My Testimony - A Reawakening (Pt. 1)

On New Year's Eve 1997, I had one of the worst nights of my life. My friends and I were arguing (though I don't remember what about) so my plans for the evening went down the toilet. I spent that night with my parents and their friends. They were in my mother's friends' dining room playing games and laughing, I was in the den watching the news about Michael Kennedy's fatal ski accident. When the ball in Times Square dropped, everyone cheered... then I went outside and had a good cry.

My parents were fed up with me, and with good reason. I struggled through high school and threw their money away in college by flunking out. My mother had already told me - through clenched teeth - that if I thought I was going to sleep all day and sponge off of them, I had another thing coming. I never intended to do that, though. I was relieved to be done with college. I hated school. It kills me to say that because now I'd love to go back, but back then I hated it with a passion. With no clue what the future held for me, I made a pact with myself on New Year's Eve: I was going to work my butt off, make as much money as possible, and move back to Nashville permanently and as quickly as I could. Pennsylvania represented everything I hated - the snobby wannabe rich people, my horrible relationship with my family, and the years of sexual abuse. It was all stuff I wanted to run away from and never look at again. Nashville felt like home and I missed my friends.

In 1998, I did work my butt off. I became a supervisor and took any and all hours that were offered to me. If there was a special dinner, I'd offer to work it, even if it meant being on my feet fifteen hours a day. I was still living at home, not really getting along with my mother, but at least my folks were happy that I was working. They stayed off my back about that. I wrote songs with a guy named Brian and did a lot of late-night drinking with friends. I spent hours and hours with my Nashville friends, sometimes talking to them on the phone till the early hours of the morning. I even flew down to Nashville a few times for a weeklong vacation. I guess you could say I had the life - no expenses, job flexibility, and plenty of money.

I had no interaction with God, but I have to say I genuinely missed Him. I thought about Him constantly and told myself I was going to get right with Him, but it was easier for me to push it to the back of my mind. I figured I wasn't getting myself into too much trouble so I might as well leave things alone for the time being.

In the fall of 1998, I decided I would try to move back to Nashville by spring 1999. I went out and bought new luggage and made my parents aware of my plan. They didn't like my plan at all and basically told me I'd never make it but I had it all figured out. I had the money, I had a friend to stay with until I got on my feet, and I even had a donated futon. The plan was to fly down there, get a job, buy a car, and find my own place within a couple of months' time.

There was just one little speed bump in the way: I ended up falling in love.
I started dating Scott in January 1999. It took us 3 dates to fall madly in love with each other, and by March we were looking at engagement rings and naming our future babies. I tried to convince Scott to move back to Nashville with me, as he had worked as a Christian music buyer and had his own connections to Music City, but he wanted to stay near his family. I loved Nashville but I loved Scott more. I chose him.

Scott wanted June Cleaver, and I was anything but. He wanted a woman who didn't drink or smoke, too, and for a while I was able to hide it from him, but eventually I told him the truth and even dragged him to a few of my drinking parties. I told him nothing about any other drugs. He eventually told me that if I wanted to be with him, I was going to have to stop partying. He thought the smoking was gross, but it was the partying that really bothered him. His older brother has fought a drug addiction for more than 30 years and Scott didn't want to be anywhere near the party lifestyle. He gave me an ultimatum - either I knocked it off, or he walked. Begrudgingly - very begrudgingly - I agreed to curtail the boozing.

I saw my impending nuptuals as an opportunity to build the God-centered family I had always dreamed of having, so Scott and I found a church together, which was pastored by a friend of Scott's, and began attending and shortly thereafter became members. Unfortunately, I didn't realize it at the time, but I was going through the motions of being "churchy" but I wasn't spending anytime working on my relationship with God. I was trying to make Thanksgiving work with the fixings but no turkey. I figured if I looked the part, that would suffice, and maybe it would even make me want the real thing.

After Scott and I married in 2000, we settled into lovely Lititz, PA and joined a new church that was closer to us. Less than a year after we married, I lost my job at the bank I was working at, and that began a downward spiral. There were job woes, major financial struggles, and my husband's health began declining. I won't go into all the details of our once-broken marriage - you'll have to go out and buy my book to read about that. :-) But even as we went to church and took classes and I overwhelmed my senses with Christian music and Christian t-shirts and Christian posters and everything short of Christian bagels, I was still in the clutches of my faith crisis.

Because I knew my faith was in a state of upheaval, I began to develop quite a complex. I thought other Christians sensed that was I evil and I also began comparing myself to other women in the church. In my mind, I wasn't blond enough, pretty enough, soft-spoken enough, I didn't have kids (which I assumed was a huge strike against me) and I wasn't terribly domestic. Plus, there was some other "thing" that "church ladies" had that I didn't, or at least that's what I told myself. I just wasn't like them. I was too rough around the edges, too easily annoyed, too outspoken, too this, too that. It didn't matter how many people told me it was all in my head, I bought it hook, line and sinker and it drove me away from church and away from other Christians altogether.

So I went back to some of my old friends and my old ways. I started drinking again and started ditching my husband to go out of town and party.

Also, my deep depression was back, with a heaping helping of rage on the side. I was constantly angry over anything and everything. It wasn't that I just got a little ticked, either - I would FLIP OUT and destroy anything in my path. I'd be chopping an onion and accidentally drop my knife and go absolutely ballistic, screaming and yelling, slamming doors, punching the wall, cursing... OK, so clearly I had an anger problem of some sort, so I decided to go back into counseling. After I felt like I had talked all of my problems to death, I was still filled with rage. I couldn't turn it off. I was powerless to calm myself down. Once I got angry, it snowballed and I felt completely out of control. When the dust finally settled - after my husband had been screamed at and insulted, after a fresh hole had been slammed into the wall, after my pet rabbit was cowering in the corner of her cage - I felt incredible shame, like a knife being driven through my heart.

I said horrible things in my fits of rage. I told my husband I wanted out of our marriage, I put him down and I cursed God. When I was done, I just wanted to die. I hated myself and felt like there was no going back on what I had said and done. Often the depression would last for days or even weeks and I'd do nothing but cry and sleep, missing a lot of work and threatening suicide.

My erratic behavior was taking a huge toll on my marriage, and our relationship had reached a breaking point. It was further exacerbated by the fact that I had lost another job - this time because of my anger problem. I had missed a lot of work and was constantly sick because I wasn't sleeping and my mood... well, that was anybody's guess from day to day. And losing a job meant financial problems, which meant more stress on our marriage...

That was the final straw for me. At that point, at the ripe old age of 23, I had nothing more to lose. My marriage was going under, I felt a million miles away from God, I had no job and no money. Plenty of well-meaning folks told me to relax - I was young, I would get through it. I didn't want to hear any of it. Life seemed to be over. I could have given up; I WANTED to give up. But I decided, instead, to do two things:
1. get help
2. become a writer

My first priority had to be finding out what in the world was wrong with me! Pin It