Project 52 Week 16
Macro, that is where you take something small and make it look big, right? As someone with anxiety I am REALLY good at that. Not in a photography sense, mind you, in a life in general sense. I can take something really small, like the fact that when I asked some people who were supposed to be working on something for the last several months for what they had accomplished and it turned out they hadn't done anything, it became a point of anger for me that ruined my whole day. When, granted, it should have just been something that I reminded them to do and then moved on.
No, I am really good at taking something small and following its implications to the point where it will obviously destroy everything. It is easy to do. You start with something simple, there is construction you did not anticipate while driving to see some friends. Well, that construction is going to make you late and being late means that your friend will be mad at you for making them wait. Maybe they won't even wait. They're going to be mad. It is going to cause a fight. Suddenly everything has gone wrong and you're left alone with no friends. In reality, it has just been a couple of extra minutes and you're still in your car waiting for the light to change.
That is just what anxiety does to some of us. We perceive danger and fear in small things because we follow them to their worst possible conclusion. I could argue that then we are aware of what the worst possible scenario is and that a false positive in our danger sensors does very little damage, but that isn't right. Anxiety, that false danger signal ruins our present and what should be the peace and enjoyment of simply living.
And, there is almost nothing I can really do about it.
I have been thinking a lot about mental illness recently. I think there is a false idea that Christians should never feel anxious or depressed because it means that we are not holding on to the hope of Jesus. That is wrong. People seem to enjoy pointing out that your brain is a muscle. It is part of our broken, human body, it is something that is fully susceptible to the fall of man. Meaning that mental illness is just as much a symptom of original sin as anything else. Meaning that my depression and anxiety does not mean that I have forgotten in my soul where my hope comes from. My brain is not my soul and I feel like one of the most important things I have learned in the last few years is how much my brain is part of my body. How much my brain is changed by my body. They are not separate entities. They are one and the same.
I spent several years living with heavy metal toxicity. I was in an environment where I was constantly exposed to metal dust and that had a huge effect on my health, particularly my mental health. Now, it is no one's fault that this happened, because of factors inside of my body I was more sensitive to it than the average person might be and because of my already lowered ability to cope with certain mental factors it had an effect on my brain that it might not have had on others. It made concentrating difficult, it made me feel slow and sluggish, and it often made me feel like I was walking through a thick fog, unable to really perceive what was around me. My brain was failing because it was subject to the weaknesses of my body.
My brain, my depression and anxiety, are just as much a reflection of my physical health and the fact that I live in a fallen, imperfect world, as my physical health.
I don't have any good encouragement to take away from that except that I am glad to know that my hope in God is not lessened because of my mental and physical illnesses and that is encouraging to be reminded of.
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