Depression runs in my family. I don’t want to out specific family members and their particular struggles, but suffice it to say that more than half of my immediate family has experienced a profound struggle with depression. I grew up with a very melancholic personality. I felt things deeply, took things personally, and sometimes spent hours in an empty bathtub, fully clothed, crying. I remember my mother sitting on the edge of that tub trying to talk me down off the ledge (or out of the tub, as it were).
My teenage depression peaked my senior year of high school, which was one of the lowest points in my life. My three years younger brother was heavily into drugs and alcohol, and his mental problems absorbed the majority of my parents’ time and emotional resources. My older sister, my best friend and worst enemy, had just left for college, and my boyfriend of three years had just left for the Navy. My tiny support system had crumbled. I still resisted telling anyone how much I was hurting. Even to this day, there are only a couple of people who know how very hard that year was for me, and how dark my thoughts were. The worst part was that I was starting to head down a path, morally, in which I did not believe, and which could have seriously derailed my future goals.
It was right as I started college that God revealed Himself to me in the most direct way He had up to that point, or since.
Read the rest of this post at Heart of the Matter Online, where I am blessed enough to be a contributor and an editor:
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