Version 2.0

This is a version of my life that I am not accustomed to. So many times, living with this illness has been the most uncomfortable thing to bear. In the early weeks, the days were long, the nights terrifying. Yet, over time it has become something I have learnt to live with and dare I say, be thankful for.

The thing about depression is that it slows everything down. It's like you're caught in thick gooey slime that you cannot shake off. It swallows you whole. You wake up finding yourself suspended in the sadness and it feels like it will never end. Your heart is shredded, over and over. It is paralysing. Nothing is interesting and everything is pointless. So you do nothing and feel guilty about doing nothing. For the longest time this was my experience of life. Every step, every action took willpower and there was a limit to how much I had.

I stuck this on the wall right next to my bed and for the first two to three weeks, I had to force myself to go through it to get through the day.  

Because of that, I wasn't able to plan further than the day (sometimes half) and even then, things wouldn't necessarily go as planned. This was scary for me because if you know me, you would know that as a secondary teacher, I was a planner. My type-A dad had drilled into my being that 'if you failed to plan, you planned to fail.' So from a young age, I had ideals and timelines and did my absolute best to stick to it. You know, graduate at 18, marry at 26, earn this much by 28, that kind of thing. Similarly, I had plans for my year on maternity leave. I was going to go back to school, up-skill somehow or volunteer somewhere (all while being a dedicated Mum to Josh). Instead I found myself struggling with everyday tasks. One week, it was so bad that I constantly felt like keeling over and collapsing. I would quickly pass Josh to someone else and just lie down, feeling like death was near.  My dreams died and I only had one plan, to get through the day.

So, I learnt that I had no choice but to follow that plan. I had to take the days as they came and be open to both success and failure. And when things were tougher than I expected, I learnt to tell myself to try again tomorrow. I had to live day at a time. While going through this period, the words from a familiar song played in the background of my mind. The chorus based on those words from the Good Book went "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies never come to an end, they are new every morning, new every morning, great is Thy faithfulness O Lord, great is thy faithfulness."

Suddenly those words became alive. I knew what it meant to rely on His mercies day to day. I had to live these words. It was a complete surrender on my part to a surpassing peace, a sufficient grace and a love that would never fail. And in this time of difficulty, I learnt to be thankful for how the experience challenged erroneous beliefs and strengthened age-old convictions, about faith, about life, about joy.

For the longest time since I found out I had PND/A, all I wanted was to go back to being me. To erase my whole PND/A period and go back to the old cheerful, carefree and a little nutty 27 year old life that I was used to. I missed her. Yet the more I think about it, I don't think that's possible. I have become a different person. But perhaps, that may not be such a bad thing. In fact, I think I'm starting to like this new version of myself. It took a lot of pain, a lot of refining, but I have learnt so much about being patient, I've been humbled to the core, I have empathised with others in a new way, I have stared death in the face and come to a place where I know how to surrender to a God whose ways are higher and realized that what I thought would kill me, was meant to make me stronger.