Coming Clean

I'm feeling the need to have a few moments of honesty here. One of the features of a blog is the ability to filter and edit what you want others to know about you. Although this is a public venue, I still choose how much I want to put out there for the "world" to know. During the past two years I have worked overtime editing my life to hide my illness and the struggles that have gone along with it. Well, I'm now discovering that there are some serious ramifications for continuously minimizing things in your life. As my therapist told me, "when you work to minimize something, you are actually maximizing it at the same time". That's right...I said therapist. Two weeks ago I started going to counseling. Neil and I decided that I really needed to seek professional help in my attempt to sort through all of the turmoil my disease has caused in my life during the last two years. Additionally I have also reached a point where I am learning to accept my disease as part of me and I needed guidance on how to go forward. I've noticed over the last couple of months that although I have been feeling better physically, my anxiety level has been rising steadily. In some ways my anxiety has become a handicap, preventing me from living normally. I have huge fears associated with public places, especially new places where I don't know where the bathroom is (that was tough to say). So, as I travel this new road I will work hard to put it down in words here, which is not easy for me. But that's part of the process. I have to learn how to be ok with educating people about my disease and any special needs that I have associated with it. I can no longer minimize it and pretend that it's not a part of me. I can't protect everyone from it, because then I'm essentially attempting to protect people from a fundamental part of me. Everyone needs to feel accepted and loved and in order for me to fully feel that, I need to know that people are knowingly accepting my disease. When I hide the disease I always feel that there is this secret part of me that is not embraced by others (I recognize that by keeping it a secret it doesn't give others a chance to accept that part) and that people would feel differently about me if they really knew me. I'm not entirely sure that makes sense, but I needed to at least attempt to put it down.

Counseling has been an interesting process to begin. I know that I am only at the beginning of a very long road, but I've already learned a couple of valuable things:

1. Counseling is really hard work! In my ignorance I always thought that it was simply sitting and talking to someone. It's not that at all. I have a new found empathy for those going through the counseling process. It is so much more than talking. It's digging, sorting, pressing, thinking, pondering, weighing, shifting, changing... I am exhausted after each session. Physically, mentally, emotionally, exhausted. I have also actually felt nauseous digging up thoughts and fears with my counselor. There's a reason that you have buried a lot of those thoughts and they are not easy to dig up! Hopefully, I will be able to love and relate to people struggling with counseling in a new way after this adventure.

2. This last week I have been faced with the startling reality that I can't successfully navigate through this process without the Lord. Now, for me that's a huge step in the right direction. For the past two years my relationship with the Lord has been severely dry. I have tried time and time again to rekindle the flame that once burned so brightly, but every time I have tried I have found that I have nothing to say. I felt so stripped of things, my health, my job, my purpose, that I didn't know who I was and therefore didn't really know who God was anymore. I knew that it wasn't a question of whether or not I believed in Him. I understood that it was a desert period and that eventually I would have something to say. Well, I finally have something to say. As I work to sort through everything, the question that keeps rising to the surface is "who am I". Not as in, "my name is Courtney and I am 27 years old", but more "who am I in Christ and who was I created to be". Believe me, I thought that I had this sorted out years ago, but apparently shifts in life will continuously cause us to lay before Him and redefine who we are and who He is. I need Him during this difficult time and I know that there is no way that I can figure out who I am apart from Him, because apart from Him I am nothing. Glory!