told the Lord that if money ever became more important to me than Him, that I wanted him to take it away??? Maybe that would explain why I’ve never had much of it. In my mind, I say that I want God to be in the center of my financial house, but in my heart I want money and I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I don’t know how NOT to want money.

Loving money the way I do (my love of money is actually cloaked in a fear of not having enough money to meet my needs) is it any wonder that many a depressed episode and lots of my suicidal tendencies can be tracked back to money? Money worries can make the sane person crazy and the crazy person postal. And I was somewhere between crazy and postal.

Right now my church is doing the Crown Financial money management study. Finally, something to help me put God in the center of my finances and to make all the crazy in me go away. Who knew that CF was going to trip the wire to show me what’s REALLY in my heart? The chapter on honesty was the first sign of trouble. I have always considered myself a fairly honest person. Knock off two brownie points for lying to myself. I have learned that I am only as honest as I am comfortable being. The minute my mental health gets squeezed, I’m content to be comparatively honest. Y’know… compared to the majority of people, I’m pretty honest, honest.

God doesn’t call me to relative or comparative honesty. His standard is different. And so much of the worry and anxiety that  I’ve felt in the past over money isn’t because I’ve been too honest. It’s been because I haven’t been honest enough. God isn’t at the center and if I’m honest, I’m not sure I want him to be. Won’t he ask me to give up all the stuff I love?? Like my laptop? It broke down last Thursday after my mid-week crown study. Or my car? It’s having trouble again and I can’t afford to pay  cash to fix it. With $24 in my checking account, I don’t have much money to do anything… and I won’t be singing Kumbaya any time soon.

Yet, I’m not going to be singing the blues (like I would have in the past) either. I’m choosing to confess that I am not yet ready to put God at the center of my finances but I will continue persevering to that goal. I’m not ready to start giving to the poor either since I AM the poor. Additionally, the issue of tithing was enough to make me cough up a fur ball, and the whole notion of keeping a monthly budget has chaffed like a pair of nylons that are two sizes too small.

Is it any wonder that I had money related mental problems in the past? With me at the helm guided by the world’s economy? Not really. And now I see that my expectation of waltzing in and doing the Crown series without any drama was naive. Putting God in the middle of anything means that you have to forcibly push something or someone else out of the primary seat of prominence. I have been having a lot of dreams lately… mostly images of things that scare me or bug me. Crown isn’t causing these dreams. It’s merely revealing what is already in my heart: fear. I am afraid that God will not provide for me, but after all the crazy ways I’ve seen him provide for me over the years, I’d have to be crazy if I continued to worry.

This morning I decided to turn my worries into prayers and all the negative things that have happened that have had positive outcomes? I’m turning those into praises. The biggest being quitting teaching. I am GLAD I quit and I praise God for giving me the courage to do it. Yes, the fall out has created financial and mental stress for me, but the alternative was worse. At least by being poor, I don’t hate myself and I’m not full of rage anymore. I’ve also come to understand that God isn’t expecting perfection from me right now. I’m nowhere near mature enough in my faith to take most of the steps Crown is advocating… but I take comfort in the fact that I can take my shortcomings to God in prayer and he will not only understand, but he will help walk me through my fears and limitations. Money can only make me as neurotic as I let it.

Things That Bump You in the Night

Last night I had a living nightmare. I don’t know if that’s a real term, but I coin my own words all the time in Bipolarville. The fact that I’m awake and functional is a good thing because my nightmares have been known to leave my physically incapable of moving the next morning and my bad dreams have often left me feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck. Back in the beginning days of my blogging I used to say that I’d been visited by a giant lady wearing steel tipped sh-t kickers… but I’ve cleaned up my act these days. A bit. Somehow swear words have not yet exited my vocabulary. Probably because they are alive and well in my thought life.

And my thought life is the subject du jour. Last night’s nightmare seemed real to me. I dreamed that spiders, rats, scorpions, and snakes were crawling around in my room… on the walls, on the bed, on me. At one, point I woke up fully expecting a rat to be in my bed because I felt it crawl on me! I turned on the lights and searched the room. Once the light was out my thoughts continued to bump into me making me think that spiders were really crawling on me. I know the recent appearance of scorpions, spiders, and rats in our place had much to do with this dream, but I couldn’t tell when I was dreaming and when I was awake. I was in this weird place between sleep and the waking world and I couldn’t tell which world was real.

I’d wake up, check for critters and go back to sleep afraid. I didn’t pray. I didn’t tell myself I was dreaming. I just kept looking for things that weren’t real. If that’s not a secondary definition of the word “Mental” I don’t know what is.

Of course, I’ve come a long way from when my nightly nightmares used to own me. I no longer wake up in cold sweats, terrified for my life. My nightmare last night was creepy… but I wasn’t being hunted, violated, or murdered. Evidently, I’ve stepped up a few levels in the dream world. My dreams used to make me feel fragile and crazy. Trying to go to work after having one of my nightmares always seemed impossible, and yet after surrounding myself in prayer, I could generally make it to work where I proceeded to promptly fall apart. Those were the really mentally unstable days… but Jesus has brought me to the other side of all that. Nightmares are no longer my normal. Nights where I have them are the exception. I don’t have to worry when I go to bed if I’ll have nightmares that will make working a mental and physical struggle. I might go to work tired… because I still don’t get enough sleep, but I don’t go to work traumatized by my own thoughts.

And praise God I do not have to work today. I know I could pull myself together enough to function in low gear, but it’s nice that I don’t even have to try. I’ll snap out of it before the day’s over and I’ll pray about whatever it was that caused all those critters to come a crawlin’ into my head and unto my pillow. Dreams like that rarely come when everything is ok in my world. Something must not be right and I’ve been ignoring it. Time to look into my head and see what God wants me to surrender.

V-J Day

“I was lookin’ for love in all the wrong places. Looking for love in too many faces…Searching your eyes, looking for traces of what.. I’m dreaming of…”

Ok now! Everybody join in, because I KNOW that I’m not the only one who is guilty of living these lyrics. It’s Valentine’s Day, so it’s almost a given that I have to say something about love in the Bipolar universe. Those lyrics have dominated my life since I hit puberty. Now, I’m 41 years old and I’ve got a sexual addiction, but I’ve made a faith choice to remain celibate until marriage. Uh…? Aren’t there some statistics out there somewhere, that say I have more chances of being struck by lightning while using my cell phone in the shower than I do of getting married? Should I keep singing the lyrics hoping Mr. Right will hear me and come a knockin’?

My last relationship (which I mention in the book) imploded so badly it made the Titanic look like a pleasure cruise. My other attempts to find Mr. Right didn’t end much better….so I’m not going to step out and try to have any sage advice to the lovelorn on Valentine’s Day. For most of my Christian walk I’ve whipped myself up into a fine Bipolar frenzy convincing myself that nobody could love such a train wreck like me. A mental illness AND a sexual addiction? What Christian guy with half a brain would settle for that?

Believing that I’d be alone and loveless created a lot of mental instability in me. It didn’t seem enough that Jesus loved me. Jesus loves everybody.  Besides, what good were the arms of the Lord when it was real human fleshly arms that I wanted to feel around me? My last relationship was a turning point in my walk with God. I crashed and burned, hitting bottom with such force that it nearly caused my back teeth to crash through my forehead. Ok, maybe not, but the resulting pain and devastation that  might have lasted a year in the real world lasted five years in Bipolar World.

But now that I’m on the other side of all of that… everything looks different to me. I don’t go into all the gory details of the relationship or the fallout overly much in the book because I still don’t have enough distance from it all. I still can’t believe that I made such phenomenally bad choices in my search for love or that I believed for even a minute that the love of a man could ever compete with the love of Jesus. Now don’t get me wrong. I still want to marry and be loved. But that desire no longer owns me. Being owned by our desires is a sure route to destruction and misery.

In the absence of a love relationship with a real Christian man, I am finally happy. I didn’t think I could be happy being single with no prospects on the horizons, but I am. This Valentine’s Day it is enough to know that I love Jesus and he loves me (hence the V-J Day). And I’d like to think that if I can find happiness as a single, other neurotic women can too.

The Adventures of Bipolar Girl: Comfort for the Neurotic in All of Us.