Valley of Burnout

Time is a healer

My trip to America was a great one. It was just so good to enter ‘John & Abbey’s world’ and simply hang out. I felt very much at ease and able to relax – it was truly a blessed experience. But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking too and in the past few days I’ve realised that on one level I’m doing good and my basic functioning is in fairly good order. I can laugh, make jokes, smile and often mean it, have deep discussions about faith, politics, culture, the meaning of life etc, make basic decisions, pray, read the Bible, read ‘heavier’ books (at the start all my brain could cope with was children’s books!), do fitness training and so on... But on another level I still feel a huge amount of pain, fear, fragility and loneliness inside and even yet it’s not everyone with whom I feel safe. When I first went off sick, a good friend told me that depression can have 3 phases: hurt, heal and help. I thought that I was moving on – especially with the improvement I felt after Christmas. But I’ve realised that I’ve still got a bit to go. I still find it hard to not pressurise myself into rushing things and thinking I should be ‘pulling myself together’. But it’s just going to take time to heal, it can’t be rushed…and that’s ok, I’ll get there.

posted by Debs Erwin @ 23:25