My sister-in-law Ellen is working on a project promoting mental health awareness and understanding, and I want to share her vision with you in the hopes that you’ll participate and spread the word.  I think the project has the potential to be a very powerful display demonstrating to viewers the humanity and needs of those struggling with mental health conditions.

Open Up!

A community art project addressing mental health in our world

Open Up! is an opportunity for individuals to share anonymous messages about mental health that will collectively make up a powerful art display.

We want mental health advocates to participate – mental health professionals, individuals diagnosed with a mental health condition or anyone who has supported a family member or friend with a mental health condition.

Using a greeting card or note card, design a short message that answers one of these questions.

• What personal triumph have you experienced in the area of mental health?
• What don’t most people know about mental health?
• What is depression? What is bipolar disorder not? What is obsessive compulsive disorder? What is post-traumatic stress disordernot? Etc.
• What is your greatest wish for our world when it comes to mental health?

Be personal and creative in your own special way – the hope is that your self-expression that will touch those who see it (remember your note should be anonymous).

Our vision is for this project to raise awareness in the community – building connection, understanding and compassion in the area of mental health.

Put your note in the mail and send it to:

Open Up!
c/o Ellen Hale
4004 Pleasant Glen Dr.
Louisville, KY 40299

Contributions should be submitted by March 12. If you would like to be notified when Open Up! goes on display, please include your e-mail address.

I’ve received some requests to hear more about my healing process.  I tend to give encouragement for today and hope for the future, but I don’t tend to dig into the gritty details of my desperate healing process.

The truth is that it really hurts to think about.  I don’t like to relive it.

But when I do dig back into my past I can also see the glory of God’s hand working through my life.  In response to requests I’ve received, I’ve been sifting through some papers and projects I worked on during my first year of counseling to see what I actually wrote about myself during that time.  My “eureka” moments were often painfully simple but packed a deep punch.  And so I’ve decided to share a few of them with you – the glory moments, not the desperate moments.  I hope they speak some truth to you!

The following is an excerpt from a paper that I wrote on suffering in my life.  I worked through a specific event.  One part of the assignment was to respond to the question “Who is God–relevant to this struggle?”  And here is what I wrote:

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.  Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way… (Ps 42:1-2)

I know this.  I have turned to this psalm for comfort many times.  But I had misunderstood Psalm 46 to mean that if God was my refuge, I would not be fearing–God is a refuge, therefore, I do not fear.  Then what was I missing?  Why was I fearing?  How does one gain this type of refuge?  And, most puzzling to me, if we don’t fear, what is there to seek refuge from?

My answer (and the short answer usually automatically given by teachers and leaders) was that I should not fear because after I died, I would be with God.  There would be a final deliverance from my suffering.  That is our refuge, the hope of eventual safety with God, and God would strengthen me to cling to that promise.

But what about the hurt now? And why was that answer not as comforting to me as it seemed it should be?

This particular week, however, through discussions with others, class readings, Bible reading, praying, and the work of the Spirit in my heart, I began to understand this in a new and more profound way.  I began to understand that God is not just a refuge in some abstract sense.  I learned to see the rest of the Psalm–a very present help in trouble.  He is right there to comfort me now.  God is present and near, even in all my sin and wretchedness.  ”While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom 5:8(.”

If that is so, then he will give me comfort and peace while I am still in my sin.  I can be a refugee and still hurt, because honestly, there will always be something to fear.  David is a great example of this truth.  Powlison points out (in Suffering and the Sovereignty of God) that in the Psalms, “David does not mentally rehearse the fact that God is in control in order to quietly press on with unflinching composure.  Instead, trust pleads candidly and believingly with God: ‘This is big trouble.  You must help me.  I need you.  You are my only hope.’”  In Why Does it Have to Hurt?, Dan McCartney states that in Psalm 27 David is “actually struggling to remain confident.”

I had been seeking something impossible–either an absence of fearful circumstances or the willpower to not fear in the face of fearful circumstances.  Consequently, for so long, I assumed that I could only achieve peace once I gave up fear.  That fear was keeping me from God.  But I began to learn that fear should be the very thing that brings us to God.  His comfort and forgiveness gave me the third option that broke me free from being trapped in distress.

In the end, I learned that the first step was not destroying the fear.  I learned that the first step was admitting to God that it hurt, that it was painful, that I was scared, and then letting him bring me peace in that fear.

There’s a problem that I ran into fairly early on in my struggle with OCD.  Here it is:

When it came to the irrationality of my fear-world, I believed myself above all others.  But when it came down to making decisions about reality, I didn’t trust myself at all.

I am convinced that much of this came down to the fact that when mental struggles begin to cloud our mind, they strip away our confidence in ourselves.

Whether you’re new to the struggle with OCD or it’s been going on your whole life, there’s one thing you know above all else – second guessing.  But I don’t think that this is limited to OCD.  If you struggle with panic attacks, you know betrayal, and after awhile, you wonder what’s really wrong with you.  If you struggle with grief, you lose hope – and without hope, the world doesn’t make sense.

My goal today is to tell you that you are critical to your own healing path.  There’s a saying that doctors always tell me – you know your body better than anyone else.  Here’s a saying for you – you know your identity better than anybody else.

As you walk this journey, don’t make choices simply based on your therapist’s goals, or your family’s concerns, or your friends’ advice.  Evaluate all of that, and recognize that it may change what you think.  But only you know what is best for you.

Let me give an example.  I went through a period where I was struggling with some of the items in my home that gave me the most comfort – my favorite clothes, blankets, and pillows.  Some serious incidents had happened to “contaminate” them and I had cut myself off from them.  I am a very touch oriented person and am extremely sensitive to my physical surroundings.  The distance between me and my comforts had stripped away a bit of myself, and had left me with constant discomfort and a lack of a sense of rest.

To the world around me, the most pressing issues to be working on were much more obvious – fixing food, obstacles at work, etc.  But to me, I needed to regain some of that inner peace that only I knew bothered me so deeply.  And it was only I who could suggest or choose to expend my energy working on such things that were easily swept aside by those monitoring my progress.

And the fact was that regaining the things that gave me back a bit of myself and a bit of peace gave me more strength for battling up bigger hills in the future.

Don’t be afraid to disagree with those around you when they prescribe various exposures and schedules for recovery.  There will be times that they are right; but there will also be time that you know best.  Interact and present your side, and instead of accepting advice blindly, make sure to engage in some healthy, realistic introspection over what is the most important to you.  Don’t forget to conquer those areas that make you feel like yourself again, because they will give you more strength and lay a better foundation for future wars.

I love winter.  I love the snow and the cold and the bundling up.  This morning I woke up with my husband still snuggling in bed with me, home for a snow day.  I opened the curtains to see the snow falling and covering my pretty iced pond and fell back asleep with the snowflakes drifting past the windows and my husbands arms around me.

I was miserable.

Sometimes it happens at Christmastime, sometimes it doesn’t come on until the last cold days of March or April, but it seems that every year I get hit with a round of “Seasonal Affective Disorder” – or, translation, “I Hate the Cold and the Dark and Can’t Stand it Anymore and it’s Getting Me Down.”

The difference is that usually it comes when it’s just dark and brown and muddy, when winter has lost its luster and shine.  But right now, I just want the snow to go away.  I’d take a week of rain over the continued freezing cold.  I want the mornings and evenings to be brighter and I want going to the gym to not be a battle against the frigid air.  I want out from under the blankets on my couch and I want to have Diary Queen and Rita’s.

I want to complain.

That’s it, really.  There’s nothing wrong.  I get to see the sunshine all day in my sunny apartment.  I have plenty of social activities going on.  The snow is lovely.  But I’m just grouchy.

The worst part is that I start to crawl back into my old hole.  I start to get nervous about coats and cars; about washing my hands and about putting on socks; I get nervous about working in the kitchen or pulling that book off the shelf.  And if you’d ask me, I wouldn’t know why anymore; I’d just avoid it.  I start heading back down all the same paths but this time it’s more ridiculous; I don’t even remember why these things upset me anymore.  They’re just there, and it’s just easy.  And I get confused in a rut that’s both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

It’s hard to tell myself that it’s just the winter.  That it’s just lack of warmth and sunshine and ease of going outside.  That it’s just the quietness of everyone holed up in their homes and the busyness of my husband’s work life.  That it’s just post-holiday loneliness.  That it will go away.

But it will.  It’s circumstantial.  It’s really not related to me at all.  It’s my reaction; but it has nothing to do with anything that can really cause me fear or hurt.  To fight back against such nebulous tentacles is hard, but I do it, every day.  Sometimes better than others, but I keep doing it.  It’s these times that our guard has to be up even higher, even as exposures go down and I’m huddled in my chilly house all day.  Sometimes I feel I have to fight harder when it seems there’s nothing to fight against… except myself.

There was a time I found this beautiful enough to photograph.  The textures – the icy tips of the grass, the varying glasses on the water’s surface, the distorted reflections.

It didn’t change.  I did.  I will find it again.

Last night I was watching an old Glee episode.  If you’ve never watched Glee, here’s the recap.  ”Chubby” Mercedes has been told by the cheerleading coach that she needs to lose 10 pounds in a week, leading to an attempt at a crash cleanse, a starvation diet and a fainting episode in the school cafeteria after she imagines everyone in the cafeteria as a piece of food.

As she recovers in the nurse’s office, former head-cheerleader Quinn sneaks in with a granola bar.  Now pregnant, Quinn has been kicked off the cheerleading squad.  The scene between the two of them, as Quinn convinces Mercedes that her health and her body and her self-confidence is far more important than her image, is quite moving – and all the more poignant because we recently heard Quinn’s boyfriend telling her to “quit supersizing” because he doesn’t want a fat girlfriend, to which she responds vehemently that “I’m PREGNANT!”

The force of Quinn’s words hits home when she says, “When I realized how willing I was to eat more to take care of someone else, I wondered why I was never willing to eat to take care of myself.”

Human nature is so often illogical.  We constantly make choices for ideals that are usually actually detrimental to ourselves.

Over the last two months, I’ve had family in my home for at least a month of that time.  When my siblings were here, I bent over backwards to make sure that they had proper nutrition and good food.  I cooked breakfast, chopped fruit and vegetables, served proper servings of protein and made them drink water when they whined.

When the dust settled and I was home alone once again, I realized how bad my own eating habits were.  I tend to munch here and there on easy to reach, “clean” snacks, pushing myself to my hunger limits in procrastination and forget to drink anything until Andy comes home and asks me how much water I’ve had.

Don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not lazy or disinterested with food.  I love food.  I’m not thin.  I’m just afraid.

On the typical day, I would rather save myself the stress of deciding what is “okay” to touch and what isn’t, and save myself a few handwashings, than eat or hydrate properly.  And since Andy eats very different things than I do during the day, eats breakfast before I wake up and packs his own lunch, he eats fine – it’s me, alone all day, that shortchanges herself.  It’s me who cooks Andy a salmon burger and then eats something meat-free for dinner so I don’t have to worry about bacteria in my food.  Can anybody else sympathize with this struggle, for either the same or different reasons?

But when there’s someone else who needs something, I dive right in and serve them, sacrificing my standards and my hands and my fears to make sure that they are healthy.

On the one hand, that is a good thing.  It’s good that I am at a place where I can put another’s needs above my fears.  But what about the next step?  Where I realize that my compulsions to “save” myself are actually hurting my own health?  Where I rate my own body important enough to sacrifice my compulsions over?

That is my goal this year, starting now.  And the more I ignore those compulsions and put my own health first, even if it means a few extra handwashings or some discomfort and stress, gradually eating and drinking properly will become the default, the “normal”, and the compulsions will begin to fade.  I know that to be true, I just need to ignore my instincts and put it into practice.  Does anybody have any tips or success stories for me?