What follows is dreadfully long. It was quite painful for me to write. Part 2 will be coming later this week.
When I was 14 I got glandular fever. This was not from kissing. I was sad because the autoimmune disease caused me to miss months of school. A blood test showed I had it, and I underwent rapid personality change. I lost friends while away, became lethargic. I was miserable, depressed, prescribed sleeping pills, and had not kissed another soul!
Giving me sleeping pills seemed an odd decision by my family doctor. I was sleeping all God's hours with night time insomnia and early waking that I think now was related to grief and anxiety. There are dozens of good, effective methods for stabilizing sleep.
Glandular fever is called the 'kissing disease' because of its high incidence in adolescence and how it's passed. Frequently not serious, glandular fever is considered a joke. I was treated as if it was my inoculation against teenage life by adults in my path. As if it kept me safe from hard knocks.
I was fatigued for years from glandular fever's aftermath. Looking back I think this is when my depression started, although I never had a conversation about mental health with my school, doctor, parents or other caring adults. The clinical term 'depression' was first introduced to me by a doctor when I was at University.
So what happened when I was 14? My school refused to mark work I sent them. They denied me grades – as if I was on holiday. I got no feedback or reward for my effort. My home tutor refused to teach me because she wasn't a specialist in my subjects. She supervised, stopping by my house for a cup of tea and a chat. She spent three hours a week with me, and we used that time as if it was a homework club. I can't overestimate the harm to my confidence and burgeoning sense of identity.
I was on free school meals at the time this happened, and to this day I believe that made a difference to the teachers who had a responsibility to me. When your parents don't work, you already carry a stigma at school. My parents were distracted by my mum's disability. They didn't engage well with the school to find solutions to the problems I was having.
What was horrible was that school transmitted to me whether they intended to or not that my limited prospects were inevitable. I felt as if I had repulsed adult help. My doctor continued to give me blood tests. I wished I could have given them more of what they wanted. But I didn't know what that was. They certainly weren't being cheerleaders for my continued attendance. Neither was I punished. I felt abandoned and unloved.
I played netball, hockey and badminton, sang in the choir and theatrical productions, when I started secondary school in 1992. I enjoyed creative writing and won the chair at the Eisteddfod, which in Wales is considered a big honour. I was in year 10 when I got sick, so these hobbies had been followed faithfully for over three school years.
Within a few months, suddenly teachers wouldn't greet me in the corridor. They were adults I looked up to and trusted to keep me safe. What I would describe as passive aggressive behaviour continued until I was 18 within several settings, not only at school, also at churches I went to and to an extent with peers outside school, and tutors at college. It was difficult to talk about what I wanted. I was discouraged. Even today I struggle with getting help I need in my life. When I had a care plan my social worker wrote I was socially anxious and found it hard to trust people. The whole document was under ten words of handwritten text.
When I did go back to school, I didn't find it easy to integrate. I found the noise too loud and I believe then I had severe anxiety. I was socially anxious because I was confused I hadn't succeeded in communicating through normal channels with teachers and friends. I found it frightening to navigate my social world again.
I was intimidated by school. The threat I would fail my exams was a genuine one since I had a huge amount of work to catch myself up on. I remember studying from the revision guides I bought for science and that was the first time I had seen a large portion of the material.
I returned to school with a huge desire for approval. I was at a dead end because I didn't know how to get what I wanted. Mix this cocktail up and you get experimentation, not all of it wise, or safe. By sixth form I was mildly disrespectful to teachers. My heart was let down.
My body and my heart were in the doldrums. I genuinely felt like I'd been put in the rubbish bin. To this day, I find it difficult to throw objects away, and cling to them because the process reminds me of that time in my life when I was discarded. Those filters adults applied to my teenage years effectively said 'not now,' 'not her time'. I took this to mean that it would never be my time to fit in. I was sure I would never get what I needed from the people who were in my life.
That was not a very resilient attitude to have. I would coach a teenager against this stance if I had the opportunity to counsel them now. All I needed was one adult to be kind to me. I wasn't looking hard enough for the silver lining. I didn't find that until I met friends at University who accepted me for who I was. This was shortly after swapping courses when I was 20. By that time we were all adults. This helped because children can get swamped by friends' mental health, however I believe they take their cues from parents and teachers, no matter how we say that peer groups are important.
Being ill was a scandal. I felt that labels teachers chose didn't suit me. I began to doubt who I was inside. The person they had known before I was ill had evaporated. If you asked them I'm sure they would blame busyness. Actually, this was a stigma and it's interesting that it exists around mental and physical health. There is a close relationship between minds and bodies. Hundreds of children of school age have asthma and diabetes but the emphasis in my school was on managing those conditions. I wasn't a good manager of my glandular fever, partly because it was quite mysterious to me how my body was changing.
What my body could and could not do wasn't well supported by people in my life encouraging me to safely do more. I could reach the ceiling of what my capacity was physically quite quickly. With the right help and patterns of rest I believe I would have recovered emotionally and physically. If I felt good I would push on and try to return to sports but my body needed gradual reintroduction to exercise and a base consistency. I struggled with relapses of fatigue until my late teens, and even now I monitor myself carefully. My tiredness could now possibly be attributed to other causes, for example, unresolved emotions.
My peers caught the stigma I gave off and I became isolated. My attitude wasn't positive at this point. I had grown cynical. To be sicker than is not to be better than. I think it may have felt like this to my friends because I was asking for special treatment. Perhaps I seemed superior? Or special.
Spiritually I also felt 'off.'
Even though I was doing my best at school to catch up, I felt like I didn't deserve it. I began to believe that I shouldn't do well. I felt guilty when I succeeded. This is a belief that people with depression will often share that they have. I didn't know I was depressed. When I started following these beliefs with behaviour at University, I didn't know they were part of depression, even once I knew that's what I had. I tried to suppress my sad feelings, to distract myself from them and replace them by loving people who could reciprocate, and they were usually the younger members of my family, my niece and nephews.
The last coping strategy is a good one, we all need love. Except I had adult needs as well and the children could not meet them, with the best will in the world. I put effort into sibling relationships. As time has gone on and I've become accepting of myself, I understand that my siblings and I have our own expressions of personality and not as much in common as I assumed we did when I was in my twenties. I had a Pollyanna attitude to my family, partly because I felt I'd failed to connect with my peer group once the structured activities I'd previously enjoyed fell away. I still put store by my family because they have helped to shape me, for better or worse.
Can you see how, if I'd had a person of authority or influence to help me express assertive doubt as a teenager, I would have been better off? Have you ever used assertive doubt to explore a clouded issue? Did it change the outcome, or how you felt about what happened? Could you use the technique of assertive doubt in your church?