The Rev. Beth Cantrell, Our Brother Legion, "Nothing in this world will ever break my heart again."
Nothing in this world will ever break my heart again.
Nothing in this world will ever break my heart again
No pain this life will put me through
Will ever, ever hurt like you
Buxton/York for the cast of Nashville
Last year I accepted a call as a pastor in a church out of state. It was a disaster. When I got there, I thought to myself “Did I ever feel called here?” Hmm. I didn’t feel called. In fact I didn’t feel much of anything. I’m a person living with bipolar. Not feeling much of anything was a new experience to me.
That job proved untenable so I resigned and I came back to North Carolina. I went back to my old providers and asked to go off one of my meds. Yup. I wasn’t feeling anything due to the medicine. I did fine for three weeks. I even started sleeping without medication. Then life struck. My best friend got Covid and lived in a ventilator for twenty days. A large event that I’ve planned for December went wonky, then I got bronchitis. And a friend let himself in my car and kissed me.
Guess which one of these things blew up the mania?
It wasn’t just a stupid kiss. I liked him. Our combustibility reflects the very unique dynamic that only two people with a variety of mental illnesses can ignite.
It’s over. The possibilities are over.
It’s only a month; it’s not a marriage, right? Well, tell my heart that. Tell my disease that. I’m a bipolar, rapid cycler, mixed episodes gal. I generally feel two things at once when I’m deciding whether to order chicken salad for lunch. Heartbreak feels like a Southwestern omelet exploded. In rapid succession as well as simultaneously I felt sad, abandoned, humiliated, angry, concerned, a glimpse of emptiness, emotions all hung together by the mortar of confusion. I don’t quite remember so much confusion during those first depressive months after Ex left. I’m sure there was, but I don’t remember it. Everything else feels simultaneously strangely wild and strangely familiar.
When Ex left I felt sure that I would never feel that bad again. Like the featured song, I vowed that nothing in the world will ever break my heart again.
As if.
Nothing is so uniquely singular that it’s not repeated. It always seems appropriately intuitive to me that Genesis posits two creation stories. The Hebrew mind demonstrated the theological sophistication and candor to admit that even the act of creation itself is not unique. But I forgot. I got a little too self righteous about my stability. I got a little too complacent in my knowledge of coping skills. I have this so well-educated bipolar life that therapies and mad skills (and lots and lots of unacknowledged avoidance) so that no real dart penetrated my heart for years. I kept my egg safe with meds, therapy, skills, meditation, being the good girl. I was unassailable. Funny how God never permits unassailable to last for long.
And my works righteous mentality didn’t work because it doesn’t work. It never works. Nor should we want to save ourselves from the noise and adversity. If we’re lucky in this life, relationships come which means that they might go. If we’re lucky in this life, we’ll be invited to a party and there might be beer and you might face temptation to drink. If we’re lucky in this life, we have dear friends who might get sick. All the good stuff provides fodder from the things that compromise our minds and moods and choices.
Everyone who is someone eventually tells you “You are not your disease.” Bollocks because everyone who is someone plus everyone else also implies “You must manage your disease or else you’ll be banished from the tribe.” It’s a rare person in the mental health field or who is part of your social support who nurtures your individuality and who nurtures your individuality toward your own understanding of care. It’s called managed health for a reason. I am so managed that I’ve forgotten how to live. I am so managed that I forgot to give myself permission to have a feeling, much less make a mistake.
I absolutely know that bipolar feels all-consuming. Like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from time to time some asshole pours more gasoline into the fiery furnace. But we are not consumed. We are transformed. How are we transformed? In Daniel 3:21 we learn that these three brave Jews were bound before they were put into the fiery furnace. Then in Daniel 3:25a we hear the incredulity of the King Nebuchadnezzar. He inquired to his men if three people were shut into the furnace. They affirmed that fact. Then the King replied “But I see four men unbound, walking in the middle of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the fourth had the appearance of a God.” How are we transformed? We are unbound. Yet we are protected.
Huh? Unbound? That’s not what we think of recovery in mental illness. We think of moderated. We think of medicated. We think of managed. We think of well-behaved. We call it recovery. But really, a true recovery is not just about redeeming the old but living with integrity into the new.
Let me tell you about my unbound friends.
I have a friend who is very heavy. He recently enrolled in a medical nutrition program. He has to drink shakes. He has to eat every three hours on the nose. He has to count every almond. Everyday transformation. He chose to outlive his anxiety and outlive what was eating him up.
I have another friend who realized that his alcohol consumption consumes him. I am terrified for him every minute of every day because he reached this soft, tender spot of realization and he’s got to live into it one day at a time. But what a start! Everyday transformation to name your demon.
My best friend came down with Covid over Thanksgiving. He spent twenty days on a ventilator and he lived through it. My best friend is a rare childhood schizophrenic. He never knew a time in his life without voices. He calls his voices “the committee.” When I finally spoke to my BFF after his ordeal, I asked him about the committee. Here he is sitting in pulmonary care unit after spending 30+ days in ICU and he said, “Last night two tall men were standing in this room and they told me to jump out the window.” In this world that I inhabit, everyday transformation means resisting the voices who prey even on the most vulnerable.
Outlive your despair. If the church wants to empower its people and witness to the world, then mental illness is not a tertiary social justice. It is primary. We say with one collective voice: outlive your despair.
Ten years ago when my disease forced me to move back home with my Dad, I compulsively told people that I had bipolar disorder. We live in the fading countryside of North Carolina where beautiful John Deere tractors dot the red clay fields which formerly grew tobacco. Even if I hadn’t told the whole population of this county that I was bipolar, they would have known in slightly less time by tried and true word of mouth. The preacher’s daughter has bipolar.
Ten years later and the preacher’s daughter doesn’t look so singular. A family from my home church lost two different adult children in two different suicide incidents. A younger member of this community found their middle school child dead in their bathroom. In November I attended a church for people who are homeless in Winston-Salem. Maybe we had 120 unhoused people in that room. If less than 1% of the general population lives with schizophrenia, in that room I saw at least seven people talking to themselves. Oh, wait. Not just people. Specific marginalized people. Black men.
It all breaks my heart. Over and over. It is not mine to decide to be inured to heartbreak. Heartbreak is the sound of God’s people praying and crying and finding a path to live.
We can’t fence out the heartbreak. I survived four weeks of serious, unfun mania. No doubt I am a little worse for the wear. But I didn’t hurt myself, I didn’t hurt others, and I didn’t stop functioning. So I’m not going back on the med because right now my life worth is not worth living insulated from emotions that teach me who I am and how I should live in this world. Heartbreak is instructive; despair is the danger to avoid. Unlike the first time with my marriage, despair didn’t take up residence in my chest. So I guess some things change.
That’s my Gospel. Heartbreak is essential to social justice. Heartbreak, once you cry ugly, is instructive. Good mental health doesn’t mean that we avoid the feelings. It means that we feel them. That they instruct us, but that they do not dominate us. Good mental health means that we are protected from the flames while we walk in them unbound.
May we all live outlive our despair because we are in touch with the everyday transformations which surround us.
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The Rev. Beth Cantrell, Our Brother Legion, Wallburg NC - Writer, UCC minister, Painter, & Mental Health Advocate
_____The Clergy and Mental Health Blog is a forum for faith leaders to share insights and observations, sometimes speaking from personal experience, about faith and mental health. We welcome diversity of thought and perspective. The view of authors are their own and do not represent the views of the blog as a whole.
