Mourning to Morning

In view of my emotional instability combined with my ambivalent feelings about Jesus, Lent is a difficult time for me.  Trying to get into a pattern of reading a Bible passage each day and thinking about it just gives me more things to worry about.

I had been mostly on a fairly even keel for the past three weeks.  But on Sunday evening, I was unexpectedly knocked back by a wave of self-pity.

PDB11 and I are currently reading The Rainbow of Renewal by Michael Mitton.  This is divided into seven weeks’ worth of themed chapters, with the first week on the theme of mourning.

We discussed our experiences of loss.  PDB11 talked about his best friend who had died when they were in their early twenties, and his experience of splitting up with his previous girlfriend.  While of course he still misses his old friend, splitting up with his girlfriend had been difficult to get over because, rather than her having died and therefore being definitely out of reach, she was still there, so that he could long for them to get back together even though he knew that it wasn’t going to happen.

It struck me that what grieves me most is not when friends have died, but when relationships have become less close.  Sometimes this has been my fault.  For example, I had behaved in an insensitive way towards a friend in the past, insisting on talking about my worries when she has problems of her own, and not listening to her when she tried to explain her point of view, especially when I was so worried by how I interpreted something she had said, that I couldn’t follow her explanation of what she had actually meant.

So she experiences me as someone who always makes everything all about myself, all the time.  Therefore she doesn’t feel comfortable talking to me about her feelings.  A few years ago, I went to visit her, and began the visit by asking, ‘How have you been feeling lately?’  She brushed this question aside as too complicated to answer, so I asked the simpler, ‘What have you been doing lately?’

For the next hour or so, she talked to me about her various interests and activities, and I listened.  This was broken only when my friend put on the television for a programme that she wanted to watch.

At the end of my visit, as I got ready to leave, my friend said wistfully, ‘You know, I do wish that occasionally I was allowed to talk about my feelings and my point of view.  You do always make everything all about yourself all the time, and I wish that, sometimes, things were allowed to be about me for a change.’

In a way, I felt relieved.  I now knew that her criticism of me wasn’t an entirely fair reflection of my behaviour, and therefore I didn’t have to worry too much that I really was a narcissist.  But equally, I have to accept that because my past behaviour has coloured her perception of me to the point where she can’t even perceive when I’m trying to listen to her, we can’t have the close friendship that we might otherwise have had.

But some of the most traumatic break-ups I had in the first 25 years of my life were simply the fact of growing up and being expected to become more independent of my parents, whether or not I felt emotionally ready and whether or not I had close friends my own age to turn to.  I still feel traumatised at being pressured to move out of my parents’ house, even though this was nineteen years ago.

Of course, most parents expect that most young people will want to leave home by the time they are in their late teens or early twenties.  But being told that I needed to leave felt like being told, ‘Even if you don’t have friends you want to share a house with, we’d rather you just lived with strangers whom you have no real connection with, rather than living with us, your own parents, the only people you can trust to love you.  If you stay with us, you’ll be sad and lonely when we die, so it’s best if you move out and get used to being sad and lonely now, because this is your life from now on.’

Of course, my parents were well-meaning.  They thought that leaving home would make me learn to be more independent, emotionally as well as in practical skills. 

But instead, being told to leave home, rather than choosing to do so by myself, just set me up for expecting to be rejected in all areas of life: by employers, and by God.  I fell into a cycle of being sacked from jobs, going to interview after interview without success, eventually getting a job, deciding that this must be a terrible mistake because I knew I was unemployable, and self-sabotaging until I got sacked.  The last straw was when, around nine years ago, I came to the conclusion that Jesus secretly hated all humans including his disciples, wanted them to kill themselves, and was planning to send everyone to hell. 

Ironically, this was the turning point in my life.  Because I could no longer tell myself that I didn’t need a boyfriend because being loved by God, and loving the patients I looked after in a nursing home, should be enough for me, I actually decided to join a dating website.  I chose a Christian site, because even if I no longer trusted Jesus, I was so culturally Christian that my attempts at dating non-Christian men hadn’t worked.

So I met PDB11, who was not only someone I could love and be loved by, but also a theology student who helped me find a more hopeful trust in God’s love and a less literal and dogmatic way of reading the Bible.  Now, after knowing each other for eight and a half years and being married for seven, we still feel deeply grateful to have found each other.

But nonetheless, I sometimes feel that I have been too mentally messed up by the first half of my life for things to go right in the second half.  It’s not fair to blame all this just on having been asked to leave home when I was in my early twenties.  After all, I have now had nearly as long being in a relationship with PDB11 as the time between leaving home and meeting him.

But it wasn’t just leaving home, but practically everything in my development from the age of three.  It wasn’t my parents’ fault.  They were – and are – loving parents who did their best, and they got most things right.  And it wasn’t as if I had experiences which would be traumatic by a normal person’s standards.  Nobody was abusing me (apart from other children at school bullying me).

It was my interpretation of events that made almost every experience that for a normal child would be a step towards maturity and independence feel to me like a rejection.  Becoming an older sibling: I’ve been replaced.  Starting school: my mum doesn’t want to home-school me the way my friend’s mum does.  Going to secondary school: I’ve lost all my old friends from primary school and don’t know how to make new ones.  Going to university: this should be the best time of my life and I just feel emotionally empty at being away from my parents.  Leaving home for good: this is the end, and my dad says it’s ‘unnatural’ that I even want to come round once a week to eat Sunday lunch with my parents.  All of it seemed to build up the sense that the older I got, the less worth I had and the less anyone, including God, could love me.

What this comes down to is: I’m not normal.  In a way, this is a very liberating realisation, because it means that the way my life has gone wasn’t my fault.  I don’t have to blame myself, any more than I would blame someone with brittle bones for suffering fractures too easily, or blame someone with coeliac disease or a food allergy for not being able to eat foods that everyone else could eat.

Equally, it wasn’t my parents’ fault, because they didn’t have any support or guidance in understanding me.  Once I was eleven, they had a diagnosis for the sort of ‘not-normal’ that I was, but there was no-one to explain to them what it meant in practice.  I think they just assumed, ‘Oh good, this isn’t a mental illness or a learning disability, simply a difference, so there’s nothing to worry about,’ and nobody warned them that I could have psychological problems because of the loneliness that stems from being not normal.

But although I don’t blame myself for not being normal, I still feel frustrated with myself for being damaged.  I feel that if, in the first half of my life, I didn’t develop in the best possible way (whatever that would have been) into the person I was meant to be (whatever she would have been like), then it’s too late to be perfect in the second half. 

I revert to the unhelpful ways of thinking of Jesus that I had a few years ago: picturing him as someone who commands us to ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,’ (which, in a depressed mood, I interpret as meaning, 'be someone who has always been perfect for all eternity, never needed to develop or learn, and certainly never made any mistakes'), and who, when we by definition cannot be this, informs us that we clearly don’t love him, since ‘If you love me, you will obey my commandments.’

Of course, Christian literature from the 1^st century onwards is full of stories of redemption or recovery or rescue from all sorts of bad starts.  Whether you are a 1^st century religious fanatic persecuting Christians, an 18^th century slave trader, or a teenager caught up in violent gang culture, I can easily believe that Jesus loves you and wants to help you turn your life around.

But can he love me – someone who isn’t a slave-trader, but is just mentally messed up?  Someone who is boringly middle-class instead of a street kid?  Someone who can’t make a new start by converting to Christianity, because I have been a Christian ever since I was a child anyway?

Well, I know that I believe that God loves all of my friends who are mentally messed up.  PDB11 may be a lot saner than I am, but he has psychological problems, too, and I’m sure God doesn’t reject him for that.

And as for not being able to convert to Christianity, what I need to work on doing – and may well need to continue doing throughout my life, is to convert my idea of what I think Christianity is.  This is the problem that evangelists easily miss: that not everyone who reads the Bible gets the same message from it.

There are plenty of Christian books on overcoming depression.  However, what some writers forget is that, for a depressed Christian who has been depressed for most of their life and has also been a Christian for most of their life, the religion they believe may well be depressed Christianity.  Christian books tend to assume that you love Jesus, you think that you are supposed to be happy and feel guilty about not feeling happy, and you want to be healed of depression and are disappointed that this isn’t happening.  The writers can’t imagine that if you are a depressed Christian, perhaps you believe that Jesus hates you (and feel guilty about not loving him for hating you), you believe that if you experience happiness in this life you will go to hell, and you worry that it is selfish to want to be healed.

Getting out of a mindset like this doesn’t need simply intercessory prayer and a ritual of anointing with oil.  It takes years of re-examining everything you think the Bible tells you about what Jesus is like.  It may require a completely different starting-point for being a Christian, such as ‘Suppose, instead of deciding what God is like on the basis of what I imagine Jesus sounding like when I read the gospels, I decide that if God is love then God’s character is like the description of love in 1 Corinthians 13, and try to understand Jesus’s motivation from the perspective that he is like that?’

I think I’m making progress, mostly.  There are times when the old worrying thoughts come back, even when I know that they are based on my misinterpretations of the Bible.  But I know that I don’t have to believe them.