A Beaten Path

How hard could it be to walk away from something and never look back?

I'll tell you. Imagine sitting down at a table. You haven't eaten in what feels like years and someone places your favorite food in front of you. However, there is a catch. The last time you ate this food it made you violently ill. But it's still your favorite food. You still want to eat it and feel the joy that it once offered you. You take that bite and you quickly remember that it made you ill because you are allergic to it. Your main source of happiness, your joy and comfort has now become a poison to your body. You can no longer eat this food without suffering extremely painful consequences. Consequences that are often too much to handle. But, but, the sweet feeling of that food coming to your mouth, the sweet wonderful smell filling your nostrils, the saliva coming and awaiting the treasure. What happened? All you find is pain. You wonder what went wrong. You wonder what you could have done. You look back confused. You want to make amends. You want that food back in your life. How could you live without it?

We, along with many other things, were not designed to forget easily. A tree trunk does not forget the knife that carved letters into it. A car engine does not forget its constant need to be nourished. A damaged heart does not heal quickly. Memories live on, requirements still need to be met, and scars take time. Somethings will never go away, while some will lose themselves. A beaten path does not quickly lose itself.

I like the beaten path the best for this. The beaten path is there because someone found it useful. The path offered a way to an end. It wasn't necessarily the best path, it wasn't perfect, but that path was good enough for someone. That path was forged by those who walked it. Once a path has been deemed useless, the brush starts to grow back around it, the weeds come and cover what it once was. And so it is with saying goodbye. It is not that the path is no longer there, it is not that the hikers are no longer there. It is that the path is no longer useful. It is that the hikers decided to take a different route. It is that the hiker might have had to go home. It happens. It is life.

Better, eh?

You know, when I got back from my mission I wanted this blog to be a way that I could show the world that my mission had made me a better person. I wanted show that I was much more capable after my mission than I was before. Because that' how it works right? You go out on a mission and serve your time and when you get back all your imperfections are fixed, all your weaknesses are your strengths, you know the scriptures inside and out, your ability to do missionary work is above and beyond what it used to be. These sound pretty ridiculous to me now but not too long ago that's how I saw things. I saw them in a very imperfect manner.

I got back from my mission, in my opinion, more broke than I had left. I felt more like a tree that had grown due to the adversity caused by the strong winds. However with my growth come the equal if not exponential increase in that of the wind. I felt that my world had come crashing in on me during me mission. There are still days that I still feel that way. On my mission I was diagnosed with MDD or clinical depression. You know, the depression that makes it hard to leave your bed in the morning. The depression that feels like a bucket of ice cold water to end your shower. It's the kind of thing that you don't feel comfortable admitting. And I am no exception.

When I was first diagnosed I walked around in denial for a while. How could this be? But then I remembered the months and years I had contemplated that I had it. Things were starting to make more sense. Unfortunately that didn't help. As a student I'm used to the way that the more understanding you gain about a problem the easier it becomes to solve it. Well, for a while there the more I understood about the depression the worse it made me feel. I grew angry and even bitter at the Lord asking how He expected me to live my life with this. It didn't make sense. My whole world seemed to crash around me.

One of the things that I learned early on is the way that depression makes it feel like the relationships you have have not developed. It makes years of friendships feel like encounters on the morning train. This was absolutely devastating to me. I was in a foreign country and I felt all alone. I felt that I had no true friends. And the way I saw things it looked that way too.

Anyway, I came home and hoped that things would get better. That I would understand it better, that I would be better able to cope with it, and that my meds would lessen the severity. It didn't seem that way. For a while there I felt that I had lost so much ground. I could see the obvious growth that had happened but at that moment it felt non-existent. I felt that I had taken two steps forward and ten steps back. That's the reason for the title of this post. I don't always feel that I am doing better. I'm lucky to be feeling good about anything, let alone personal progress. I have however gained a deeper faith in the Lord and His power to guide us through the darkness. He has a plan for each of us.