Western Sun: Mental Health, Luck, Survival, or Divine Intervention?

I was the third most musically gifted person in my household growing up. Without question, my sister was the first. I got my love of music from my dad. My dad was always playing guitar and making up songs. My sister on the other hand was a true artist and tormented like one too. As things go with siblings sometimes, neither one of us were willing to acknowledge the other's musical talent most of the time. As you've probably noticed from what I write, I don't tend to talk very specifically about the living. That's on purpose. Their stories aren't mine to tell. And, we probably see the journey a little bit differently. The interesting thing about growth and change is that sometimes it's you who can't recognize how you've changed and sometimes it's others who can't recognize how you've changed. 

Growing up as an Evangelical Christian was a really interesting experience. One I don't really recommend, but it's not my intention to take shots at anybody today (goodness knows I did enough of that in my religious writings). It's fair to say one thing that my sister and I have in common is that we're both a little f***** up from religion. Ironically, she'd probably be more surprised than anybody that I left the Church. While I didn't fit every stereotype you know about a judgmental Christian, I certainly fit a lot of them. 

What I learned about grace and compassion came from having my ass handed to me by life. No more, no less. I gravitated to the teachings of love and forgiveness because from my perspective, for a really long time, and today we live in a pretty unforgiving world. Some people talk about religion as a crutch and I don't think that's exactly right for someone like me. It was life preservation and it came with a great cost. 

Everything I know about being compassionate towards people who are afflicted with mental health issues, I learned the hard way and through many years of lots of judgment. The interesting thing for me is recognizing the need for balance. While I can look at certain things with compassion today that I definitely didn't at certain points in my life, I still see the need for boundaries. 

My mom was afflicted with mental health issues and she died of an overdose. My dad was afflicted with mental health issues, he was an addict, and he died from neglecting to take care of himself and mounting health issues. My sister also struggled in ways that I won't get into here because like I said, it's not my story to tell. But, I was there for some pretty dark moments and I didn't always respond with kindness or compassion. Some of our worst grievances with each other even spilled out publicly online, something that pains me to this day. 

I wound up sharing my stories about life with a disability, living in the intersection of family dysfunction because I felt like only telling one part of it, the disability part, didn't tell the whole story. I still don't tell the whole story. The irony of me sharing these stories publicly and intersecting them on LinkedIn is the generally low profile I've taken on other social platforms. And, why I took that low profile.

A line from one of my sister's songs clicks with me through the attachment I feel to the parts of life that I left behind by choice. “I know the West is gone, but I can't help myself from riding into the sun – forget about everything else” (Colleen Kellogg, Western Sun). In some ways, telling the stories reminds me that they're a part of my life. Sure, it informs my readers of that too and paints an entirely different picture of who I am or who I was, or something like that. On the inside, I know what it is, it's attachment. I'm bonded to the life I once lived, to the people that were in it who are no longer, to the scars that it produced, to the memories I'm grateful for, and to the memories that produce the most flashbacks in a complex trauma sort of way. 

My mom is gone. My dad is gone. My sister rode off into the Western Sun. Not literally I suppose, but it's the best way to describe it without describing it. It's the best way to tell you that I was the lucky one. I wasn't the stronger one, though sometimes it may look like that. I didn't come out of all of the things that we shared experiences of unscathed. I was just lucky enough to be able to live a semi  “normal” existence in spite of the journey. 

Every once in a while, I listen to her songs, and I think maybe I should cover one of those as a nod of healing and respect. I also sometimes think about what could have been if things were different. We don't really get to change the path that has been and I don't even know really what's possible to heal amidst so much pain and brokenness. But, I know one thing that's healed a lot for me is that judgment that I used to carry with me pretty strongly. I've been wrong about a lot of things in my life. The thing that I was probably the most wrong about was my uninformed understanding of mental health.

My family members dealt with the pain of their mental health struggles in the only ways that they knew how. Unfortunately for them and others around them, the paths they went down were pretty self-destructive. Their paths left a pretty tremendous mark on me as well. There's not a day that I don't wonder how it managed to turn out differently for me. I live such a vanilla ordinary life that these past stories make that almost unfathomable to me. And I lived it. The fact is, I judged all three of them. Sometimes I still do. Simultaneously though, I hurt from what we went through and what was lost.

If you understand how I grew up, you'd know that some would answer that question by saying that I survived by the grace of God. For a long time, I'd answer the question the same way, and maybe it's true – maybe that is the only reason I'm still standing. Yet, the journey that I went through left me in a state of disbelief. I've been questioning God's role in all of this for over twenty years and the most direct answer anyone ever gave me was not to question God. If you know me, you know I'm never going to take that advice. At least not without some choice words on the back of my t-shirt, on the tip of my tongue, or in the shape of my fingers. 

“If you think you have a clue about me, you haven't seen me today” (Colleen Kellogg, “Pesterin’ (Baby Come Take a Walk)”). Those are my sister's words and it's a mindset that we have in common sometimes. Even though I've got enough content that I will most certainly finish my book this year, I've really only scratched the surface. I'm still telling you the story because I haven't told you the story. I've told you enough for me to still feel safe with the words that I put in the world. I've told you enough to know that there's more to me than meets the eye each day. I've told you enough for you to acknowledge my resilience and I thank you for that. In a lot of ways, I've acknowledged the dysfunction that I came from and I've tiptoed around it. The nice thing about writing the story, is that you get to observe it from a distance, and digest it and whatever way makes it palatable for you. I'm living it and reflecting on it every day. The largely past tense stories that I share with a public audience inform my present a lot more than I touch base on. When I have to make difficult decisions at work and manage chaos in life, all of this stuff shows up. It shows up in being able to do something insanely difficult and then switch gears a moment later because you don't have another choice. It shows up in that cold and hollowed out feeling that leaves my words few and far between. It shows up in what I don't write or say.