The Rest of the Story

From the time I was old enough to be aware of my feelings, I knew I was different. Unlike my sisters and brother, I walked a tightrope between deep melancholy and extreme anxiety. Part of this was due to my severe asthma. I never knew when my chest would seize up and breathing would become impossible. Add to this the massive amounts of steroids and bronchodilators I was on, coupled with the occasional life-saving adrenaline shots, and my little body became the perfect playground for a rollercoaster of anxiety and depression. In addition to my struggles with asthma, I had some severe phobias that made me afraid even to move sometimes. My main phobia was of insects of any kind. I’d gotten locked in a playhouse when I was three, and the terror I felt, alone in there with wasps, was always with me.

Every summer, my siblings and I spent a week in Wray, the little town where my grandparents lived. The summer when I was ten, I read a book about a writer who took a notebook and went to a cemetery to write down story ideas. That appealed to the curious, romantic writer in me, so I asked my brother if he would walk up to the Wray cemetery with me. He promptly said no—it was almost 100 degrees outside. He wanted to watch TV. And the whole idea was lame. Partly to prove him wrong, and partly because I wanted to be like the girl in the book, I borrowed one of my grandpa’s legal pads and set off by myself.

The cemetery (yes, the same place I’ve written about where my grandparents are buried) was up in the bluffs above my grandparents’ house. If I’d gone with my brother, we would have hiked up through the bluffs. But I was afraid to go that way by myself—I had zero sense of direction and was certain that I’d end up in a cave, never to be found again. So I walked up the road to the cemetery. It was only a mile, but the road was a steep climb up a canyon. On one side of the road, there was a sheer drop off of one hundred feet. On the other side, there was no sidewalk, so I had to walk carefully as I watched for cars. But I finally made it to the cemetery and started wandering through the gravesites.

Midway through the cemetery, I stopped to write down the information on a particularly intriguing tombstone. As I stood there, I heard buzzing. Loud buzzing. I looked to my left and saw a cloud of hornets—a cloud so thick that it looked like a black tornado. I felt a wave of abject terror wash over me as I looked around and saw that there wasn’t another person in the entire cemetery—I was completely alone and helpless. I started to wheeze, unable to catch my breath, and I realized that I’d forgotten my inhaler. I looked down, and a hornet landed on my shoe. I dropped my pencil and pad, and I ran—me, the little asthmatic girl who rarely walked, let alone ran. I ran all the way back to my grandparents’ house, down the steep road, slipping on the loose stones and falling several times, skinning my palms and my knees.

As I ran, I vowed that I would never let myself feel that alone and helpless and scared again. And I kept that vow. I stopped going places by myself. When something scared me, I ran. And when I was old enough, I started using drugs and drinking to keep myself from feeling the familiar darkness of fear. When I got sober, the hardest part was facing those feelings for the first time in my life—facing them and sitting with them rather than running from them or covering them up. As I learned in recovery to face my feelings, I felt God prodding me to put my experience into words. And that was the genesis of this blog—to tell anyone who reads my words that there is joy and hope even in the midst of fear and depression.

I will never tell you that the journey of healing is easy. I won’t give you a step-by-step road map to guide you to a place of fearlessness and bliss. And I won’t tell you that I’ve found the answers. What I will tell you is this: I understand your fear because I have it, too. And I know it’s hard to keep going in the midst of pain and fear and darkness. But you’re not alone, and you’re not helpless. I’ll walk beside you and share everything I learn along the way—in recovery, in Bible studies, and from my own experiences. One of those lessons is that your fear and pain don’t have to drive you to run or to use substances to numb your feelings. Your pain can drive you to a search for healing so that even when you’re afraid or depressed, you’re able not only to cope but to find purpose. If I can do that—me, who will always have a helpless, terrified ten-year-old inside of me—you can, too. So come with me. Look up with me. Together, we can learn and grow and find the height of joy and freedom—living in alignment with God’s plan for us. Are you with me?