When You Feel Like Giving UP

So many times in my life I’ve thought about committing suicide. There have been few times when I was so obsessed with it that I wasn’t even sure what the outcome would be.

No, I’m not suicidal now.  My head is still really full and I’m sleep deprived… but I am nowhere near that place. Lord willing, I will NEVER go back to that place ever again.

Into the mental storm that I am dealing with God has been trying to speak. The other night he didn’t let me sleep at all, but I only started trying to listen to him around 4am. I took notes because I didn’t want to forget what he said. This morning he decided that 2am would be a good time for a chat. I guess I’m too busy worrying and obsessing during daylight hours to hear him.

I want to continue my series responding to my friend’s questions… but this morning I have to take a break. I was feeling really tired and really weepy this morning. A song came to mind, “Can’t Give Up Now” by Mary Mary. It is the ultimate “Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds” song and I needed to hear it this morning because I needed to remember. I also needed to cry. When I hear it I cry. When I cry I feel a little bit better.

When I heard it this morning, I thought of another friend, Gerry. He was a Christian I knew who was battling sexual addiction, drug addiction, and mental illness. He struggled for a really long time and the struggle got to be too much. He killed himself. He tried once — he even emailed me his suicide note. We got help to him in time, but once he was released from the hospital he tried again and succeeded.

No matter how defeated I might feel…
Jesus is ALWAYS there.
He is always God.
He is always good
and I do NOT
believe he brought me
THIS far
to leave me…

 

What Color is YOUR Pony?

When I woke up this morning I was exhausted. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to go to work. I just lay there and prayed.

I expend way too much energy trying to deal with difficult people or change things that cannot be changed or trying to meet expectations that have been put on me that sound good in theory, but aren’t really realistic. Trying to find the pony in that kind of hailstorm of hooey gets hard even when I’m trying to be optimistic. I am, by nature, pessimistic. Yet into my  haze of stress, God spoke: Be still and know that I’m God.

I kept hearing that in my head yesterday , but completely ignored it  to my own peril because I was so busy. The pile of crap that I had to wade through was so big that I even if I’d found the pony I would not have been able to dig it out. Eventually, I decided that being still and letting God do what he does best was my only option. What he said did not sit well with me.

In recent weeks I mentioned that I was working through some of the issues surrounding my sexual addiction. I also think I said that I wasn’t too keen to be digging through all of that stuff again and I’d really rather be done with it. Well, last night I hit a wall. I made it to “Principle Seven” (the sit in a circle and sing “Kumbaya” principle) only to be told that I could not proceed! The workbook said that if you hadn’t had six weeks of “sobriety” you needed to go back and do Principles One and Four! WHAT??!! Were they kidding?? I felt like I was playing “Chutes and Ladders!” The past six weeks have not been easy as I worked through the other six principles. It didn’t help that life got really stressful either. I have had some monumental slips. The more stressed out my life seems to be the more I seek to “self-medicate.” Only thing is, the “medication” is worse than the problem.

Being a Christian woman with a mental illness was hard enough. The church is only just beginning to understand mental illness, but it’s a lot more accepting than it used to be. Lots of Christians are admitting to having mental health issues and Christian therapists are springing up all over the place. It’s pretty safe to say in church that you have a mental illness. Being a Christian woman with a sexual addiction sucks. Nobody talks about that. Guys do… but women don’t. If I was a drunk there wouldn’t be much shame in recovering from that. I could bop on over to the local church and attend a Celebrate Recovery meeting and connect with other Christians who also have drinking problems. I know a number of Christians who are recovering drug addicts and alcoholics.

I do not know a single other female on this entire island with a sexual addiction. As my stress has gotten greater I have acted out more. I recently crossed a line that I hadn’t ever thought I’d cross. All of this has only added to my stress and I haven’t had a single soul that I felt like I could tell. Don’t get me wrong. I have wonderful women in my life who love me. They know all about my issues — mental and sexual. I have been able to turn to them for accountability and prayer in the past… but none of them actually struggle with a sexual addiction. I need to connect with somebody who’s been there so they might show me which way to go. I feel so isolated in this addiction. Sex is still such a touchy subject in the church. Besides, church has been stressing me out lately and I’m back to wanting to retreat into my bubble… but my bubble spells death to my spiritual growth.

God is telling me that if I want to be well, I must be willing to change. The accountability that I had in my life has not expanded to cover what I’m dealing with now. The workbook says I need a sponsor. I am resisting this. I’ve been resisting this ever since Principle Four. I made a half-hearted attempt to find a sponsor and then gave up when I couldn’t find one. And nothing changed. Actually, it did. My stress got worse and life pressed in on me and I began to isolate myself from pretty much everybody. I put on a mask and acted like I was ok. As the walls of my bubble began to contract the loneliness began to press in on me, suffocating me. My chest hurt. My mind hurt. My life hurt. I started to feel like there wasn’t a single place in this world where I belonged. There was nowhere that I fit in. So I did what I do when I’m in pain. I self-medicated.

Eventually, I cried out to God. That’s when he pulled out the “Chutes and Ladders” game and told me that I wasn’t ready for Principle Seven! I needed to go back to Principle Four. I needed to ask myself did  I really want to get well? I had to face the sad truth that I didn’t. Not if “getting well” meant changing what I do to protect myself from outrageous people. Not if “getting well” meant surrendering my safety net or deflating the bubble. Shutting people out is what I do best. People at work pushing my buttons? Completely ignore ALL of them even the cool ones. People at church pushing my buttons? Don’t go to church! Stay in my little two room studio singing the Bipolar Girl Anthem.

Isolation, however, is not what God calls the Christian to do as a life-style. My life has become really unbalanced.Work and home. That’s it. I’ve backed off from pretty much everybody else.

I cannot control anything in my life right now. My sexual addiction is getting the worst of me. Admitting that is Principle One. I tried to do an online group to get support, but it fizzled out. Maybe I need to ask at church can I start a recovery group. Of course, that could backfire. I could put myself out there and NO other woman come forward to get help. Then I really would feel like a lone freak of nature. Of course, I could step out and try to start a group and one other woman could step forward because FINALLY somebody else was admitting to having a problem. The stats about Christian women struggling with porn and sexual addiction are growing, but evidently in Hawaii it’s in the “Don’t Ask. Don’t Tell” category of sin. Alls I know is God is telling me that I have to step outside my isolation. I need to seek out real accountability. I need to also find a sponsor.

Not that I want to do this… but Saturday I’m going to get in my car and drive to the other side of the island. There’s a meeting at a church for sex addicts. I have NEVER attended a meeting for this (12 step or otherwise). I always did my recovery work by myself or with a therapist. The idea of opening up face-to-face in a group of total strangers and talking about sex  weirds me out to no end… but the idea of staying like this the rest of my life weirds me out even more. I have been struggling with this addiction since I was eight years old. I have looked at the roots of my issues backwards and forwards. I’ve read books. I’ve watched ministry tapes. I’ve done workbooks and online courses. The one thing I have not ever done is actively sought out other people who struggle in a real time setting.

I can look for the positive in bad situations all that I want… but if I’m not willing to change, then no matter how many ponies I find, I am never going to be free. People equal stress and pain and more stress to me. I generally see them as threats to my mental health. Yet  avoiding them has not helped. It might lessen the stress… but if I end up isolated and acting out, that’s not healthy. My life has got to change. God wants me to be healthy. I want me to be healthy. The one fault I have with the Ronald Reagan joke is that the optimistic kid is looking fanatically for something that’s not there. I don’t want to spend my life  searching for something that’s not there. Maybe instead of obsessing about obtaining sexual purity I need to obsess about getting closer to God. Maybe as I do what he calls me to do (open up my life and love people), I will find that there is no need to self-medicate. As my life begins to be characterized by love of God and love of people… it will be so full of peace, joy, and all that other good stuff that I won’t have time to wallow in my addiction.

Of course, since I’ve put all of this out there, I now have to go to this meeting. People are going to ask me if I went or not. I could delete this post and nobody would be the wiser… but there’d be no growth or change in that and I need God to help me grow. I need God to change me. The only thing that’ll really mess with my head is if there are no women at this meeting. So if you’re reading this and you’re a praying person, pray that I go to the meeting and pray that there’s at least one other woman there. There may not be a pony in all this stuff that I’ve been dealing with, but if I follow God wherever he’s leading me, I’m bound to find something better.

Related articles

• Commercial Interruption: The Bipolar Girl Anthem (theadventuresofbipolargirl.wordpress.com)
• Return of “The Pony” (theadventuresofbipolargirl.wordpress.com)

If the Postman Knocks Twice…

Have you ever noticed that people will send stuff through email that they wouldn’t be caught DEAD sending if they had to put it in an envelop and attach a stamp to it… followed by a walk to the post office??

A former student sent me porn today. At work.

And before you start thinking that it was a hijack job, I do not think that her email was hacked. She sent it to my work email… which is federal government property. It now looks like I tried to access porn at work.

As if.

Given that I have had a long history of struggling with an addiction to porn, it’s not so far fetched that I might look... it’s just that if I did... I’m not so stupid as to look at it from my work computer. Not sure how to respond. She’s troubled. She’s lesbian. She has mental health issues. This might be her weird way of reaching out…. but if it is, surely she knows that  I don’t swing that way.

Interestingly enough I’m having the bible study in my class tonight. I couldn’t open the email at work so I sent it to my home computer. I thought it was to her blog, so I wasn’t expecting the unpleasant surprise. With such a visual reminder of all of the muck I’ve waded through in my past as a sex addict so fresh in my mind, one might think I’d take myself out of the running for the study tonight. How DARE I try to set myself up as a righteous person after all the things I’ve done, right? Again I say, “AS IF.”

Maybe I might have thought that a few years ago… but I now believe without doubt that it is for people like me, with murky pasts and questionable presents that Jesus came to save. I’m forgiven. I’m not perfect and I never profess to be. If my students are turning out expecting to see two perfect people leading a bible study then they’ll be in the wrong place.

If they come expecting to hear more about a man named Jesus who came to forgive messy people like me... then they will have found what they were looking for. My former student? She’s former because she was kicked out. I didn’t get a chance to share the truth about Jesus with her before she got kicked out. I actually don’t have regrets about that because I’m not an evangelist. I don’t try to convert every person I meet.

I have a passion for reaching people who are struggling in their faith because of mental illness or addiction or whatever dysfunction or spiritual challenge they might be facing. They already know Jesus… they just don’t know how to live for him. I’m hoping a bunch of confused wannabe Christians end up showing up for this study as the weeks and months go by. People who can’t figure out why God didn’t just work some mojo on them when they became believers and magically make their problems go away. I can understand those kind of people. I used to be one of them.

Of course, if the cyber postman brings me another email from this girl… I probably will respond. First, I’ll tell her that I forgive her for sending me inappropriate email. Then I might just tell her enough about my own struggles with purity to let her know that I understand where’s she’s at and that there is a better way. What she does with what I share will be up to her. Remember, I’m not trying to convert her. I actually need to put her and her email out of my mind because tonight my mind needs to be on the study and what I hope Jesus will do through it. Even if only one person shows up and we shine some truth into their ignorance that will be enough for a beginning.

Say What You Need to Say (the prequel)

God has really been challenging me these past six years since I moved back to Maui… that I need to take off the mask and,  “say what I need to say.” Remaining silent goes hand in glove with wearing a mask and both are dangerous. What’s the quote: Bad things happen when good men do nothing?? Ok... a bad paraphrase, but you get my point.

I’ve been burned by this “good men do nothing” syndrome on more than one occasion. As a person struggling with a mental illness, I often found myself playing the role of the “weakest link” in whatever chain I happen to find myself in. When you are trying to battle the ferocious inner impulses to kill yourself, coping with injustice is generally not high on your hit parade. If conditions around me were unjust or the leaders around me were wielding their authority appropriately, I generally caved under the pressure and fell into a depressed episode. I’ve found over the year that status quo and injustice weigh about the same when they are pressing down on your neck. I needed somebody to speak up on my behalf and nobody did, so I tried. Only thing is, I wasn’t stable enough to fight  those battles and depressed morphed into suicidal.

Although I’d trained in high school and college to be an orator and a writer, mental illness leveled that playing field. I couldn’t advocate for myself. It was humbling and humiliating that I couldn’t speak up for myself without completely falling to pieces. It was humiliating and hurtful that the very same Christian people who were supposed to be guiding me in the faith were often the ones ignorantly doing the greatest amount of harm. I’ve posted before about what happens when “good people do bad things.” I guess this next series of posts will round out the trilogy, because when I was unable to credibly speak up for myself, I believe with everything in me that other Christians had an obligation to speak up, but did not. They didn’t know what to say. They didn’t “feel called” to say anything. They didn’t want to get involved.

We, Christians, have some twisty interpretations of scripture that cause us to remain silent when we should speak up and speak up when we should remain silent. Whenever I see Christians doing protest rallies about abortion or gay marriage I cringe. Not that I support those things. My views on either topic are my own unless somebody specifically chooses to ask me. If anybody actually did they’d be surprised. On this I remain silent until I am asked to give a defense for what I believe.

The message that gets sent to the non-believing world, when confronted with all these sign waving believers, is that Christians are bigots. People dismiss God because his kids thought it’d be neat idea to go out and wave signs around. They tried that here to stop the civil union law from going through. My friends went to this rally. I didn’t. The church is not called to try to legislate the behavior of the unbelieving world. We’re not called to sit in judgment over the world and try to force our belief system down its throat. We are supposed to judge the church. God will judge the world. I trust his judgment better than mine.

When I read my bible I see that we are told to correct and rebuke other believers using the word of God as our guide. We are also told to love each other, so that the world will see that we are disciples of Jesus Christ. If we, the church, were doing what we were supposed to be doing, the world would see something phenomenal going on. The world would want to know what set us apart and THEN people would want what we’re always trying to shove down their throats. And none of the contradicts, or conflicts with, the mandate we have to preach the gospel. We keep trying to tell the world how to clean its house, but when the  non-believer looks at the church they often see the bickering, corruption, division, and other gnarly stuff. They see that we need to take care of our own housekeeping before we condemn theirs.

I am a say what you need to say kinda person… but I haven’t always been. There have been two notable periods in my life where God put me in situations where nobody was speaking up about problems that needed to be addressed. The average stable person could ignore the problems. Bipolar Girl could not. The spiritual temperature of the water that God had placed me in was set to boiling and both times it triggered severe mental episodes that quite possibly would have resulted in my suicide. Both times people stood by and watched. This isn’t to say that they didn’t do anything. People did. It’s because of the people who stepped in to help me in practical ways that I am still alive. But they shouldn’t have stopped there. They should have spoken up on my behalf to the powers that be, because when the status quo is squashing the life out of somebody it becomes an injustice. After that last episode I became afraid to say anything because it was in trying to say something that all the problems began. Or so I thought. The problems began when other, stable people who had gone before me had said nothing. If even one person who had gone before me had spoken up, things might not have been so bad for me. I ended up really emotionally, mentally, and spiritually scared from both experiences.

After all the “spiritual adhesion” removal of last year I find myself in an unusual place. I am mentally stable and I’m not at the center of any conflicts. The problems that exist around me were in place LONG before I came around and I now know enough not to take on burdens that aren’t mine. I find myself in the role of exhorter. I’m encouraging OTHER people to “say what they need to say” because some battles are not mine to fight. Some battles might even be avoided if people took off the masks and opened their mouths and said what they needed to say!!!

Something God has given to me to help me in this process (and speaking truth IS a process)… might seem unusual to many but it works for me. Since I’m a writer, writing factors heavily in how I process emotion. I put on a song, “Say What You Need to Say” by John Mayer and then I type. I type until the words cannot come anymore and I pour out everything in my heart into a letter to whomever might be at the center of the conflict du jour… and once I’m done writing I save it in my “SWYNTS” file on my desktop and leave it there. I don’t keep reading it and digging it up.

I’ll explain this process more later… but for now I’m wondering if ,as you read this, you thought of somebody you need to say something to? Is there somebody who has hurt or offended you, but you can’t or won’t say anything? Out of some misguided sense of  Christian “grace” you don’t say anything, but you feel a whole lot of many things: anger, bitterness, resentment, pain… you feel all of it, so you think you haven’t forgiven the person.

Then I invite you into my process. Here’s a link to that song (ignore the ridiculous commercial). Get a piece of paper, open a Microsoft Word document, do hieroglyphics on your kitchen wall… do whatever you need to do to help you “say what you need to say.” I do not encourage you to rush off and go confront the person with your letter. Remember that ex-friend who did that to me??? That’s evil and it’s wrong. There is a difference between what you need to say and what you actually should say. God might call you to confront that person later and he’ll tell you what to say, but first, you must take off the mask, get real before God,  and look at what you really feel… and say what you need to say…

The Human Race

People first.

That sounds great… but what does it look like??

I wondered about it since God had told me that that’s what I was supposed to be doin’ and all…

but I really couldn’t figure out what it meant.

I knew immediately what it didn’t look like:

So much of life is a competition where people are trying to win. They’re looking out for number one; trying to be better than everybody else; jostling for their 15 minutes in the spotlight. I used to live like that. Before Bipolar took over my life I was a Type A overachiever. From every indications I was destined to succeed in school and go on to make a name for myself doing whatever it is that Type A overachievers do. Growing up “gifted” I got used to hearing teachers tell me that I was going to do something amazing. I didn’t count on mental illness. I guess you can say that struggling with depression and suicidal ideation for over two decades and coming out on the other side alive and normal is amazing…. but I’m pretty sure that that’s not what they meant. Mental illness is something you pretty much cannot outrun. It takes you outta the race.

For years my life looked a lot like this:

Me standing alone at the starting line. I wasn’t racing against other people trying to win. It was just me running around in circles trying to stay alive.

People first?? Great commercial slogan… but what did it really mean??

I  asked God what that meant, so shouldn’t have been surprised when he started showing me. He had a friend call me yesterday. Even though I hate talking on the phone with an intense passion, this friend and I talked for nearly 2 hours. It was wonderful to reconnect with him and just hear to hear his voice. He needed to talk to me and he needed me to listen and to understand. When I put me first the phone stays off and I return calls when I feel like it. Eventually people stop calling because they know I won’t pick up. God had another friend call today. Again… the fact that my phone was even on was an act of God. She and I haven’t spoken in months and it was good to talk to her. Her life has undergone some major upheavals and because I wasn’t putting people first, I had no idea. I wasn’t there when she really needed me… but I was there today because God wanted me to put people first. Again, we talked for nearly an hour and I’m glad.

Then another friend came over today. She facebooked me and asked could she come over for prayer. We had an awesome time of prayer and then we just talked. Could putting people first be as simple as that??? Being accessible to people when they need an ear or a prayer?? Well damn. That seems so simple. Why hadn’t I ever thought of that??? It didn’t involve me needing to be lobotomized. I didn’t have to sprout warm fuzzies. I just had to be there and listen… and since I have two ears, that’s not so much of a stretch. I had another friend come over for our Friday Night Prayer group. It’s usually anywhere from 2-4 people. Tonight God wanted me to just be there for her. She needed to unburden herself and that kind of stuff usually works better without spectators. It was good. It was intense. It was a lot of things… none of which involved us racing against each other trying to get ahead. There wasn’t anything to be won and being “first” didn’t even apply.

Tonight I feel more alive than I have felt in years. Sure, when you engage with people there is a very real possibility that you might get hurt. People are people and as long as they are people… the potential for getting hurt is always going to exist. For years I had to put me first because I couldn’t handle more hurts from people….but I’m finding that if I engage with people now there is the very real possibility that something wonderful might happen.  Putting people first??

Maybe it looks something like this:

People taking time to help other people get where they’re going…

The last two days have taught me that we’re in this together.