Positivity post

I’ve got a (fairly miserable) post about counselling that I’ll put up soon, but thought I’d break what seems to have been a fairly negative run of posts recently, with some of the good things that have been going on recently. In no particular order….

1) The mentoring scheme between juniors who are struggling academically, and senior student tutors, which I’m setting up in my medical school, is starting to come together. I called a meeting at the weekend with some of the other students who are keen to be involved and it went very well. I”m really excited about this – at the moment, the med school’s support system isn’t that great, and although I’ve never struggled academically (aside from the deadline trauma of last year), from what I’ve seen, for those that do, having some peer support could be so beneficial. I love organising and leading new projects, and this is right up my street. Very excited!

2) My additional research project in foetomaternal medicine is also going to be lifting off next week. I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth into something and perking up my CV after last year – even though in a lot of ways, it’s not really that neccessary, doing something positive to counteract last year feels good – and if I find something out that will help save some babies in the meantime, even better!

3) In November, I’m actually having a proper holiday where I go away somewhere, with people I love, and get out of my city – which, much as I love it, has been a bit stifling of late. What’s even better is that a dear friend I worked with in America is coming to visit, so together, with one of my best UK friends, we’re going up North for some rest, relaxation, and lots of nature. I’m anticipating a lot of wine, chocolate and good conversation. I can’t wait. It’s going to awesome!

4) I’ve started confirming details for my medical elective – all students have an 8 week block to go and do medicine in another country, and after lots of um-ing and ah-ing, I am off to Pokkhara in Nepal, from mid January till mid March 2012! Elective was really what I stood to lose last year, as if you fail something, you have to stay behind and resit, and I honestly didn’t really think I’d make it out there. I’m still waiting on what I’ll be doing but am hoping for some time in a leprosy clinic, then a few weeks of obstetrics and paeds. The leprosy clinic is church-ran, so I’m also really excited to see medicine done from a Christian perspective – which is just not what happens here. Everyone say Namaste!

5) After some discussion, a few friends and I have decided to start up a girls’ Bible study. I’m really excited about this – I’ve felt a bit adrift in my church at times, and this will be a little less intimidating than sitting with lots of older people, with very different circumstances to me and my perennial studentdom. We’re also finding out from the staff if there’s anyone they know of who might benefit from some community – which again, is something I know I’d have appreciated when I started at church.  It also feels as though finally, I’ve found my place in the community, after so long of being at the sidelines. I want to be part of making things better for new people. I don’t want it to take someone else, as long as it took me.  At times, the thought of leading something like this kind of scares me – but I know it’s going to be good for me, and if I’m going to be serious about my faith, I’m going to have to learn how to share and discuss stuff eventually. The three aims are Accountability, Bible, and……Cake. Because, you know, man can’t live on bread alone etc. Holiness and hyperglycaemia, here we come…..

6) The most positive thing of all, is that I actually feel excited at all – and although there are certainly bad days, black days, head-under-the-blanket-days, as the balance slowly shifts, as the new mornings come and the weeks slide by, the good things, the God things, do shine through. I’ve always been a self-starter and a go-getter – and it was those traits that I most missed when depression struck – I lost that sense of who I am. I thought I’d never get those things back. I thought a part of me had died. So now, with these new things on the go, I know that those changes weren’t permanent. I didn’t lose myself to depression. I may not always like the way it did change me, but at least those parts that make me who I am, are still here. I’m still here. I’m still going. God is Good.

What positives have you had, recently?

xxchar48

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Green-eyed and grumpy

I’ve had a nice weekend off, seeing a few friends and chairing the meeting for a new medical school mentoring scheme I’m heading up. I rounded things off with an evening service at church, but found myself not quite at ease as I listened and sang.

I’m back in counselling tomorrow afternoon and it’s been quite tricky sorting my timetable at the GP’s to get the time off – and after spending a few days with them, am not really that keen on being completely honest about why I need it. I’m also just getting completely fed up of having to always, always be thinking about how to get the afternoons off I need, where my next attachment will be (and whether I can get back from it for counselling), of knowing that on Monday evenings, I may well be capable of no more than collapsing in a heap and crying. I’m fed up of having to keep marching to this constant drum. I’m fed up of being constrained, first by depression and now by recovery.

I was sitting in front of a girl in my medical year tonight, and sometimes, I just feel so jealous – jealous that other people haven’t had to deal with juggling depression and medical school, recovery and medical school, counselling and medical school. I get envious about the things I miss out on, as for example, I can’t go to a lot of the teaching hospitals at the moment as I would’t be able to get back in time on Mondays, so am stuck in the city. Recovery, as so many of you will know, takes so much time and so much effort. Sometimes, I really do just get a fit of the ‘poor-little-me’s’ and want to say, why, why is is me that was brought down in this way, why was it my life that had a year, if not more, completely wiped out of it, why is my grades that, after four years of working so hard to stay in the top end of the year, have now slipped, thanks to last year? Why is it my life that was turned upside down, my mind and reason that went AWOL, my body, that didn’t take well to medication? The list goes on.

I know, so well, that it’s pointless looking and envying people. A lot of people, if not all, have significant struggles to work against. A lot of students take a hit from illness of one sort or another. A lot of people go off to counselling and survive to tell the tale. I’m not usually one prone to self-obsession (that would be my older sister). And yet, sometimes, I just feel so frustrated I want to cry. I feel so tired of this ‘journey’ that I want to sit at the side of the road, and not move another inch. I want to hang up my hat, turn in my chips, leave it, leave it all behind. I don’t care, for the reasoning that for all I know, this girl, or anyone in my year, probably has a shedload of stuff going on, behind closed doors. I don’t care, for the reasoning that no one had a clue that I was falling apart last year, so how can I assume things about anyone else? I don’t care, that it’s unfair, unjust, unreasonable to crack out the envy and let it seethe. I don’t care, that having the odd hissy fit at God, won’t get me anywhere. Sometimes, I just have to hiss. I just have to stamp my feet and let it out.

I think part of it is that at the moment, I’m feeling quite alone in all this. Sometimes I wish that I had a family who rallied round and helped me through things, rather than the dysfunctional, corrosive one I have. I get fed up sometimes, of managing on my own. Sometimes, like at the moment, when I’m having a few days of feeling oh-so-vulnerable, oh-so-easily wounded, all I want is someone to take it all away and help me know what to do. Last year proved that I’m not always good at making my own decisions, and as a result, I don’t feel quite as capable or invincible as I did before. Walking wounded. After the whole run in with the substance-misuse doctor the other week, it’s as though all my armour has been stripped away and suddenly, it’s only to obvious to the world that I am defenceless, fragile and not quite as bullet-proof as I’d have it believe. I’m back to square one again. I hate square one. Sometimes, depression feels like a game of snakes and ladders, but with no ladders and extra snakes. It’s hard enough to stay in one place, let alone move forward.

God – please help me stop being so grumpy and ill-thinking. Please help me see the way through this. Please help me keep my eyes fixed on you, and not on things I can’t change. And please don’t let counselling finish me off. Love, Char48.

So – let’s hope that this week isn’t quite as grumpy as the last.

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A strange hubris

I wrote about validity a few weeks ago and have been thinking about that topic since. Something I’ve realised is that I don’t just doubt my own validity and station under God, I also doubt, fairly regularly, God’s validity, and truthfulness in being who He says He is. Last night at church I was struck by this – I was listening to a sermon based around faithfulness and the preacher  said

‘perhaps you think that your inadequacies are too big for God to handle’.

Ahh, the power of the rhetorical question. This statement and my tendency to feel inferior, pretty much sums me up. I spent the first year of my faith believing that an all out, 100%  type of path  showered with gifts and graces wasn’t for everyone and wasn’t for me – that I was happy as an afterthought, sneaking in to the back of sermons, set apart by inconsistency and aching doubt, that I was content enough with being a guest in God’s house, with a daypass but no set of keys, that I was happy enough watching God work through everyone else, while I hung back, an eternal observer, a fearful loner. I thought everyone else had more of a right to be there than I did – I was the eternal gatecrasher, looking in, not quite welcome, but not enough hassle to send on their way.

And then this year, with its billowed hangings of depression, has seen me believing that I’m just too messed up for grace, for God. Sometimes I still think that – I think that somewhere along the line, I became too broken for repair and too wounded for healing, if God even looked my way to begin with, the afterthought that I am. There was a long period where I thought my depression was too big for God – that it was this blackness that ultimately controlled me, and that God had failed or just didn’t want to step in and get me back. This is a strange hubris, unfounded and flimsy – who am I, to think that my problems are too big for God? Who am I, to think that the God who parted the waters and sent down manna from heaven, is no match for my tangled views and cautious problems? Who am I, to put myself above the like of David, mad in his cave, or Gideon, an unlikely leader, or Jeremiah, weeping for his people? A strange hubris; someone who is capable of sending the plagues of Egypt is probably up to the challenge of my malfunctioning serotonin. It’s a lot less chaotic than a shedload of frogs and locusts. Pride has so many facets, and this is sort of a pride of brokenness – it’s one thing to feel wrecked and wretched, but another to convince yourself that you’re too wrecked for God and therefore more messed up, more sinful, more broken, than everyone around you. You only need to step back for a second to realise that this isn’t true. We’re all broken, in our own ways. We’re all sinning, in our own ways. We all need God, in our own ways.

Part of accepting that I too have a place and portion means accepting that God is going to be working in me aswell as the people I stand amongst on Sundays. It means accepting that God isn’t going to leave me alone, or leave me, at all. It means accepting that God has been faithful to me, that his promises have stood up, that through it all and after everything, there’s a place for me that will never be given away.

Balancing out a need to be a bit more forthright in terms of my place and inheritance from God against a need to get off my high horse and accept that God’s power and goodness is more than a match for my inflated sense of hopelessness, is tricky. Weighing one thing against another is childs play, simple – but so difficult, when you’re dealing with the intangibles of faith and living. There’s some verse somewhere about not straying left, or right, but sticking to the centre and keeping fixed on Jesus – the centre or the middle is probably what I need to be aiming for right now. Let’s see how the balancing act works out.

In other news, I meeting my Director of Studies this afternoon. This could be a little tricky – I haven’t seen him since I was at the lowest point in my depression and pretty impressively lacking in insight. It gave him a bit of a shock (understatement of the century). I’m quite nervous about it and am not quite sure yet how I’ll approach it. Then, I start a GP placement tomorrow, which has its own associations as it was on my last one, exactly a year ago, that I really started to unravel. So much has changed since then – but it’s giving me an eerie sense of deja vue and almost feels like the year didn’t happen, or like groundhog day  – I don’t know how I’ll manage it. I’ve also got to decide how much I tell them about needing time off for counselling – explaining things like this is often a minefield. I don’t want to be labelled with mental health stuff before I’ve had a chance to show that I’m more than this depression and more than this year. It’s tough.

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The trouble with validation

This is a bit rambly – sorry!

I’ve had a lovely weekend, after getting my result back, and my younger brother and his girlfriend came to stay as my brother turned 21 yesterday. It’s been lovely, catching up and laughing together, and hearing stories from his work at the camp I’ve been involved with for two years, but couldn’t work this year due to starting 5th year. He’s looking after some of the campers I cared for, and love a lot, so I kind of still feel part of it, through him.

I’ve been thinking about validation this weekend as, after getting the all clear with the research project (TAKE THAT, DEPRESSION!), I feel so much calmer, as though I’ve finally proved that I deserve to be in my final year with everyone else, as though the barrier between me has been brought down. I’m no longer marching to a different drum, or doing things in tandem – I’m back on track. For the past few weeks, I’ve  felt like a fraud, still waiting to hear if I’d ticked every box for 4th year, or is I was going to be hauled up again and find myself working out of synch to make it up, again. I feel more validated now, as though I have a right to be where I am.

Seeking and needing validation is tricky territory – very ‘of the world’ as the apostles would say. Since becoming a Christian, this is certainly something I struggle with, when at times, there’s a constant sense of only being as good as your last exam mark or assessment, and I don’t always manage to separate out my requirements as a medical student to hoop-jump and satisfy criteria, with my requirements as a person under God, who needs no other validation or title. Academics are an easy bolt hole in a lot of ways – when I was a teenager, maintaining perfect grades was a good way of convincing myself that things were fine – as long as I could do calculus, what did it matter if my dad had been sat in the ER overnight again, sobering up? I was ostensibly fine. I could differentiate with the best of them. And that stayed with me through university – it took a long time to even start getting away from thinking that God uses a grading system too, or that he lines us up according to ability or worth, with the runts confined to the broom cupboard. My confidence in academics and medical school has certainly taken a dive recently, as has my confidence in most things – so I’m trying hard this week to remember that I don’t need any other paperwork or confirmation, or validation or proof, than that which I get from God. Depression built itself a lovely wall between me and my faith – it’s going to take a while to get all those bricks down again and back to baseline, before moving forward in faith once again.

Feeling on equal footing to everyone else as a Christian has been something I’ve struggled a lot with – one memorable moment was at one of my first services, listening to someone read from Isaiah 40, and panicking as at that time, no, I didn’t really know, I hadn’t really heard and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, aside from following a pull I couldn’t describe. I sat there feeling like a fraud for not knowing about Jesus and not knowing about God, and wondering if I’d get thrown out if anyone knew just how clueless I was. As someone who came to faith late, I don’t have the stories about sunday school and church holiday camps. I wasn’t raised saying grace before meals or praying before bed. I don’t know a lot of Bible history and I get a bit confused between all the Simons and Peters and Simon-Peters, and all the Johns too. I don’t know the words to the songs the children sing, have no contemporary Christian music on my ipod, don’t really know what to say when I receive communion and get a bit stuck when I’m in a prayer circle and can see that it’s my turn to give something up. I usually feel like I’m running a completely different race, bowling with the bumpers up, cycling with training wheels, swimming with armbands – separated out by a lack of history and a whole lot of uncertainty. It took a long time to realise that if and when I’m standing outside Heaven, St Peter is probably not going to whap out a Bible and say ‘you have ten seconds to find Habbukuk – GO‘ – and that if he does, that’s probably a lot easier than the whole judging of my life etc. Note to self: start preparation for End Times.

This last year gave my self-worth a heart kick in the teeth, to be honest. This week, I got my validation from the medical school and thus can more freely move on and get on, with my last year. Tackling other insecurities isn’t quite as straightforward – it’s not as if I’m going to get an email that says ‘just to let you know, you scored an 88 on being a child of God – above average, but room for improvement. Formal feedback sheets available from the college office’. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to tackle this, aside from getting back into my Bible and seeking out those verses that tell me that I’m not as unworthy and not as much of an after-thought as I often feel. Psalm 139/Ephesians 1/John 3, here I come…..

One of the first Christian books I read was by AW Tozer  and I remember being completely bemused when he wrote about a mild, meek man who was nothing out of the ordinary, who didn’t break records or the glass ceiling, who didn’t kill himself striving and trying – but who was completely firm in his value, every day, no matter what, due to his inheritance from God. At the time, I didn’t get it – I didn’t understand that our value to God has no bearing on our position in the stock market, our mortgage, our children’s IQ’s or our climbing careers. This is something I am gradually getting to grips with, though breaking a life-long habit of using my CV as my yardstick for worth, is hard. According to my counsellor, I’m pretty typical for someone ‘growing up alcoholically’ (her words, not mine) – in that I was raised with mixed messages and changing promises, with love used as a tool for bartering and being with-held when someone stepped out of line. Without wanting to get too Philip Larkin, those early relationships both mould and marr. Early patterns are hard to break.

So – now that I can stop focussing on ‘worldly validation’ from the likes of the medical school, I’m going to focus the next few weeks on sorting out my own stumbles in seeking validation from God. Let’s see how it goes. Any tips/ideas/maps always greatly appreciated.

In other news – I’ve got a week left on care of the elderly before moving off to GPland for a month. If you’re a praying person, please pray for elderly patients and the staff caring for them – there’s a lot of tough stuff going on for some of them and if it was up to me, I’d take them all home with me and set up a nursing home in my living room. However, as this is somewhat socially contraindicated, prayers from you, and (attempted) attention from me, will have to do.

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