Beginning Author’s Note:
The following is a lost-and-found letter to no one in particular. It was originally written as an assignment for an English class, a persuasive free response ‘About Me’ sort of thing, if you will. By the time I’d finished, I’d decided that the content had veered too far off from what the original assignment was supposed to be, so I ended up handing in some mediocre middle-school level memoir introduction instead, and stowed this away among old school folders and packages of loose-leaf paper. I’d completely forgotten about it until recently, when I was organizing my room in the midst of a bipolar manic episode. In recent months I’ve started to revert back to a depressed state of mind. (It’s taken me a full week to type up these 3 pages from the original handwritten version.) I’m publishing this now in the hopes that it may appertain and be of help to at least one other person, and act as a reminder that not all questions have answers, and that you won’t always get closure, but to still never stop searching.
January 7, 2015
I was raised in a devout Catholic household. Growing up, using the Lord’s name in vain wasn’t tolerated, and on weekends, attending mass at our local Cathedral was a consistently upheld ritual for the entire family. A wooden crucifix perpetually adorns the wall above the entrance to our kitchen and Grace is recited almost mechanically before family meals. Paintings and various pieces of art adorn walls throughout the house; ones of a divine shepherd with a halo above his head and a lamb in his arms, the breaking of the Bread before Jesus and his twelve apostles at the Last Supper, and psalm lyrics and excerpts from scriptures are framed and hung for prominent, ‘can’t-miss-it’ display. This all sounds pretty picturesque, no? If I’m completely honest, it sort of was for the vast majority of my childhood. God, prayer, and church were welcomed, abundant, and predominant constants in my life that I never questioned or rebelled against. Why would I? I didn’t have any reason to do so. It was all I knew.
Then came the summer before sophomore year. I was fourteen when I was first diagnosed with clinical depression and bipolar disorder. That year proved to be extremely difficult, and I had a great deal of trouble adjusting to this new, totally foreign concept that I wasn’t okay. Besides myself, my initial diagnoses followed by the unrelenting side-effects of my mental illnesses took a toll on my parents as well. As much as I’d fallen victim to my own mind, my mom and dad were feeling the blow of it too. I imagine it must have been incredibly difficult and disheartening to fall mere spectator as their youngest daughter, barely a teenager then, slowly but surely began to lose herself. It was almost as if I had a small flickering lightbulb that threatened to go out at any moment – and only then would the entirety of any willfulness and fight that I possessed be consumed and irretrievable at last.
Fortunately, after about a dozen botched trial-and-errors, I finally began to respond to a combination of several different antidepressants in different doses prescribed to me by my psychiatrist, whom I’d already been seeing for a few years, as an eight year old struggling with pretty severe anxiety.
And while I’d love to say that my medication worked like magic and I quickly turned back into my ‘old’ self, that’s just not the case. My depression still showcased itself in the aftermath of my first very slow, gradual recovery. It continued to take a toll on my normally ever-present motivation towards my academics and my will to participate in and complete even the simplest daily tasks like making myself dinner or showering. It was all just too hard. Self-discipline, a personal character trait I had once taken great pride in, had all but dissipated, and the result was a disgraceful report card shamefully bearing my name in all capital letters and resembling the notes on a Tenor vocalist’s sheet music. (In other words, the letter grades on my report card had dropped almost exclusively to D’s and F’s.) As a direct result, in the first semester of my sophomore year, acknowledging how much higher of a priority I needed to make my academics, I made the decision to drop out of my high school’s International Baccalaureate Program. Maybe in another alternate universe, one in which I never had depression and had I gotten out of the program under different circumstances (perhaps expulsion, or one in which I was homeschooled) I would have been made to transfer to another high school, the one for which my neighborhood was zoned. Had this been the case, if I were to have been thrust so suddenly and unwillingly into such a large, overwhelming, and difficult transition, things only would have gotten worse. Fortunately, after having sent in a written request explaining how the circumstances of my situation had had such a direct and negative impact on my grades and was what ultimately caused me to leave the program, the school board granted me special authorization to leave the I.B. Program whilst continuing to be enrolled and graduate from my same high school by taking traditional courses instead.
I will always be grateful to the people who saw to my well-being and allowed me to stay. But having said this, as much as the latter was the highly preferred alternative, the transition from I.B. to traditional classes, though small in comparison to what could have been, proved to be far more difficult than expected; from having trouble finding classrooms on parts of campus I hadn’t even known existed, not knowing a single name or face, and having to get to know and adjust to my new teachers, very different teaching styles, rules, and expectations, it all just made me feel like a confused freshman on the first week of high school, which was a much too long and grueling experience, but still somehow managed to be even worse the second time around. Because this time, there wasn’t a single person who was lost with me. Aside from my elective theatre classes and extra-curricular involvement in the drama club, I rarely hung around my old friends who were still in I.B. On top of this, there was the on-going presence of depressive tendencies, predominantly the one in which I favored the idea of living in my bed and becoming a recluse. I grew further and further away from the people and friends I’d made and grown so close to my freshman year. Sadly, now two years later, this remains true. And I’m reminded of what used to be and what could have been when I pass an old friend in the hallway and I am bestowed with beautiful memories of when we could just sit and talk for hours straight, but now hesitated and even struggled to simply wave or mutter a quiet ‘hi’ in passing. But against all odds, I finished my sophomore year with passing grades, something that seemed near impossible in the beginning.
Then came the following summer before my junior year, where the annual months-long hiatus from school allowed me to properly reflect and focus on recovering from my depression. It was then that I first began to question my faith and my entire religion. I been suppressing every negative emotion I felt when I finally started to respond to the anti-depressants, because I was scared absolutely terrified, that the very second I allowed myself to feel these completely rational and appropriate feelings of anger, regret, and overall sadness, that the depression which had crippled me and left me weak in the knees, aching throughout my body, and disgusting in my own skin, would come back and do so again. But what terrified me even more than the thought of backtracking to the very beginning, was the knowledge that it wouldn’t happen the same way twice. Somehow, I knew that as painful as it had felt the first time, it would hurt ten times worse if it were to return then. And I will always remember how, the night before school was to start back up, I stood crying, shaking in front of my parents in the living room because I was so traumatized of going back to the place that was now a reservoir of so much pain.
Still yet, I began to question what I had done to have been put through something so terrible (mind you, at the same time, I felt guilty for pitying myself in the slightest when I was constantly reminding myself just how much worse others had it.) I was desperate for an answer, for some sort of explanation or justification. So I went to the place that I believed housed all the answers to my questions; my local cathedral. I went to the priest, my old youth group leader (I had absolutely refused to keep attending), and various adults whom I recognized and knew from attending the masses, and asked the same question. “If God loves us unconditionally, why is there suffering in the world?” and received various forms but of the same answer. I was told each time that when God created Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis, he gave them and all of their descendants after them the power of free will. That God loves each and every one of us so much, that he allows us the freedom to make our own decisions; Adam and Eve were foolish and made the bad decision of eating an apple from the only tree God had forbidden in the Garden of Eden, thus giving in to the Devil’s temptation, and had to face the consequences of their actions. In the same way, having free will means that, while we are allowed to make our own decisions, we must face the consequences of whatever may happen as a result, thereby justifying suffering in the world. For example, there is nearly always suffering as a result during and/or as a result of war, but it is humans, not God, who allow and are responsible for that suffering to occur, be it intentional or not. But for me, that raised the question of suffering that is not caused nor is able to be fully controlled by humans, like natural disasters and mental and physical illnesses. God is consistently referred to as almighty and all-powerful in the Bible, so I wanted to know why the fuck he/she/it has never done a damn thing about the suffering of his so called ‘children’. Suppose the latter is true. That means that if God had even half a mind to, he could make it to where suffering simply does not exist at all, or at least that which does not occur as a consequential result of human decisions or actions. God is supposedly real and all-powerful and this ancient book describes how he literally created the entire universe in less than a week. So why then, does God allow his precious sons and daughters, whom he allegedly ‘made in his image’ and ‘loves unconditionally’, to continue suffering horrifically and constantly around the world, especially in cases where it’s through no fault of their own?
End Author’s Note, as of May 2nd, 2016:
I still haven’t received a valid answer to any of my questions. I’m nowhere closer to reclaiming/restoring my faith or believing in any God, religion, or other supernatural deity than I was three years ago. I’ve accepted that I probably won’t ever receive closure and that I will continue to struggle with mental illness for the rest of my life. But the difference is that I’m no longer looking for answers, nor am I nearly as bitter or upset. I still hate the fact that there is suffering in the world, and sometimes I still become so enraged about it that I silently curse whatever/whoever may exist with the power to put an end to it yet continues to let it to happen. Only I’ve grown to realize that no one person or figure probably is (or ever will) be listening. And that’s okay. I don’t need faith to live a happy life. I don’t need constant reassurance that every bad thing that happens in this world is a part of some ‘greater plan’ that will all make sense when we’re rotting in the ground six feet under. Life is unfair and shit happens in the world, and yeah, it fucking sucks. Sometimes it’s easier to focus on the bad than the good, especially when it’s what’s most shown and talked about on the news and social media. But it’s important to remember that with 8 billion people living in the world, there are 8 billion good things that are worth living for.
