Our associate rector the Rev. Dr. Craig Lemming; our deacon the Rev. Judy DesHarnais; our seminarian Trevor Sannes; and parishioner and lay leader Susan Creel have been meeting to discuss and plan how we can begin the work of greater and more purposeful Disability Awareness and Inclusion here at St. John’s.
July is Disability Pride Month, and will mark the kickoff of this work of inclusion. From now through the end of July, we are offering a series of weekly articles written by parishioners who experience disabilities, both visible and invisible. In these reflections, they will share how their disabilities intersect with their faith and participation in the church community.
by Allison Brown
As an elder Millennial, coming of age as mental health’s awareness has grown from a shameful seed into a wild prairie of flowers has been awe-inspiring. But a decade ago, I was building a three-part art piece for my thesis intended to challenge the shame and misconceptions surrounding therapy at the time. Now, in the height of the 2020s, mentioning a therapy appointment feels as easy and pragmatic as noting you’re going to the optometrist week after next. What progress!
And make no mistake: I count this normalcy a blessing. It certainly makes mentioning my own particular diagnoses of generalized anxiety disorder a far easier task than when I was in my late twenties. Yet, as with everything that bursts from awareness to zeitgeist, the complexities of mental disorders get a bit of a pop culture sheen.
In other words: have you ever found yourself being a touch too fussy about how your party table looks and chide yourself for being “a little too OCD about this”? Or perhaps you’re having a down day and sigh that you’re “soooo depressed”? Socially, that makes total sense; language is malleable, and these terms help offer the gist of how you’re feeling to a friend. But the lived actuality is, often, far more complicated.
Therefore: allow me to take you along on one of my bad weeks, to show you how my anxiety not only lives in mind… but in body.
It’s late April, cooler than average and rainy. I wake with my alarm, but I can’t move. My bed is often the ground zero of the Bad Weeks, starting when I slept for 14 hours a day during my very first depressive episode at the age of 20. Now, I have a herding dog in need of a job who gently, patiently headbutts me to roll over, her soft muzzle digging underneath my neck to lift my head up.
(Larkspur, as you can tell, is a very good dog.)
It takes a solid 35 minutes, but I finally sit upright. My heart is already racing, because it’s a work day, and my current state of panic is presently connected to my paycheck. I shake my head and raise my eyes to the sky, to the Parent helping me through the day with a running dialogue for my inner child to cling to during the storm. One of my favorite Vonnegut quotes falls from me easily, a simple prayer from one Hoosier to another: “And so it goes.”
As I go through my morning routine, I narrate everything to God. Silly as I feel to do it, the narration helps with a common anxiety symptom: executive dysfunction. A symptom I share with my ADHD siblings, executive dysfunction is defined as “a condition that disrupts the brain’s ability to control thoughts, emotions, and behavior” (Cleveland Clinic). For me, this often means my usual focus is shrouded in fog as my brain attempts to chase after the perceived threats du jour, and tasks that appear easy at first brush are insurmountable mountains. To speak this aloud to God often reminds me of the Baptismal Covenant, when we assert that we will attempt to hold to our promises “with God’s help.” Sometimes, it’s enlisting God’s help to renounce evil; other times, it’s to ensure I eat food.
Either way, I’m asking for the help.
And it works: I manage to log into my remote job, and I begin to tackle the mountain before me. As alarmed emails and panicked messages to me flood my screen, I take note of what I feel in my body. First is the shoulder tension, muscles tighten up with every petition of false urgency. The stress headache comes next, which spreads so thoroughly and completely across my skull that light feels piercing and sound aches as my nerves fire on overdrive all over my body.
And finally: the fatigue. So much of my energy is spent trying to remember, trying to act as if the world is not burning, trying to continue on as if everything is fine fine fine, that I often resort to lunchtime naps. The worse it gets, the more I find myself sleeping in, going to bed early, and crashing multiple times a week. It is at the edge of one of these naps on this rainy April afternoon that my phone rings, soft and gentle beneath my cheek.
It’s a member of the Circle of Care. I pick up, shame and relief waltzing in my chest, and say hello. I’m greeted with a kind greeting in return, mentions they wanted to check in. “How are you? We haven’t seen you lately. We miss you.”
The embarrassment, as I should be able to power through my exhaustion to go to church, sparkles in the corner of my eyes as I hold my phone to my ear and cheek. “I’m… not good.”
And it’s the most relieving prayer I’ve made for weeks.
One of the beautiful things about prayer is how answers begin to bloom for you. After that call, I found a book that helped. (Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski is a great read, by the way.) But most of all, I knew that my community cared. Texts started to sprinkle in, with friends sending me cheerleader messages, and parishioners allowing me the time to recover by stepping down and being.
It doesn’t escape me that this season in my life was during Eastertide: a hands-on lesson in resurrection. My suffering was but a wisp compared to Christ’s Passion, but the great redemption of the Resurrection grows beyond the act. Sometimes, it is also a map, a promise that there is a bridge to the end: “this too shall pass.”
And should you have a loved one who has similarly dropped out of their public life? Perhaps, with gentle care, give them a call. It might be an answer to a prayer they didn’t know they were saying.