Thursday 4 August 2016

The Evil Ice-Cream Scoop

Hey, guys, it's Daisy. How are you all doing? Hope you've like my previous posts. Please feel free to give me some feedback on how I'm doing so far.

So the title of this post might seem a bit weird and comical, but it's the name I used for something that happened to me when my depression was harder hitting. Then and now, it's the best way I can describe what it felt like. This post will hopefully give you an insight into how some emotions - how generally feeling - was for me. Note the "for me" in that sentence: this is one of the areas that can vary widely from person to person.

Ever since I was old enough to know what emotions were and how to identify them, I've felt that I was always feeling something; mostly happiness and the sort of childish joy you might see in a six-year-old playing with bubbles (even now, when I'm 22!); then of course sadness in times when you might expect it; even boredom. There was always something there. My heart was so eager to experience things that I am what you call a sympathetic laugher/crier: I will cry and laugh simply because someone else is, no matter if I have no connection to that person or if I know what they're upset or amused by. If I am moved by their emotions enough, I will feel them.

Enter: depression.

A lot of people just think that it's feeling sad. Even if they acknowledge that it's more than the usual blues, they still just think it's sadness. For me, it started like that. But I would be sad for no reason. It's like my body would wake up and decide, with no previous information, that today was a bad day. And that was just one aspect. Another aspect was an impending sense of doom, just a general feeling that something and/or everything was going to go catastrophically wrong. And with the warped thinking that comes as a free gift with depression, "public humiliation" and "nuclear explosion" were counted as equally catastrophic.

But then, as my depression deepened, things changed. Like my body had just decided it had had enough, and it shut itself down as a self-preservation mechanism. For the first time in my life, I felt...nothing. I don't know if it's "normal" for some of you guys to just feel nothing, but for someone who has never experienced emptiness like that before, I find it very difficult to describe. Hence the title of this post; it was like the Devil had got his favourite ice-cream scoop and completely cleared out my insides.

This emptiness is reported by the majority of people with depression, but what varies is the reactions to it; some relish it because they had had enough of the pain that they were feeling before; some feel empowered by it for similar reasons. Personally, I hated it. It terrified me. Luckily I felt it only for two hours. But it was one of the most horrible evenings of my life.

This analogy may seem weird at the start, but bear with me. I have really bad circulation, particularly to my extremities. My feet are almost always cold, and my hands are only slightly better. So when I explain to people that I'm wearing microwaveable slippers because my feet are cold, they recommend thick socks. This is very kind of them. But each time they do, I have to remind them that socks - or any sort of heat-conserving clothing - only work if there is body heat being emitted in the first place, otherwise they are useless. The same thing could be said for my body when this ice-cream scoop was through me with; I felt physically cold enough to be shivering on the sofa as all my warmth, that I had at differing times both treasured and taken for granted, was robbed from me. I was a useless shell.

Luckily, I wasn't alone when I became empty that evening. My Christian boyfriend and very good friends were there, one of whom was very well-versed in the Bible and very in-tune with our Lord spiritually. He read me some verses that explain to me how loved I am by God when I was feeling that everything in the world hated me. I'm afraid to say I can't remember which verses they were (there are many in the Bible, though!). But I do remember how I felt while and after he read it and sat with me. If the Devil had emptied me of everything I was, God poured it all back until I was full. And then kept pouring. I was filled and filling up with this uncontainable joy and thankfulness and relief and safety. And it wouldn't stop; it just kept on coming until I had been sobbing on everyone's shoulder for half an hour non-stop.

The Devil had taken everything away from me, and I didn't intentionally cry out to God because I didn't even feel like I had the strength to. And He came anyway. He saw my agony, my emptiness, and filled me up with Himself out of love. And with God inside me, as I had forgotten He always had been, that ice-cream scoop didn't even bother returning ever again.