This one is going to be a little bit longer this week, everyone. Please just bear with me. I promise there’s a point, but to get there, I have to share some background.
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If someone had told me back when I was ten years old that my mom would have a brain aneurysm and that I would never be the same, I probably would’ve stared at them blankly. I wouldn’t have known what an aneurysm was, and I would probably have laughed at the idea that I would go from a care-free, outgoing ten-year-old to an introverted, hurting, and depressed eleven-year-old in the span of just nine months. But that’s exactly what happened.
I was a week shy of my eleventh birthday when it all started. I can’t remember very much from before I was ten. Not sure why since those memories were most certainly far happier than the ones that came in the years to follow. But for whatever reason, my mind lost those childhood memories and lost more of them than most people would at my age. However, I remember the day my mom got sick vividly. I still remember the leather chairs in the lounge and the water fountains off to the side. I remember the gleaming but scratched gym floor we were roller blading on, and I remember what was said to me. I remember lots of things about that one day when everything turned upside down and I was set on the track I’m on today. It was one of those life changing moments, which I would later learn happen when you most need them but least expect them. Although I didn’t see it then or for many, many years later, God was working on me and working out His plans through me. But that perspective comes much, much later down the road.
When my mother had her aneurysm and ended up in the hospital on both her birthday and mine (Which was the week after hers), life went from unclouded to stormy all in one go. I don’t remember feeling much of anything when my father sat us down at the dining room table and explained that our mother needed surgery and that the doctors didn’t know if she’d make it or not. I remember what I was thinking though when he told us we had to grow up and be tiny adults now if everything was going to go smoothly. I was thinking that it was what it was and that I had no more time for being a child. As the oldest out of six, I viewed it as my responsibility to take care of everyone while Mom was out of commission. I even viewed it as my responsibility to take of my mother once she came home on bed rest until the neurosurgeon could operate in November, nearly five months after she had her first brain bleed.
It was a scary time of stepping into shoes I didn’t know how to fill, feeling abandoned and lost, and pushing aside those feelings every day until they became distant noise in the background that I didn’t notice. The fear was there though. At eleven, I understood more than at least the two or three youngest who ranged from six or seven down to two. I knew there was a chance my mom would die. I knew she shouldn’t have survived the first bleed and that, if she had another one, she would die even if the operation would’ve been successful. With one bleed already on her record, the likelihood of another was pretty high. To say I was terrified would be an understatement. But I didn’t have time to stop and think about it during the day because I was busy taking care of things, worrying about my education, and helping with my siblings. At night, at least up until her surgery got closer and we started figuring out where all of us would go while my dad stayed at the hospital with my mom an hour from home, I don’t really remember thinking about it much. I went to bed and went to sleep.
From end of April when she had her bleed to October or November of the same year when she finally had her surgery, I was, to all intents and purposes, a machine. I felt very little or allowed little of what I felt to touch me, and I moved on autopilot. I did what was logical, what needed to be done, and I cared for everyone else around me as best I could. But I didn’t take care of myself and no one knew I needed more than just the basic attention to my education and physical needs because I myself didn’t recognize a need. While I was needed, everything seemed fine. I’m the kind of person who, generally, in a crisis doesn’t shut down but instead thinks in a very logical fashion. I figure out what needs to be done and then do it with little thought to how scared I am or what’s going on emotionally. That’s all left behind until later. And later is when it really hits. Later was when it finally hit here too.
I was twelve by the time my mother was back on her feet. I’d just live through some of the most harrowing months of my life, and I didn’t even register that. I just knew my mom was back on her feet. I suppose I expected everything to go back to normal, and those expectations were cruelly dashed on the rocks of reality. Nothing went back to the normal I’d known, least of all me.
My mother struggled constantly with the fact that the surgery had left her partially blind in her peripheral vision on one side, with the slow return to her ability to speak, remember things, and do things, and with the inability to drive at first. She struggled with the recovery process and her natural inclination to think she was stupid was only compounded by her newfound lack of ability to do even some of the most basic things, like remembering her own children’s names. I often caught her crying when she thought we weren’t looking or couldn’t see her, and I always seemed to show up at all the awkward times when she stole off to take a moment to break down.
And I was breaking down too. She just didn’t know. Maybe if we’d both admitted it, we could’ve helped the other. We understood how the other felt more than we knew at the time. Instead, as my siblings returned to the normal they’d known before and went back to the happy, care-free kids they’d been, I became more and more depressed and retaliatory. I lashed out at them because they got mad when I wasn’t the same, and I lashed out at my mother because she wanted me to go back to someone I didn’t even know anymore.
The twelve-year-old girl she saw should’ve been the same ten-year-old girl she’d left behind in her mind. But she’d missed an entire year of my life, and I couldn’t forgive her for it. I knew logically that she didn’t choose to leave me alone without the one person I always talked to when I was struggling with emotions. But now that the crisis was over, every negative emotion I’d been feeling and shoved aside all that time came to the forefront in one enormous wave, knocking me down and drowning me in the pain. I couldn’t cope, and so I fought with everyone. I built walls. I shielded myself from any more pain, or I thought I did. Instead, I just refused to be vulnerable, and so, as a result, no one could help me.
The years following her surgery and recovery were some of the worst in my life. I spiraled out of control. Living in a Christian home and being a believer myself, I could never justify certain methods of dealing with the problem such as suicide. I was firmly convinced my life was God’s, and as such, no matter how miserable He allowed it to get, I wasn’t going to take what wasn’t mine to take.
But even as I cried out to Him begging for it to end, I became angry and bitter. I no longer trusted anyone. Not myself, not God, not my family or friends. But with everything spiraling so far out of control, from my perspective anyway, I needed to feel like things were somewhat controlled. No one stepped forward to comfort me and tell me it would be all right. No one took control for me like I so desperately wanted, though I would probably have said at the time that I didn’t want that at all due to the lack of trust in people. So, I took control. I found ways to cope. I wrote, I asked God a lot of questions I didn’t really expect answers for, and I turned to my own head for some sort of comfort.
By the time I was sixteen, no one who knew me when I was ten probably would’ve recognized me. I didn’t care about anyone or anything because my pain was so great that I was blinded to everything. You’re probably wondering now how anything could possibly get better when things were so sad. Well, fortunately for me and everyone else putting up with me at that point, God didn’t leave me there.
I hit rock bottom at fifteen or sixteen. By then, I was becoming or was already addicted to reading pornographic content in the form of romance novels (I really can’t remember exactly where I was at by then). I didn’t have the mental capacity or presence of mind to skip content that wasn’t appropriate, and I got sucked right in. It offered an escape, and at the time, it let me live for a bit in someone else’s skin without all my baggage and with someone who seemed to care. But in the end, it left me worse off because, afterwards, I knew I shouldn’t have been reading stuff like that and my guilt added to the depression.
I think things might have kept going like that if not for God. But isn’t that how it usually goes? I shared the things above so you can understand just where I was because if you don’t understand that, then you might have a pale view of just how powerful God is. I was a mess in every since of the word. Suicidal but not able to take that last step because of my beliefs, disconnected from everyone, and tormented in spirit and soul. I didn’t deserve God’s grace, and if I had been honest with myself, a large part of me felt betrayed if not a little angry because He hadn’t taken away the suffering when I’d asked. I had a wrong view of God and a wrong view of myself in so many ways, and I had to hit rock bottom before I was ready to admit that I couldn’t go on as I was, that I couldn’t take control or do it on my own because when I tried, I failed every time. I wasn’t ready to hand the reins over to God, but I wanted someone to bring some clarity and some control to a time in my life that was severely lacking in both of those and in the self-discipline necessary to pull me out of the mess I’d created.
That’s when God finally stepped in. It started when my parents pulled us out of the home-school group at the YMCA so that we could do riding lessons as a family on a horse rescue farm where we could work for lessons. At that point, I had no friends. I’d made one friend per year we’d been there (two for the first two years), and when the third year rolled around, the only two friends I’d made had moved on. I had no one, and I didn’t really care what we did. My best friend had moved away roughly two or three years before when I was thirteen or fourteen, and I had nothing left I really cared about. Horseback riding was, however, something I’d always been interested in, so I had something to be excited about for the first time in years.
Turns out that horseback riding was one of the pivotal pieces in His plan to bring me to where I am now. While I was there, I didn’t initially connect well. I liked riding, but it was mostly just something to do. I didn’t ride with anyone who wasn’t family, and besides my instructor and her kids, who were younger than me, I rarely interacted with anyone else. I acted like it didn’t bother me, but being away from my usual routine where I was used to the pain of being lonely actually made the loneliness more acute.
Then, on one of the days where I was working in the barn cleaning stalls with my instructor and helping to groom horses while everyone else gardened in the co-op garden she ran, I happened to spot a red-gold mustang in one of the stalls. I don’t know why, but for some reason, I was immediately drawn to the high-spirited horse, and my riding instructor shared the horse’s story with me. He’d been rescued from a paddock where he’d been left loose with one other mare, who had died while he was out there. The owners severely neglected him, so when he first came to my instructor’s farm, he was starved and could barely walk due to overgrown hooves. Immediately, I connected. Silly, I know. He was just a horse. He couldn’t understand, and he couldn’t talk to me like I talked to him. But I didn’t care. This horse had trust issues just like I did, and this horse was lonely like I was.
No one else would ride him besides the teacher because he was so uncooperative and stubborn. I didn’t care. I wanted to ride him, and I pushed to get to a level where I could. For the first time in years, I made a strong, real connection and I cared about something besides myself or the difficulties I was facing. I practically lived for the one day a week when I got to see that horse. And when we moved just half a year to a year after we’d started there, I was broken-hearted. I didn’t have anything left there that I cared about except that horse, and I spent a lot of nights crying myself to sleep because I missed working with him, grooming him, and just spending time with him.
But that connection, as much as losing it hurt, brought something in me back to life. And God began to slowly work on me as He brought new friends into my life and taught me more and more about how to live life again and how to do it while trusting Him. Now, I’m at a point where I don’t struggle with depression all the time. I still do, but not as often. My addiction is under control even though it too remains a struggle because of my sinful decisions in handling my depression as a child and a teen. And I now have a friend that has remained my closest friend for almost three years now, something I never thought I’d have again after my childhood best friend moved. I still struggle to trust people, and things I’ve been through since have made that even harder in a lot of ways. But you know what? God’s constantly using new things to teach me to trust Him, even if I don’t have the ability to trust others or even myself. He’s mended my relationship with both my parents as well and has helped me to mend relationships with my siblings, even if not all of them are great all the time.
If you’d told me back when I was ten that I’d live through all of that and come out of the darkness into the light on the other side, I would’ve laughed. My God back then was not big enough to do all that. My God now? Let’s just say He looks a lot more like the God of the Bible who could take on anything and win.
