I stopped going to church in the spring. It wasn't a big decision I made after hours of contemplation, prayer and fasting, or discussions with friends. It was more of a realization I had after leaving my childhood church a couple of years ago. It was only after I left that I realized that the church had broken my heart and that going to church wasn't actually going to help me heal. I needed time and space to heal so i wouldn't become a bitter Christian. So I called the head of the ministry I was serving in and told him I wouldn't be coming back. He said he understood but was sad to see me go. In fact, I think he knew before I did that I would be leaving because he didn't even try to convince me I was wrong, like other people in the church have done in the past. I was a little surprised but relieved when he didn't try and tell me God had told him otherwise. I took this relief as a sign I was doing the right thing and left The Church. I had no plan to deal with my heart break but figured it was work itself out and started viewing my Sundays as more a recovery day then a day for the Lord. I would prep for the up coming week and enjoy a quite breakfast after sleeping in for the first it in my life.
Over the summer I did visit a couple of churches when I was visiting friends and family in other states. The messages were full of determination and love for disenfranchised people. For those who felt the church and country had forgotten about them. One of the churches had a Black Lives Matter banner out front and I didn't know how much I needed to hear the church say that until I saw it. I felt like I'd found what I'd been missing from the church back home. A place that made me feel like I mattered, like I was a person and they were waiting for me to show up. They weren't waiting for me to set up a camera or check the sound system or run the CG during worship. It felt like they saw me, Sydnie, and were glad I was there. It was unsettling at first. I'd never felt that from the Church before. I'd never felt like anyone in the church had ever missed me if I wasn't serving in the ministry. In fact feeling Seen helped me to realize that I often felt insignificant. In the past and sometimes now I struggle with negative self talk that makes me think that if someone ignored me when I spoke to them it's because I don't matter, not because they probably just didn't hear me. That if I didn't get a reply to my email it's because the other person didn't care, not because they are just busy and haven't gotten to it just yet.
I took all these realizations, balled them up, and shoved them down deep within me. I didn't want to deal with how small my childhood church had made me feel. I didn't want to tell my parents I no longer believed in The Church and wouldn't be going back for awhile. I didn't want to have to deal with having a broken heart because I had done everything I was taught to do to be a good Christian girl but still had ended up brokenhearted, single, and childless in my late thirties. It was too much to deal with so I didn't deal with it. I went to concerts, had drunken evenings with my friends, stayed out late, when to art shows, anything that distracted me from having to think about and process how insignificant I felt. Part of me knew it wasn't true, the feeling of insignificance, but more of me thought it was so I just avoided it and took the advice of Instagram and lived my best black life. And for awhile, it worked. I was able to ignore or push down my anxiety about these feelings and pretend they weren't effecting me.
Then I moved back in with my parents and things quickly started to fall apart, mentally anyway. Outwardly I appeared happy and joyful. I was tired, cause I had three life changes happen in a week, but I was fine. At least that's what I kept telling myself. I'm just tired and need to sleep. While traveling with my parents back to Dallas from Chicago I had what I thought was a heart attack. My mom started praying and called 911. She kept calling on Jesus and I wanted to tell her she was wasting her time. God didn't care about me, I was insignificant, and no matter how much she loved me God wouldn't be doing anything to help me. The paramedics arrived, put stickers all over my chest, performed test, and told me I wasn't having a heart attack. In fact, I was in perfect health, there was nothing wrong with me. They took me to the hospital and performed more detailed test but came to the same conclusion, I was in perfect health and my heart was very healthy. It was only on the ride to the hospital that I realized I'd had a panic attack. All the work I'd done to ignore or cover up my sadness and anxiousness was undone in a matter of minutes. It was a reality I hadn't accounted for.
When we finally arrived home, the depression fully hit me. Not as hard as when my aunt unexpectedly passed or when I'd gotten fired or when I realized that the American education system is fucking over poor people and mostly poor brown people so it can reinforce the status quo. Those times it felt like I was floating in space, untethered to reality with no way to find my way back. This time the depression was a pool of sadness, it's depth's unknown. I was the lone swimmer in this pool and it kept pulling me down deeper into it, the weight of the water pressing in on me, weighting me down. It was hard to get out of bed, hard to keep the sadness off my face, hard just to function as an adult. So I did something I've been putting for more than a year. I got a therapist. I took the advice of my internet friend Crissle and signed up for TalkSpace. I knew an in person therapist would be more effective, and I will more than likely end up with an in person therapist, but taking that first step was necessary to help pull me out of the pool.
No one tells you how to fix a broken heart, they only tell you that time heals all. I don't know that I really believe this but I know I have some work to do. This is bound to be a long journey that has no real end and a lot of peaks and valleys but it's the journey I'd rather take then let myself be pulled to the bottom of the endless pool of sadness.
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