Tag: mental health

The State of the Ellie: October 2019

Of more delays, a mental break (and repair), and arting outside the box.

Colorful fairies string power lines in the clouds over a stormy sky with lightning - Lightnings by vladstudio via DeviantArt
The State of the Ellie is my monthly update on what's been happening this side of the screen for the last 30-ish days. It usually drops at the start of the new month, but I'm moving it to the end because it makes more sense and I don't know why I didn't always do it like this.

Immigration, Florida, and another Canadian winter

Welp. Here we are, staring down the barrel of November (seriously, how did that happen already), and despite our rosiest projections, there’s nothing to report here, except that, because there’s nothing to report, we are officially into next year for our big move. Between paperwork delays, the impending holidays, and the idea of driving a 20ft U-Haul through the Appalachian Mountains in winter, Lino and I (and our pastors) have re-re-re-calibrated our plans and are now looking at*giant sad sigh* April. Which means we’re woefully unprepared for the coming winter because this past spring all we could see in December were palm trees and beaches, so why would we need snow boots and gloves?

On the positive side, though, I had a breakthrough with my disappointment about the delays we’ve endured. I realized that Lino and I are on some kind of accelerated spiritual training track that’s growing our ability, capacity, and maturity in the Kingdom; God is stretching and growing us in ways we didn’t know we could (or thought we wanted) during this season. So I’m choosing to be content. I don’t want to miss anything by being impatient or distracted by jealousy or striving. Be here now, eh?

I accidentally facilitated a women’s workshop at our church.

Related to that accelerated training track, I was given an opportunity to lead a small group through the culminating event of this year’s series on dreams in our women’s ministry.

I sort of stumbled into it, honestly (which is how you know it’s God). Some folks couldn’t make it to the weekend retreat, myself included, so I offered to host dinner for those of us staying home. I got the green light, but because I’m me, rather than planning a simple night with friends, I wanted to tie our decor and conversation into the retreat material so everyone could feel included. Before I knew it, I was being handed official booklets and teasing out the story of Joseph with our pastor. I ended up presenting a full-blown six-hour workshop for eight women, including message, dinner, prayer, and declarations of the dreams we’ve hidden in our hearts.

And you know what? I LOVED IT.

It’s become clear to me that my path includes speaking, teaching, facilitating—roles that involve holding space and being the one everyone’s staring at (roles that give me nervous poops)—in addition to writing. Running this workshop was 100% a confirmation of that calling. It combined things I know I’m good at with things I’m just starting to wade into, and it felt like everything clicked. I’m not sure where it’s all going, but I do know that I am fully strapped in for the ride.

I had a serious mental health problem, but I got better.

I don’t want to get into a lot of detail about this here because I wrote an in-depth post about it last week, but it was a major deal, so I do want to touch on it.

The TL;DR of that post is that I suffered obsessive, graphic, intrusive thoughts after seeing an Instagram post in which a four-and-a-half year old died in an accident. It got more intense and frequent until I was worried I needed to seek help, but I couldn’t seem to tell anyone about it, either. Thankfully, I was able to scrape together enough resistance to use a visualization technique I learned in counselling to remove the damaging thought and get relief.

If this happens to you, don’t wait around like I did. Find someone to talk to and/or call a crisis hotline (here, in Canada). Please.

Drawing isn’t my forte, but Inktober has been a blast.

I’ve known about Inktober for years but never participated because I’m, you know, not a visual artist. But it turned out to be the perfect thing for my sister-in-law and I to do together as mothers with small children who know they’re still creatives despite evidence to the contrary in this stage of their lives. We decided that rather than bemoaning the loss of artistic expression, we’d art for fun instead of the serious business we’ve become accustomed to. And it’s been hella cool!

I’ve gotten behind a few times (and am still behind today), and my quirk of adding a story to each drawing has made it unnecessarily difficult, but it’s letting me play where I used to only see work and has shown me that there are stories in here yet. 10/10: Will do again.

You can see all my drawings on my Instagram for now. I’ll put up a site page here when they’re all done.

I can’t do NaNoWriMo this year, so I’m doing my own thing instead.

Speaking of challenges! I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month twice before, but I’ve struggled with novels since finishing Mirror of Ashes. As much as I’d love to dive into Apple of Chaos using NaNo as a container, with Mack nipping at my heels all day, it ain’t gonna happen.

But! About a week into Inktober, I realized that daily art is actually possible. (You’d think I would’ve figured that out after all the Noticing posts I’ve done, but I digress.) What if I did the same thing but with tiny stories? I asked a few people and got good feedback, so I ran with it, tweaking the concept to fit my writing needs and to be fun/challenging so other people could play, too. I even made a Facebook group. That’s how you know I’m serious.

Thus, No Novel November was born! We’re starting on Friday (omg tomorrow) writing microfiction from daily prompts, and I am super hype to properly stretch my writing legs after the great warmup from Inktober. I also have this tingle in the back of my mind that this Something Important, but I’m ignoring it so I don’t accidentally smother it with attention like a toddler with a kitten.

I’d love it if you’d join us! Click/tap/focus intently on this link for more info.

Miscellaneous

  • Lino and I are second-generation gamers, and as such, when the Enthusiast Live Gaming Expo came to Toronto, his mom took us as our Christmas gift. It was rad! We got to test so many cool indie games, see some truly incredible art, and I ate half a large pizza. A good time was had by all.
  • Mackenzie was in and out of casts again for toe-walking. We’re doing physio with her at home because money and are hopeful this is the last time.
  • I do not know how to Halloween as a parent. I seriously thought trick-or-treating was the Saturday nearest Halloween if it fell on a weekday, but nooooooo. WHY NOT. It’s supposed to rain like heck here, though, so I might be able to get out of it. This year.

How did October treat you?
(Do I need to have a stern talk with it?)

What are you looking forward to in November?

The curse of imagination: fear, obsession, and hope

How an Instagram post triggered me into obsessing about losing my child—and how I came out the other side.

Content warning: child harm, intrusive thoughts.
A woman with streaks of blue lightning across her face and body; imagination, inspiration

A vivid imagination is a two-edged sword made sharp with use. The same gift that makes my writing so cinematographic allows me to picture my lost keys, for example, in literally any location, (unhelpfully) independent of memory or fact.

It also imagines unspeakable things as if I’ve actually seen them.

Comic book author Ben Hatke’s 4½ year-old daughter died from injuries in an accident last month, and from the instant I read about it, I couldn’t stop picturing it. The images came unbidden, intrusive, intensifying.

Not images of little lost Ida. But of my own child.

What it would be like to see my 3½ year-old baby covered in blood and tears and glass, crying for Mommy and Daddy because she thinks we can help her—but we can’t. To see her hooked up to tubes and machines, her tiny body in a too-big bed, slipping further and further away until we have to let her go to show her one final act of love.

It’s not real.

It’s not my daughter.

It’s not her story.

But that’s the curse of the blessing of imagination: to see and feel what’s not real as if it were. As if it were her life ended so violently, my heart senselessly ripped away, our family devastated.

I saw this horror over and over through the weeks, every time a little more graphic, a little more terrifying, until the fear spilled out into real life.

I hugged Mackenzie tighter, trying to memorize her face in case I never saw it again. I didn’t want to put her in the car or have her more than a held hand away outside the house. I lay in bed before falling asleep, watching the movie of this fictional disaster in my mind’s eye, living the numb sickness of the moment again and again.

Last Friday, I finally put words around my nightmare in a Wal-Mart parking lot. The obsession had spiraled out of my control, no longer a world I was choosing to enter but one that ambushed me in quiet moments when I wasn’t even thinking about my daughter. I typed out the pain and fear between huge sobs, trying to exorcise the demon.

But the next morning, there it was. The blood and glass and tears. Writing it out hadn’t helped. I despaired into the pages of my journal, now terrified of my own terror, wondering if I was in enough psychic danger to tell someone, to need help.

Then a small voice reminded me, “You have other ways to get things out of your head.”

I laid down the pen, closed my eyes overflowing with tears, and laid my head on my desk.

The same imagination that had been tormenting me brought me quickly to a familiar meadow and a familiar face. Warmth that had nothing to do with sunlight filtered through me, making my tears come harder. He said nothing, but held out his cupped hands and waited.

I reached up to the forehead of my spirit-self, pinched slightly, then tugged. A thick rope of black ichor extruded from my mind, becoming bloody as it plopped into my hand in a gooey, deflated ball. I turned the object over in my palms, its tarry surface covered in viscera, and realized what it was: the idea of my daughter being violently killed.

I dropped the diseased thought into the waiting hands before me. He wrapped his fingers around it and squeezed. There was a pale flash of light, then nothing. I looked down at his hands and mine to find them clean, with no trace of black or red.

I opened my hot eyes in the darkened office and drew a deep breath, then another. I realized I felt different. Lighter. Cleaner. Peaceful.

Unsure, I tentatively probed my mind for the nightmarish vision, like prodding the gap where a tooth has been pulled, afraid it would rush forward as it always had. But it was gone. Even actively trying to picture the scene, I found nothing.

The thought was gone. The haunting was over. The evil thing, banished. My mind was my own again.

Side profile of a woman with gold synapse lines streaking out of her head

I didn’t want to share this story. I was (and still am) worried about it hurting someone more than it helps anyone. It’s an upsetting story. It’s triggering. It’s painful.

And yet, it’s also hopeful.

I learned two things from this awful experience, things I believe someone needs to hear.

The first is that I didn’t know how much I loved my daughter until I imagined her being stolen from me.

I never wanted children (someday I’ll tell you how I ended up with one), and since she arrived, I’ve glibly said of course I can imagine life without her and waxed rosy about pre-baby life. I admit, at times, I’ve wished she’d never been born. I’ve always felt deficient in maternal love, especially when I see my mama friends coo over babies.

But this? This unwanted, violent perhaps? At the same time it crushed my heart, it showed me that, although I may wish for a simpler time when I had more freedom and money—that I may sometimes yearn for life without her—I couldn’t bear to lose her now that I do have her.

Motherly love is not instant. That’s a myth. You don’t automatically fall in irretrievable love with your child. It’s taken me three and a half years and a mental crisis to get there.

But here I am.

The second thing I learned is that I’m better at cleaning my mind than I thought I was.

For two decades, I suffered with depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and a hyperactive sense of badness that made it impossible for me to let go of negative thoughts. It’s been a slow process of overcoming in the last five years, primarily through metacognition—noticing what I’m thinking, holding the thought out and examining it, then deciding what to do with it.

Extracting the obsessive images from my mind when I was utterly abandoned to feelings of despair showed me that it’s still possible to capture my thoughts and deal with them when I’m in the thick of it. That it works.

This incident was a major victory for me. But it’s the first time I’ve done it so easily—it’s taken years of failing and trying again, building on tiny wins and then falling behind. It’s a practice, a muscle developed over time.

You aren’t at the mercy of darkness.

You may have battles, but you’re not required to bow to it. Your mind is yours. And you can take it back—one thought at a time.

My imagination showed me hell.

I’m sure your imagination has, too.

But don’t close it off. It’s a blessing, not a curse.

The same imagination that takes you out when left unchecked also gives you the power to obliterate damaging thoughts and to find soul-deep revelation on the other side of struggle.

It has the power to set you free.

“Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ….” 1 Corinthians 10:5 KJV

“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” 1 Peter 5:7 NIV

“For God did not give us a spirit of timidity or cowardice or fear, but [He has given us a spirit] of power and of love and of sound judgment and personal discipline [abilities that result in a calm, well-balanced mind and self-control].” 2 Timothy 1:7 AMP

“So we are convinced that every detail of our lives is continually woven together to fit into God’s perfect plan of bringing good into our lives….” Romans 8:28 TPT