Resilience: A Little Blue Pill

It’s just a blue pill.  But it’s the pill that has held me together for 10 years.  The weight of it is the tipping point on the scales.  With it, I am sane and coping.  Without it, I am not.  It’s as simple as that.  There was a season and a time that the dependency I felt towards this pill made me angry and defensive.  There was a point that all I could do was try to find ways to stop taking it.  But the thing is, I was barely coping before I started taking it. 

Let’s be clear, it was the hope of Christ and His strength and the community He put around me that helped me ultimately get through my battle with insomnia but that pill, that little blue pill, was kind of my last resort.  Soon, it became the only way I slept at all.  I could tell you the horrors I faced with daily, relentless, insomnia.  The way my thoughts whirred, the noise of my anxiety, my heart beat pumping so loudly in my ears that I couldn’t hear anything but it.   I can tell you about the days I laid on the couch crying with a newborn in my arms.  The days I could barely walk for fatigue.  I can tell you about the tears I poured out and the agony of defeat that literally nothing we did ever made a lick of difference.   I was a complete wreck.  What started as normal postpartum discomfort, became a living hell.  I say that because I have never been in such a low place.  A low place that carried on and carried on.  Despite the tears I cried and the prayers I wailed, despite all that we did to try and cope and walk forward, we couldn’t do it.

I think of that little blue pill and sometimes I get mad.  But I also see it a bit differently now.  Thank God for that little blue pill.  Thank God there was a way that finally got me some sleep, at all.  Some people pushed me to get rid of it, and Lord knows I tried every which way to do it.  Brain electrodes, sleep studies, pharmaceutical cocktails, you name it.  Now there is a certain acceptance.  I struggle with sleep, I know no other way around it.  My anxiety around sleep is so heightened that even the thought of not having access to this pill and I know that I would fall apart literally.  But by God’s grace, He’s still supplied me with it even across borders and oceans and continents.  His grace alone is the reason I am still here.  Sometimes the things we fight the most, are just God’s grace to us.  

The truth is, I am dependent.  I am needy.  I am broken.  I am often anxiety ridden but God gives me a way forward every day.  He used a little blue pill to do it, but nonetheless, He gives me the grace to continue on.  Accepting that fact doesn’t make me weak, it doesn’t mean I am coping, it means I am growing more resilient.