Five Minute Friday: Dear

Note: This post is my weekly contribution to the Five Minute Friday community that is hosted by Kate Motaung on her blog Heading Home. Click here for more information about Five Minute Friday and how you can get involved! To link up with all the other entries for today's prompt word, click here. 

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Dear Depression,

As of the turning of the calendar into December a few days ago, it has been an almost 22 month long journey through your dark abyss. When are you going to let me go? I know that I have a part in your staying, as the bulk of your grasp on me is to do with the things in my head, but I have put for monumental effort at expelling you and still, you barely seem to budge. I don't understand what I have done to deserve so long a sojourn through your clutches, but here I am nonetheless, and at this point, I have no hope that this will ever truly go back to a place of normalcy. I spoke with Pendragon this week about how I am grieving. I am grieving, you know. I am grieving the loss of everything that you have stolen from me.

I am grieving most of all over the fact that you have robbed me of my ability to sense God's presence. I am grieving that loss of connection with the One who made me and loves me beyond anything I can possibly put human expression or thought to. I am grieving the fact that, at present, there is only a head connection. There is only the knowledge that there is still Truth in that He has not left me or abandoned me. I am grieving that this knowledge, powerful though it ought to be, is not enough for me. I am not just mind and body. I am spirit too and I am grieving the loss of being able to feel His presence in my very spirit. Something in you, depression, severed that connection between head and heart in a way that it has never been touched by your previous incarnations.

Because of all of this, I find myself very angry a lot of the time and part of grief is, as Pendragon pointed out, anger. From anger though, one must come to a place of acceptance. The problem is, as I told him, with the kind of grief that results from losing a person you love, you may indeed get angry, but there is a finality in death. There is an understanding in the permanence of it. Something in that understanding helps to eventually bring most people to a place of acceptance that the person is gone and there is nothing that can be done to change that and this allows the grieving person to move forward. My problem is that I do not understand how to get to a place of acceptance. I don't know what it is that I'm meant to accept. Is it an acceptance that this dark valley of depression will go on and on for the rest of my life and that this is my new normal? Is it an acceptance of the fact that I may get out of this darkness but never feel the presence of God again? Is it an acceptance of the fact that the love, joy, peace, comfort, and solace I've always felt in these dark times and in all of my faith journey is permanently at an end no matter what the outcome of my journey with you?

Where do I go from here? How do I get to that place of acceptance where I can move on? I don't think that moving on and out of depression is possible without a restoration of this severed connection between my head and my heart ad without the possibility of ever feeling His presence again in a way that does more than just give me instruction or nudge me to dos something he wills for me.

I am lost in the night and I wear black almost all the time because I am in mourning for this loss. And you did this to me. You created this loss and have sustained it and perpetuated it. I have no words for how much anger I have toward you for what you have done to me. I want to let this go, but I don't know how to. I don't know how to move through this and accept it.

I beg you. Please let me go. Enough now. Enough.

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My apologies that this is actually a bit longer than five minutes. I wasn't sure what would happen when I started writing and I got a little bit carried away and just couldn't stop when my timer said the five minutes was up. I think the writing of this took me another 2-3 minutes beyond the initial five. I also had to go back and clean up a typo or two where I hadn't capitalized something or had grossly misspelled something. Other than that and adding a couple of missing words that somehow didn't get put down (I don't type as fast as I think and I'm often thinking about three sentences ahead of my fingers) when I typed it initially, there was little editing done. Have a great week and I'll see you next Friday (but look for my other entries before then!) for another installment of Five Minute Friday!

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