Mental Health Journey Part III
Young Adult
If you have arrived at this post and want some context. Please go back and read post one and two.
I was riding high for several months after being delivered and Baptized in the Holy Spirit. But the unwelcome guests of anxiety and depression come back into my life when I went back to school. It was very disheartening. I felt like if that experience didn’t get rid of my mental health troubles once and for all, then nothing would. So, I fell into old habits of sin. Crazy right? You would have thought I would have learned from that experience but I was young and stupid.
I went back to school and finished my last semester to get a degree in mathematics. But it was rough. The same pattern of feeling anxious for a few months then having a crash and feeling depressed continued. So I kept trucking along, doing the best I could.
One year after my healing session I called up Nick. I thanked him for what he did a year ago and he asked me how my prayer life was going. I said I was still struggling. He told me about a hearing the voice of God class that a friend of his had written. This was basically a charismatic take on using Lectio Divina to find out what God’s plan for your life is. It was amazing! I learned about the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit and how to grow and live in them. I was praying in tongues constantly in the car and giving words of knowledge to friends and coworkers. It was awesome. My faith was alive and I felt like I had a commission to spread the gospel. I had these amazing experiences in prayer and saw the fruits of it when I spoke to others. I will definitely share more about these days in later posts. There was some pretty wild stuff going on in my prayer and interactions with others.
I knew I had to get serious about my vocation. Growing up, when anyone told me I could be a priest, I was very dismissive. Just thinking about it filled me with anxiety. I thought I could never do that. But after this experience I had a peace that I could see myself possibly being a priest. I was very surprised about this change! I called up the vocation director of the Archdiocese of Denver, told him my story and that I was at an impasse of my vocation. Because of my inner healing experience, I really wanted to move down to Phoenix and be a missionary like Nick. To provide inner healing sessions, like mine, to as many people as possible! And to help put on parish missions leading others to the baptism of the Holy Spirit and grow in the charismatic gifts. I asked him, “should I be a missionary first or a seminarian?” He told me that I could only discern becoming a priest at the seminary. That put my mind at ease because I had a belief that once I was in the seminary, I was going to be a priest and it was a done deal. The option of listening to the Lord and staying or leaving made it attainable to me.
He said it could be a 1-2 year process to be accepted and that I needed to start now but be patient if I wasn’t accepted this year. Two years felt like forever! I had a ton of work to do on myself just to get in. Because I had this goal of being accepted, I was able to have the drive to do it. But mostly an extreme amount of grace was given to me. I was blown away when they accepted me that same year!
So in August 2016 I arrived at St. John Vianney seminary in Denver Colorado for the Spiritually Year. The Spirituality Year is focused on prayer and discernment. There weren’t classes for grades. Just a liturgy class, a Biblical class and a catechism class. It was pretty low key. A typical day would start with: a holy hour, morning prayer, mass, breakfast, class, midday prayer, lunch, class, your apostolate (volunteering at homeless shelter, nursing home, school, etc), dinner, free time and night prayer. Four hours of prayer everyday! I loved it!
It was in those times of prayer that the Lord increased my trust in Him and I grew in hearing His voice exponentially. Slowly, I discovered that the Lord was moving me towards marriage. This was confusing to me. Why did you bring me to the seminary if 3 months in I am being lead towards marriage? My spiritual director says this happens sometimes. The Lord brings young men to the seminary for a time then leads them out to do other things. The progress I made getting into the seminary and my short time there, gave me a good foundation to set me up for next chapter of my life.
So, option one of being a priest was exhausted. It was time for option two, moving to Phoenix and helping Nick as a missionary. We lived in a house together with our mutual friend Efrain. We had a wonderful year together of fellowship, prayer and ministry.
It was this same time that I started dating my wife Brina. We met in Catholic Match and I knew very early on that I was going to marry this girl! I was apprehensive to share with her my mental health struggles though. Before her I had dated a few girls and all of them had broken up with me once they heard my diagnosis and then saw my up and down moods. To my relief she was very sympathetic and understanding. She too had had some depressive episodes in her life, along with some members of her family. We decided that the two of us would help each other in our brokenness and we would make a better team for doing it! (It is here where I am reminded of a scene in the Simpsons where Mr. Burns has a series of physical tests done. His doctor is surprised at his good health because he tested positive for so many diseases. He then goes onto explain that if his body is a door, none of the diseases can hurt him because they are all stuck in the door trying to get in at the same time). You can watch the video clip here. Please pray this is true for our kids and these mental health struggles don’t happen in their lives. I don’t think they will. I had an image of a chain breaking when I brought it up in prayer before I even had kids. What the Lord reveals he heals.
At that time, I had a job as a drafter for a mechanical engineering company. They focused on water and wastewater piping. Every day I worked on the computer trying to make sense of pipes going all directions and in all sorts of orientations. My boss called it “a spaghetti bowl of fun.” I was good at it and liked certain aspects of the job. But anxiety kept rearing its ugly head. Mostly to the fact of deadlines and pressure to get as much done as fast as possible. I would have to juggle working several jobs at once and they would be anywhere from taking a few hours to several months. Once I would finish a job there was always another right behind it. This led to a lot of depression and hopelessness feeling that I would never have a break, always just keeping my head above water. Basically, it was not a good fit for me. I had a bad depression episode where I was gone for a week. They were very understanding thankfully. The job was just unsustainable for me though.
Brina and I had our first child just before I had to quit my job. It was a difficult time. I felt like a failure and a bad husband/father/provider because I did my best to hold down this higher paying job, but anxiety and depression still got the better of me. I left that job in a broken state. Another major nervous breakdown followed by a pit of depression had happened and I would have to climb my way out slowly. I was very discouraged because it had happened again! Even after all my inner healing and doing pretty well for two years.
I decided I needed a job that was not sedentary and outside in order to get some more “feel good” chemicals moving around in my brain. I got a job as a driver/mover for a moving company. I liked the job. It was nice working outside and being a part of a team again. Moving is similar to football. You have to call plays in order to move furniture from one house to the other, end-zone to end-zone. Obstacles are always in your way. Parking, annoying costumers, awkward furniture and narrow turning hallways. And the greatest of all being stairs. The horrible cardio inducing, grueling marathon, hopeless onslaught death trap that is the stair. Every movers’ worst nightmare. The first question that is looked for on the job sheet, F***, there are stairs…. Moving is also a unique experience because you see people at their worst and best moments. Whether it be a divorce, a loved one dying, being evicted or newly weds, first family homes and retirees. I prayed, interceded, mourned and celebrated with many people. I also worked with some very “interesting” people who I would never have crossed paths with normally. Brina asked me after my first day, how the people I worked with were and I responded, “there aren’t very many ‘winners’ there” haha. They were a very rough group of dropouts, felons, satanists and a few “normals.” I had some great conversations though and I like to think I sowed some seeds for the kingdom of God. And shared some wisdom with the guys just out of high school.
My mental health was not great during this time period but I was holding the ugly beast at bay. After half a year, Brina and I found out we were having our second child. The sisters would be 16 months apart. During the pregnancy I felt the depression rise back up again out of the ashes…. Here we go again. While I was a mover, I tried what felt like every med and combination to stop the depression and anxiety before it got out of hand. They were not much help. Once my second child was born I left being a mover because of the unpredictable hours, the increasing protest of my body and hopefully zeroing in on a helpful medication. Little did I know it would be the worst year of my life for mental health.
I decided to give becoming an electrician a shot. It wasn’t a good fit though. The anxiety was kicked into high gear during the training process. Every work day felt like an exam. The trial and error, the problem solving, the frustration, the fear of doing something wrong and have my boss or home owners pissed at me. Ya…..I lasted 2 days.
Once again the cycle continued, anxiety leads to tipping point and then descending into a giant pit of depression. So much so I committed myself to a behavioral health hospital for the first time in my life. It was really bad. All my thoughts were on when, where and how to kill myself. I felt like such a failure as a husband and a father. I was only two years into my marriage with two kids and no job and no hope of things getting better. The intrusive thought I could not shake was, that if I killed myself right now, my kids wouldn’t remember me and my wife would find a real man who could actually take care of her and two children. I know right!!! The depressed mind is a mysterious thing. Looking back at all these bad moments in my life now, and seeing reality the way it really was, it is crazy to think about how I could have thought this way. It is shameful how I could be so selfish. But that is the insidiousness of most mental health disorders, they are focused inward on yourself and not outward towards others. This hellish existence and not the way God made man, it is a side effect of the fall. I also think demons have a role to play in mental health crises. They amp up their lies when you are most vulnerable to harm yourself or others.
For the next 6 months my family and I decided I needed to take some time off to really figure out my health. I have always had the amazing support of my family and I am extremely grateful and fortunate to have such amazing in-laws who understand and sympathize with mental health struggles too. We tried even more medicines, counseling and therapies. The last we tried, supposedly had success with treatment resistant depression and anxiety. Like all medications, they start you off on a small dose and gradually bring you up to the main dose in 6 weeks. And the same is true for changing a medication. You have to slowly come off of it in 6 weeks. It is a slow process. 6 weeks to come up to the right dose, a few months to see if the meds are working, and if not, 6 weeks coming off them. Some of these medications can have the opposite effect at make symptoms worse… which is what happened to me the day before my 32nd birthday.
You are not going to want to miss the final post of this series of my mental health struggles. When I think about it, I still find it hard to believe how all of what happened went down. Let’s just say I went super saiyan kwazy.
Lazarus lived and died. Lived again to spread the gospel, then died again. We all have our ups and downs. Like the story of Lazarus, know that Jesus weeps for you. Don’t be a Martha, believe Jesus can do the impossible. When he does, share your story. Live a holy life. When you die, I hope you see the tears of joy in Jesus’s eyes and hear Him say, “well done good and faithful servant.” (Matthew 25:23)
Any suggestions on how to hear God’s voice better? Feel free to share some resources.
What is the worst job you ever had?
Aren’t Satan’s lies the worst?!? Do you have a big one you have been unbound from?