“I frequently had days where I didn’t want to get out of bed…”
While I was at uni, I struggled with depression. I frequently had days where I didn’t want to get out of bed, where I lay paralysed by apathy, where I wanted to hurt or even kill myself. On one night, going to hospital was the only way to stop myself from ending it all.
It was my faith in God that helped me get up, helped me believe things could get better, that it was worth carrying on, that helped pull me out of my darkest moments.
After 3 or 4 years of this struggle, a friend with a similar problem told me that he had realised that if the same power the conquered the grave now lived inside us as believers, then that same power could conquer depression. From then on, and to this day, when I struggled with the darkness, I have learnt to call on that power to banish it.
I am still vulnerable living in the aftershock, but can say with absolute certainty that my depression is gone- when I feel low, I am still free of that old unshakeable heaviness, I can still see the light. I’ve even had my anti-depressants reduced, and throughout the trials of lockdown, I was still on top of my old enemy.