The Badger Family & the Unthinkable

If you don't know who Madonna Badger is, or what happened at her home on Christmas morning, you must be living under a dusty rock somewhere, but to recap: her Stamford house burned down, killing her parents and her three young daughters.

Why am I blogging about this? Because I haven't been able to get it out of my mind for a solid week. This has haunted me unlike any other news story I can recall. I've read a lot about devastating fires recently. First a house in the next town over burned down a few weeks before Christmas, killing a 24-year-old woman and her parents. Her teenage sister had to jump from the second floor to safety. Over in Australia, a beloved celebrity chef named Matt Golinski lost his wife and 3 daughters on Boxing Day and suffered third-degree burns to over forty percent of his body trying to save them. 

I actually found myself getting sort of angry the other day thinking about it. I don't know who or what I was angry at, I just felt... angry. I've been through some very painful things in my life, but isn't this THE absolute nightmare of everyone, everywhere? This really dwarfs all other fears and tragedies in my mind. It's senseless. The Stamford fire, in particular, was senseless - the blaze is blamed on a bag of smoldering fireplace ashes placed at the back of the house by Badger's boyfriend.

I don't know if there's something that presents a major challenge to your faith, but logic presents a major challenge to mine and always has. A loving God who allows people to lose, literally, their entire families in one swoop. Stupid freakin' logic - it's kicking me in the butt this time! I've devoted a lot of hours to mulling this one over. I've tried to envision what these people must be going through, and how they will - I hope - eventually put one foot in front of the other and simply breathe. I have thought numerous times that I would regret not dying myself. I don't even have children of my own.

I can sit here and tell you about the peace I had when my husband almost died this summer, or the way God has been healing me from a crappy childhood, and I can give you a list of things God has done for me through rough circumstances, and there is barely a comparison. Like trying to blow bubbles into a stiff wind. Right back in your face.

It leaves me feeling naked and terrified. And all I can really do when I feel that way - here's the irony - is pray. Pray because being afraid doesn't get me anywhere, and it doesn't get the Badgers or the Golinskis or the Risslers anywhere, either. I pray because it makes no sense to me and I still hang onto that little mustard seed of faith that tells me GOD understands it, and the only thing that can help these people breath and walk and carry on is HIM.

It makes me stare directly into the face of what a relationship with Jesus is supposed to be about in the first place: making Him my everything. Everything else can disappear in an instant, but God cannot be lost. Real relationship with God means you can never lose everything.

But I'm guessing none of those people are feeling it right now, and that's the emptiness that scares me. It scares me, but it brings me to my knees.

It's a messy grace that keeps us afloat, isn't it?

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Emotional Sobriety and the Fear of Losing It

I spent the first part of 2010 in a pretty deep depression. Actually, it was a really strange kind of depression, as it only seemed to occur at night. I felt incredibly sad, anxious, and I fought insomnia for months. I try not to blame everything on Bipolar Disorder, but somehow it always comes down to that, so after doing everything else I could possibly think of, I finally saw the doctor. He changed my antidepressant and within two weeks, I was feeling back to normal... well, my version of normal.

Actually, a very funny thing began to happen. I became stable. Truly stable for the first time in my adult life. I don't mean financially or professionally, but emotionally. The crushing depressions all but went away, as did my anxiety, insecurities, and the feeling that if someone so much as tapped me on the shoulder, I would plunge into a mental health crisis. Those were the things I worked very hard at hiding from most of the world, as well as my family. Sometimes it showed even when I tried to cover it up, I'm sure. But there were only a few people who knew the depth of what I went through. They were the ones receiving the fed-up, sometimes desperate phone calls and emails.

My life became so stable that I didn't even realize it. I was so used to feeling like I was an inch from losing it all that I never noticed how downright sane everything was. A dear friend/co-worker of mine told me how remarkable, drastic, and noticeable the change had been, and that was honestly the first time I had ever stopped to evaluate the true state of things, and realized how smooth the road had become. Indeed, my friendships had deepened and become more give-and-take (versus me sucking the energy out of people), I was able to focus on new writing projects, and I found that some of my old stumbling blocks (addictions?) no longer had me trapped.

I'm a little embarrassed to share this part, but I will. I think one thing that really helped me was leaving the 9-5 daily grind. I started working from home solely as a writer and while I'm not exactly rolling in the dough, there is no doubt it has changed my outlook on life. It's not that I'm lazy (it's that I just don't care - only kidding), but with sleep being such a hardship for me, and since not enough sleep makes me super bipolar, working from home and making my own schedule has been a huge health improvement. Plus, doing something you actually enjoy for a living helps!!

I have been enjoying what I like to call "emotional sobriety" and it's so amazing to feel like a whole human being. I love spending time with friends and not feeling like I'm a downer. I love that this normalcy has been lengthy enough that it's noticeable and encouraging to the people who have loved me and stood by me through everything. Even my relationship with God has improved. When you stay in bed all day because you're too depressed to move, it makes it kind of hard to have quality one-on-one time with Him, but now I'm able to do that. (Though I'm learning that these are the types of things we have to force ourselves to do whether we "feel" like it or not.) It's amazing and liberating! But I have to admit... I am fighting fear.

When people tell me they don't "believe" in mental illness, I always think, wow, try it for a few weeks and let me know if you still think it's all pretend! The truth is, it's hell. It's a feeling of being constantly out of control. Anyone who has experienced any kind of freedom from it knows that the last thing you would ever want is for a relapse to occur. Yet, the very nature of Bipolar Disorder means that the other shoe could very well fall, and the idea of that freaks me out. I've been ASSURED by my own doctor that as long as I do the things I need to do (getting proper sleep, taking my meds, etc.) that I can remain stable. I take great comfort in that, but sometimes I still worry.

Yesterday was a rough day. I hadn't slept very well the night before because of a lovely post-nasal drip and I felt down and out all day. 2 Corinthians 10:5 says:

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

I've written about this verse so many times because I am constantly having to follow its instructions. I don't know about you, but when I get down about one thing, ten other depressing things come to mind. That's what happened to me yesterday and I had to practice 2 Corinthians 10:5 because I was dwelling on every little annoyance in my life. I was struck with a sense of panic and I wondered if my bad day was becoming a bad bipolar cycle.

Fortunately, it was not the start of a cycle. A good night's sleep made the following day much better and I was able to see things more clearly. I breathed a sigh of relief and thanked God that the new, stable me was still intact.

Someone once said that "normal" is only a setting on your dryer, but I'm pretty sure whoever said that never suffered from mental illness. Maybe there is no true definition of "normal" but in my darkest days, I have often found myself saying, "Normal is anything but this."

And when you've experienced it for yourself, the thought of going back to the way things were is terrifying and gut-wrenching. Pin It