Timelines

First of all, exam results went up today and I passed well – though when I compare how my mood was in this last set to the other two seasons this year, it’s not that surprising that my results were much better. I even got 93% in the obstetrics/gynae written paper – which is the best mark I’ve had in some time. Now I’m just waiting for my project to be marked, and then I can really breathe a sigh of relief.

I was back in counselling yesterday – I wasn’t that keen to go to be honest – after handing in my project, I quite wanted a break to be honest and just have the day to myself, but L was keen for me to go, and as she was away last week, I agreed. Something I’ve thought about a lot recently is what I want out of this – and as someone who’s not that good at ‘I want’ sentences generally, it’s taken me a while to get up the courage to admit it to myself, and then to L. I won’t go into what we talked about right now – I’m still ‘processing’ it (ahh, therapeutic language, here we come) and as before yesterday I’d not told a single person about what we covered, putting it on a blog is frankly a bit much.

I think one of my problems is that for as long as I can remember, I’ve thought of myself as inherently broken. Sometimes I wonder when I started thinking of myself like that, as someone who would always be falling apart at the seams, at least, behind closed doors, if not in the open. I wonder when I painted myself with the feeling that I’m just wired wrong, that I’m put together wrong, that my foundations are on sand and not stone, that I’m missing something crucial, a horn from my unicorn, a mane from my lion, a shell from my tortoise, something so important that without it, I am incomplete, at risk, and outside the herd.

And I wonder, was it when I was twenty-one, and recovering from my first heartbreak, or eighteen, starting medical school and realising that I couldn’t cope with people drinking in my halls of residence and sitting crying in my room, or at sixteen, visiting my dad in rehab and hospital wards and feeling terrified, whether it was at fourteen, when he started drinking and suddenly the house was veiled in secrets, or twelve, when I was picked on for months at school and no-one did anything to help, or when I started secondary school, doomed to have my name forgotten for the next seven years as everyone just called my by my sister’s name, and thought nothing of it. I wonder whether it was age six when we moved back to the UK from a few years in the US and I was labelled the kid with the accent and the dungarees and the smart-alec attitude or whether it stretches ever earlier than that, from the moment I became the most stereotypical middle child I could probably be, sandwiched between my older sister, the attention seeker, the cleverer, taller, prettier one, and my younger brother, the perpetual baby of the family, going through life with luck continunally in his back pocket.

And sometimes, I wonder if I was just born like this – whether I was marked from birth with a stain of depression and a glass-half-empty attitude, whether I was determined from the cradle to be stuffed full of issues and never really sure, who exactly I was, or am. The faith I follow tells us that we are born broken, in sin, that since the day when eating an apple meant more than Eve getting her five-a-day, mankind is tainted by iniquity and cut off from God by the severing knife of disobedience, so perhaps I am just aware of this more acutely. Perhaps I am just more aware of my own brokenness, my own fracture lines, than I should be. The logical, Biblical answer would be that thanks to Jesus, none of this matters – he is the goat, chased into the desert, bearing our sin. He is the lamb to the slaughter, spilling his blood, so that  ours keeps flowing. He is the glue that sticks us to God, the interpreter opening the lines of communication, the intermediary who stands in the way and shelters us from the world of judgement. One of the things with faith, though, is that head knowledge and heart knowledge are often out of step, and the discrepancy only increases when you’re fighting depression. I’ve lost a lot of ‘heart knowledge’, this year, but it’s coming back, it always, always, comes back.