As a continuation of the Growing Up post, I moved into an apartment with my best friend while I was in college. During this time, I was working a part-time job, going to school for nursing full-time, and had started dating this guy (let’s call him John). As time went on, my best friend and I felt convicted that we were doing some things wrong, that we had used certain things for entertainment that should only be used in a marriage relationship. I felt intensely ashamed of this for a very long time, and am just now opening up about it for the first time. After we talked about it, we decided not to do those things anymore, but we had to figure out how to have a healthy friendship. This took longer than our time living together, and it took some time of not talking for a while, but I believe we have made a healthy, thriving friendship that keeps Jesus at the center.
While I was living in the apartments, dating this John character was going well. We agreed on most theological issues, we held the same values, and we enjoyed each other’s company. After a year and a half of dating, he asked me to marry him, and I said yes! He proposed in June, and the plan was to get married in January, right before my lease at the apartments was up.
However, after marital counseling (as we both agreed was something wise to do before getting married), we decided to change the wedding date to June of the following year. I was heavily struggling with nightmares, and felt depressed majority of the time. I had even debated taking my life on more than one occasion. There were also times that my legs would become paralyzed, and I had no idea why. After letting all this in the light, John suggested that I start individual counseling, and that we push back the wedding. So, I started seeing Jeri, and we decided to wait a full year between the proposal and the wedding.
While I’m waiting for the wedding to be here, and the lease on my apartment to be up, I am still struggling with these nightmares, hallucinations, and depression. I also found out in counseling that I had repressed memories of being raped as a child. That is when I kept an ad in the mail for burial insurance, wrote suicide letters, and planned to run away and never come back. I was thinking of maybe starting a new life, maybe ending mine. Elisabeth read her letter before I “ran away”, and she called the suicide prevention hotline. She talked me into emailing one of my nursing professors about it, and they kept me safe for the time being, having me give my word not to do anything for the next few weeks as I hopefully sought treatment.
My parents found out all this was happening through John (I was definitely angry with John for telling my parents). My mom and dad called me over to their house, and I went because I felt guilty. I knew suicide was wrong, but my feelings of utter despair and oppression weighed heavy, and I could see no other way out. When I arrived to my parents house, they wanted to talk to me privately, and some of their words were hurtful and caused further shame. Some of their words were “How could you…,” “Why would you…,” and “What were you thinking?”
I continue living in the apartments with Elisabeth for the next couple months; she remained a great friend throughout the entire time. There were also multiple times in high emotion settings that my legs would feel weak and then stop moving entirely. January rolls around, and I move back in with my parents from January to June. These were a rough five months. I wanted to have a more distant relationship with my parents while I figured out boundaries, while my mom wanted all the time with her daughter that she could get before I got married. She would barge in my room to come check on me when I didn’t want her to. On top of that, I was in my last semester of nursing school, and trying to plan a wedding. My mom wanted to basically plan the wedding for me, thinking that would take pressure off of me. But I wanted to make the decisions about my wedding plans and have control over something in my life.
My mom and I fought over some of the wedding details, but in the end it was a great wedding. John and I got married just a few weeks after I graduated college with a BSN; my life looked great on the outside. But even on our honeymoon, I was terrified. The idea of sex scared me. I mean taking your clothes off in front of someone else?!? That was terrifying, and the whole sex part from what I remembered as a child was filled with fear, pain, and no one taking my feelings into consideration. Then there was what I was taught as well. Basically, my parents taught me that sex was bad and evil unless it was within marriage. But, for some reason, my brain only caught that sex was bad and evil. This caused even more shame around sex.
Early on in our marriage, my legs would become paralyzed, sometimes for hours, one time for a couple days. At one point, I was home alone in a wheelchair while John was at work. I grabbed a pistol I knew we had and just held it, debating, for probably 30 minutes. I finally contacted John, who came home in an instant and brought me to the counselor’s office. She recommended I go to a nearby mental hospital, and I was there for five days. During this time, I was given a series of psychiatric tests, and placed on escitalopram.
When I got out of the mental hospital, my counselor (Jeri) recommended that I see one of her friends who could keep up with my medication. So I started seeing a psychiatric nurse practitioner, just a few months after John and I got married.
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