Writer's Block

May is Mental Health Awareness Month.

As many of you know, I've been working on a book called raging seas & Rising Suns. It's been a slow and steady writing process, but I've been hitting major writer's block on my chapter, Let There Be Light.

Let There Be Light is intended to be a self-help chapter on the best techniques to navigate depression. However, I've been in a depressive episode for most of the last half year, and I've struggled to apply many of the methods that have been so helpful for me over the years.

Depression, or depresity as a good friend calls it, can be so debilitating in the application that it's hard to describe or conquer in theory. Most healing strategies require time, patience, and an understanding support system.

My book talks a lot about mental health. Mental health is an essential topic of discussion, and the conversation is best facilitated by those who have been in the trenches and were once unable to name or describe the best path forward. Through those experiences, we learn the most valuable lessons on survival, endurance, and character. Once we've gone through the right of passage of suffering, with the help of resources like prayer, therapy, journaling, and processing with your support system, you learn how to name and describe the hell you've endured so that others have a roadmap to navigate the trenches themselves.

These frank, honest discussions point to the severity of the circumstances but also offer hope because we've already been through it, and even though we continue to go through, we'll arrive victorious once more over the symptoms & setbacks that limit us.

I'm in the waiting season still. It may be spring, but it still feels like winter in my heart. I don't know when I'll reach the breakthrough, but I know it will come. In some ways, I am being proactive and doing everything in my power. In other ways, all I can do is stand firm amid the hell-scaped hurricanes. Clinging to Christ has been the only tested, tried, and true strategy for me to consistently find hope & healing. And so I wait, I rest, and I trust.