Episode #1 What it is all about?

This podcast is an introduction to living with depression as a Latter-day Saint and an introduction to the author of the podcast.  The entire series is a personal look at living the gospel from the perspective of the author who has living with Bipolar Disorder throughout his life from teenage years through a mission, marriage and eight children.  The first podcast is meant only to give an introduction to the subject and a brief intro to the author.  The remaining podcasts will include discussions of the unique challenges to living the gospel with a mental illness.

Transcript

Intro:  Not an official publication of the church 

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in good standing, which in membership terms means I am a card-carrying member.  I hold and keep a current recommend.  Why is that important, because of the subject?  Bipolarity, depression, mental illness, mood disorder, whatever name you give it is difficult on its own without a defined set of religious standards.  Place this illness in a rigid, well-meaning, individually demanding, social religion and it becomes something far more difficult.  It becomes a mountain that everyone is climbing, except you are asked to do it with twenty pound weights around your ankles. Every portion of the disease seems to fight against climbing up hill.  You fight just to keep from falling downhill much less climb up. You desperately desire the beautiful vistas of peace, tranquility, happiness, spirituality and love spoke of in every Sunday School class and every pulpit in the church.  Testimonies and stories of miracles, happiness, and beautiful scenes abound but they don’t seem to be a part of your life.  The full view of life’s promised peace and happiness appears beyond your capability and so you settle for what you can get.  Oh people come down the mountain and tell you how beautiful it is and can’t understand why your just standing there.  Eventually they move on and your still.  It feels lonely, dark, desperate, painful, frustrating and at times quite hopeless.  All you can do is look up the mountain and hope one day things will change.  And watch as person after person climbs around you.  They certainly stop as they ascend and they give all kinds of encouragement and even sometimes a little spiritual reprimand but it doesn’t fix the problem or your capacity to get there.  And so you give up for a time, you walk off the path.  At least off the path you don’t have to talk to anyone and you don’t have to listen to those stories of happiness.  Sometimes you move back towards the path, listening to the passersby, hoping for an answer. Some reason they have what you don’t seem to possess. You wondered why.  What did I do? Why I am so different?  Why do I feel the way I do?  I am trying?  I am doing what I have been asked to.  But nothing seems to make any difference.  Why has the Lord left me alone to suffer? What did I do to deserve to feel like this?  Why doesn’t the Lord speak to me?  Why am I left in this darkness?  Where do I go to get help?  Can anything help?  Is this going to be my life forever?  When will I be happy again?  And so many other questions that slowly eat away at your soul until you feel you have nothing left to give and life seems pointless, empty, lost, lonely, dark and without well life.

If you have felt this way, you are certainly not alone.  I write those words from my own experiences with depression and bipolar.  It is a miserable disease that takes everything from you and leaves you feeling like a hollowed shell.  However there is hope. There is an answer to your questions and there is a point to it all.  Depression and its sister illnesses including anxiety, mania and others are not just random experiences meant to cause you pain and suffering with no value.  These illnesses as debilitating as they are have great power to provide an understanding of the atonement very few will ever have.  Now I know that probably isn’t very comforting especially when the darkness is thick and the loneliness is real.  But I can promise you that the Lord hasn’t left you alone and with what small efforts you can make he can provide a healing and understanding that will change your life for the eternities.

I suffered with the mental illness from as early as I can remember.  I don’t ever remember not having it with me.  It hunted me through middle school, high school, a mission to Argentina, college, eight children and a marriage.  Just when I though that maybe it wouldn’t return, that perhaps I found some mercy and peace, it always did.  I prayed.  I requested blessings, hundreds of them. I read scriptures. Attended the temple and church but everywhere I went to escape it, it always found me again and again.  I was a rapid cycling bipolar.  I cycled about every two to three months.  So I would get 6-8 weeks of darkness and oppression a couple of normal days and about 10-14 days of an agitation that was fun at first until the lack of sleep and racing mind exhausted my body.  Then it would start all over again.  One might ask how do you even function.  The easy answer is you really don’t very well.  

I spent years looking for healing through spiritual and medicinal means.  I went to doctors and finally found a medicine that somewhat normalized my life.  I found peace in blessings, prayer, and companionship. The one thing that haunted me through all of this is probably the same reason you might be listening.  I was a active member of the church.  I did those things every member should but I prayed for relief that often I felt didn’t come.  Depression would take away my access to the spirit.  Prayers felt empty and attending church, a place where peace should be found, was just dark.  A testimony was no where to be found in all of the darkness.  I guess I asked the same question everyone does eventually, where is He?  Why me?  I am doing what I should be reading, praying, church.  I was reaching out but often I couldn’t see his arm reach back through the darkness.  I felt alone.  I felt lost.  I felt hopeless.

I have no doubt many of you listening feel the same and perhaps many other things or maybe you don’t feel anything at all.  I could only describe it as hell.  Perhaps you have felt or feel now the same.  What I can say is that I have been there and I have been there all the while as a member of the church?

My story did take a different turn and perhaps this is where maybe you might get a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel.  I had suffered all of my life with the illness.  I had never known anything different.  I had sought healing from the physicians and spiritual leaders.  I had done everything but every time I would go to the Lord for a blessing of relief, hopefully permanent relief, it was always temporary.  I questioned my faith, my desire, reality, truth and a host of other concerns including the atonement itself.

While I was always grateful for the temporary relief, I wondered why.  Why did I have to suffer?  What was the divine purpose in misery and darkness?  I did not receive any answer at the time and looking back I may not have understood the answer or accepted it.  I received some answers later in life and certainly these podcasts will explore those answers.  But I didn’t give up hope. I continued to seek help and manage the disease the best way I knew.  Sometimes I did well and other times I didn’t.  Such is the life of the bipolar.  However, the day did come.  I will give you the whole story in a later episode.  The short story is the answer came that it was time.  I sought a blessing from a trusted friend and in a moment the disease was lifted.

That was just the start of a long healing process that would take another decade but that will be for another time.  What is my story?  It is that I have seen both sides of the disease from both the afflicted and affected, the healing power of the atonement both for temporary relief and long term healing.  I can’t say that I am fully healed and may never be but I have found happiness and peace.  I have a wonderful relationship with the Lord, my wife and my children despite years of severe depression and mania.  I know what it is to be suicidal and relived from the endless days and nights of darkness.  My story is of hope and my hope is that I can be someone else’s hope.

What do I want you to know?  I want you to know that there is someone who cares, who has been where you are now and who understands you completely.  Maybe there was a greater purpose in my disease and yours.  Maybe just maybe somewhere deep is a divine purpose.  I believe that there is one for everyone who is afflicted.  I hope that you find some hope, some divine purpose and understanding.  I open my life and story to you so that you know you aren’t alone and when you think that arm isn’t reaching through the darkness, I assure you that it is.  I assure you that he knows you personally and cares very much for your suffering. And most of all that healing is within your grasp.  It may not come tomorrow or the next day, week or month but with a little effort I can and will come.

As part of this first podcast, I wanted to give you some background information.  I wanted to introduce me to you.  My purpose is really for you to see that I am very normal, but blessed with a unique illness.

I grew up in two small towns in the northwest of the united states.  One small town in the Blue Mountains of Oregon and a small navy town on Whidbey Island.  I will say that most of what I remember comes from Whidbey.  I have an angel for a wife, Rebekah.  She goes by Bekah.  I have eight children and I am likely to refer to them from time to time.  5 boys and 3 girls.  My oldest three boys are married to women who I think are way above them.  I suppose that is always true but I should probably tell them more than I do.  I consider them as much my daughters as if I had raised them.  

I have a degree from Washington State and MBA from Western Washington University.  I work in the construction field as a virtual simulation expert.  By the way I love my job but it is not as exciting and the title makes it out to be.

I have wonderful parents who were high school sweethearts.  My father is a convert and my mother comes from a long line of church members running through some of the earliest days of the church. 

My father is from SE Texas and comes from what I would refer to as an abusive home mostly due alcoholism and redneckism.  He has come further in his development as a member of the church than I ever will or probably could.   When I consider where he came from and where he is now.  He has to be a hero of mine.

My mother came from a small town in northern Utah.  Basically the granddaughter of pioneers who trekked across America in search of Freedom of Religion that they could not enjoy within the US.  She also came from an abusive home.  Which I think is important to note in the sense that my life was abuse free at least what I remember of it.  I had wonderful parents.  I know that not everyone does and sometimes mental illness arises from such cases.

I paint, I write. I live and have found a great deal of happiness in the midst of all of the suffering.  I think that is probably one of the most important things about my story.  Even though I have suffered most of my life, having a mental illness didn’t really define my future.  It certainly impacted it and maybe in more good ways than bad but the Lord in his mercy seemed to insert himself when he needed to.  

Well that is it for the intro.  I know that many of us have those mottos that get us through the day.  Mine is simple and I am likely to repeat it often.  The Lord requires the fight and then he will do the rest.  So keep fighting.  Talk to you next week.