This Spring semester has been really rough.  Teaching into the evening I have been getting up later and going to bed later and not seeing a lot of sun.  The result has been struggling with depression and several week long periods of anxiety.    I was struggling with anxiety a couple weeks ago while I was on campus getting ready for teaching my evening class and talking via text to my friend Drew, and was trying to describe to him how it feels when you know the anxiety is just waiting to happen.  The picture and the words below are a result of that conversation.

Sitting here trying to make it through my day: struggling with the anxiety, feeling the pain in my chest, the breathing becoming shallow.  And I say, “There’s a storm sitting right on the horizon of my mind.”

And he says, “Ride the storm,” a soft smile on his lips.

He doesn’t try to talk me down, or tell me that it will be OK, he doesn’t even try to make me laugh in the hope that it will ‘get me out of that mood.’  Rather he sits with me, holding me in his presence if not his arms, and prepares to ride the storm with me.

Does he really know what he’s saying?

At the center of the storm I can feel the winds building. 

Soon waves will crash against mountains and turn them into sand.

The winds will pick up the sand, rending skin and sinew from bone.

Barren wastes left of my soul, a husk of what it should be.

As the storms build and slowly retreat, not really gone but waiting to roll in again, I look around expecting to be alone once again.

Who could survive the pain, the anger, the irrationality that lives within those storms?

But there he is.

Love in his eyes, gentle and kind, not requiring anything, just there.

Who knew?

Even writing about the storms makes them move closer again.  The next storm may be worse.  I never know.

And I know I will live, I have always known that.