If you’ve been around this blog for a while, then you’ve probably seen posts from the Womanly Wednesday series.  I started this post back in fall 2015 as a way to give different women a chance to their stories.  I believe so strongly that vulnerability about our struggles is what brings us together and brings us toward healing, and I loved that my blog was a place where women could share and read about the hard things we all go through without shame.

For the first year or so of the series, I pretty much just begged any and all friends I could think of to share a part of their story.  I had friends from my childhood in California, my college years in Davidson, my travels abroad, and my life here in Kansas City share pieces of their hearts, their most challenging moments beautifully expressed for the world to see and know.

My friend Taylor shared a post about her journey with life post-college and Haley shared a post about the tension of trusting God with our desires for adventure.

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! In this series, different women share their struggles, bravely opening up about their stories so that other people would be inspired and encouraged.  Today’s guest poster Liz is a close friend of mine and I am SO excited about the blog/online community she has started called Flourish.   Make sure to pop over and check out what’s happening there – it’s pretty darn great! 

“Without fear there is no wisdom because we’re not stopping to assess the circumstances, respect the challenges, reach out for help, prepare for the results, and then march into them.” -Chip Dodd, The Voice of the Heart

It was baby dedication Sunday at church. As the parents introduced their children, my husband Matt leaned over and whispered sweetly into my ear, “Someday our parents will be here watching us dedicate our children.” In an instant, those simple words made their way into a dam full of stored up tears and opened the floodgates of my heart. There was no going back: I was in the middle of service weeping–trying not to make snotty noises—and poor Matt confused as to what he said wrong. As we got into our car after service, Matt broke the silence, “Do you want to talk about what happened in there?” I stared out the window, “I’m afraid that it won’t be us.”

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! In this series, different women share their struggles, bravely opening up about their stories so that other people would be inspired and encouraged.  Today’s guest poster is my friend Camille.  She was one of my closest Young Life girls when I led YL in college and it was such a joy to walk through life with her those four years.  Also, check out the Womanly Wednesday archives to read other posts from this series! 

As a child, I remember running into my parents’ bedroom every time there was a thunderstorm. I remember waking up in the middle of the night crying because I feared that our house was going to catch on fire. I remember making my mom double check to make sure the doors were locked at night just in case a “robber” was planning to break into our suburban home and steal my stuffed animals.  As silly as these memories are, they are all rooted in one thing: fear. And as far back as I can remember, fear has been present in my life. It may have begun with an irrational fear of thunderstorms, but over the years, it’s grown much deeper than that.  

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! In this series, different women share their struggles, bravely opening up about their stories so that other people would be inspired and encouraged.  Make sure to check out the Womanly Wednesday archives to read other posts from this series! 

A wave is defined as a disturbance that spreads through a medium.

Picture the ocean on a calm day. Gentle wave after wave meet the shore, predictably and harmlessly. And then one rogue wave crashes in and disrupts the balance. Maybe there was something that caused it – a change in the tide, or the wind, or an undercurrent. Maybe a storm is coming and the new roughness was fully predictable. Maybe nothing changed in the ocean or on the shore, and that rogue wave was just that… rogue.

There is a reason we say that grief comes in waves. Before or after a storm, the surf is rough and grief is raw. It sweeps you off your feet. But time passes and pain fades. You learn to walk in the surf.

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! In this series, different women share their struggles, bravely opening up about their stories so that other people would be inspired and encouraged.  Make sure to check out the Womanly Wednesday archives to read other posts from this series! 

A month before my 19th birthday, my boyfriend of 1.5 years left home to serve the people of South Korea for two years, and invite them to Christ. During this time we would only be able to communicate by handwritten letters, and occasional emails. To say it felt like the end of the world to my little teenage heart would be an understatement. I cried myself to sleep, missing him. And I remained adamant that I would “wait” for him, and we had plans to marry when he came back. But we also knew that it might not happen, and that two years was a long time.

Shortly after he left, I started my sophomore year at college, and made some amazing friends. Through one of them, I met a boy. We’ll call him Steven. From the moment we bumped into each other at his family’s cabin in early spring, I was smitten. We started Facebook messaging, which led to studying together at the library, which led to watching a movie at his house, which led to holding hands, which led to lunches on campus and late night chats. I fell fast and hard, and for the first time in the eight months since my boyfriend had left I thought to myself, “Maybe I could fall in love with some one else. Maybe there is some one else out there for me.” And that was scary and liberating all at the same time.

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! In this series, different women share their struggles, bravely opening up about their stories so that other people would be inspired and encouraged.  Make sure to check out the Womanly Wednesday archives to read other posts from this series! 

I have struggled with my self-worth since I was a child. I never could handle it if my ‘best’ friend had another friend. I was literally that person who thought “well if they have another friend, they must not like me.” Thanks to this horrible self-worth, I’ve made a lot of stupid choices with my relationships. I’ve dated sweet guys whom I’ve left because they weren’t enough. I’ve dated real jerks whom I clung to desperately even after multiple breakups and cold shoulders. I have really been a great definition of ‘hot mess’.

The worst, and somehow best, choice I ever made was becoming “the other woman”. I don’t mean this metaphorically; when I was 24 I began a relationship with a married man. I was under no illusion about his relationship status. I knew he was married. When we first met, there was zero intention of pursuing any kind of relationship with him, because, ya know, married. Fast forward a year, and completely out of left field he was oh-so-stereotypically Snapchatting me while he was out of town. Could it be more cliche?! Gross.

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! In this series, different women share their struggles, bravely opening up about their stories so that other people would be inspired and encouraged.  Make sure to check out the Womanly Wednesday archives to read other posts from this series! 

Faith in God is a lot like a roller coaster. You are along for the ride, which includes climbing, dips, speed, and frequent loops. You buckle in, trusting that God is in control and capable to handle all the dips and loops that life has to offer. One of the most challenging aspects in my faith has been releasing my control and trusting God. However, 5 years ago, God decided to humble me and teach me about absolute trust and faith.

On January 6, 2011, my husband and I were expecting our second child. We received a call that, unfortunately, too many women have had to receive. Our second born had a condition which had caused his brain to not form properly. The prognosis was grim, he would die within my womb, or live shortly after birth. Beyond being devastated, I had no control, and that was more than I could handle.

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Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! In this series, different women share their struggles, bravely opening up about their stories so that other people would be inspired and encouraged.  Make sure to check out the Womanly Wednesday archives to read other posts from this series! 

Growing up, I don’t think I knew I was depressed even though all of the signs were there. In middle school, I begged my mom to let me stay home even though I loved school and learning. I would come home, go to my room, and just cry. I remember always feeling alone and sad, but I never wanted to talk to anyone about it because they would ask why, and I wouldn’t have an answer. In my mind, I had no reason to feel the way I did. On the rare occasion when I did talk about it, I usually got one of two answers: 1) Happiness is a choice, or 2) It will pass. And so I took the “fake it ‘til you make it” route. I didn’t know I would be faking happy for the next decade and a half.

College was more of the same. I buried myself in my schoolwork, and although I was busy to the point of exhaustion, at least I wasn’t feeling like ending it all. But some months, my depression was constant. I would go to bed sobbing and wake up to find that sleep no longer cleared my mind. During the months when the clouds had lifted, I thought that maybe this was finally the end, and that maybe I really was okay. It always came back.

Since high school, I wrestled with God over my depression. I wondered why He allowed me to be depressed. I remember begging God to help me, and I remember feeling disappointed and angry when nothing changed. I looked up every verse in the Bible that talked about depression, trying to hold on to anything I could find that would justify the way I felt. I settled on thinking that my depression was a trial and God was testing me like He tested Job.

After college, I stayed busy. I moved up to Northern Virginia, participated in a church fellowship program, moved to Arlington, held two different jobs, got married, moved two more times, started graduate school, and bought a house. I was mostly unaware that I kept myself busy, but I began to notice that if I was alone for too long, I would end up curled up in a ball crying on the couch. Grad school—with all of it’s challenges, excitement, and pure brutality—is a lot of alone time, and depression became a louder part of my mental life. I was still holding out hope that if I was disciplined enough in my Bible study, prayer, and Church, that God would one day take my depression away. But my spiritual life turned into a to-do list, and I realized that the more I checked off the boxes, the more frustrated I became that my depression wasn’t getting better. I truly felt stuck and more depressed than ever. I stopped going to God with my depression because I was too tired and too angry.  

Up until this point, I believed using medication for depression was a cop out. To me, taking anti-depressants meant that you were either too lazy to put in the work to figure out what’s really going on or you were side-stepping God. If God had a purpose for my depression, then taking medication would nullify that purpose. It was cheating. In Christian terms, I was trying to fix my depression on my own. If I could just hold on a little longer, go to the right counselor, or become a more mature Christian (check off those boxes!), then one day all of my sadness would disappear. And on top of all of this, I had a family history of depression, so this struggle all seemed very normal to me. None of my family members took medication, so I didn’t see it as a real option.

Through our church, I met a friend who was super honest with me about her depression right from the beginning. She took anti-depressants and talked openly with me about the struggles of depression and medication. I had never known a Christian to be so open about mental health. I realized that the primary reason I refused to take medication was pride. I wanted to fix my mind all by myself. After a lot of deliberating, I decided to see the school psychiatrist and hear what he had to say. I filled a prescription for Wellbutrin and went home with no intention of taking it.

But what if God was asking me to put down my pride and trust that he has put these people and this option in my path because he knows the hard choice for me is to humbly rely on something other than myself to help? Let me be clear: anti-depressants aren’t “the answer,” nor do I want to tell anyone what they should or should not do about their psychological well-being. But what I realized about my Christian community was that no one was saying it was okay. Instead, I heard that depression and anxiety had more to do with your relationship with God than with the reality of being human. No one was saying it was okay to treat depression as you would treat high blood pressure or physical pain. Depression seemed to be only situational and environmental. I spent the past fourteen years of my life thinking that my depression couldn’t be biological.

This is all hard to talk about because there are a few things that contradict what I am saying. First, I believe that psychological differences aren’t always in need of fixing. Of course I don’t want to be sad or anxious, but to expect to be always chipper and relaxed is absurd. Second, I have a family history of depression, and no one else takes medication, so why should I? Third, I do believe God can alleviate my depression and anxiety.

For me, being on anti-depressants isn’t a cop out, and it doesn’t mean I’m weak. It means God has led me to the conclusion that relying on Him means relying on modern medicine. Anti-depressants provide me with the mental space to pursue God more fully because I’m not only praying about how He can help me be less sad. It’s an exercise in letting go of the idea that I can fix it all by myself.

For the Christian community, I wish we would talk about mental health more openly. Everyone’s story is different, and there’s no one solution to depression. I am still very much in the middle of this journey into understanding what it means to trust God with my mental health and letting go of this idea that I need to do this without help. My depression is a part of me that God made. It’s a hard part and of course I wish it wasn’t there. But through all of this, I realized that sometimes God gives us answers that we aren’t expecting—answers that force us to put down our “I can do it myself” attitude and just trust Him.

Ashley is a writer, teacher, library-lover, and wife of a medical student. She just finished her Masters in English at Virginia Tech and is now pursuing her Masters in Creative Writing at Hollins University. She loves to read and write about disability advocacy, race relations, mental health, and comics. She also likes to make art out of everything. You can follow her on instagram and facebook.

Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! In this series, different women share their struggles, bravely opening up about their stories so that other people would be inspired and encouraged.  Make sure to check out the Womanly Wednesday archives to read other posts from this series! 

Cancer is one of those things you don’t think much about until it shows up in your own life. At least that’s what happened to me. I knew people—friends, family members, coworkers—who had cancer, and my heart went out to them. But I never fully considered the emotion and struggle that dreaded word brings until I heard it from the lips of my own doctor. That was in 2010, and my life has never been the same.

When a 6-inch tumor was removed from my thigh in the summer of 2010, I thought I had beat cancer. I was thankful to resume life and put the whole ordeal behind me.

And I did…for three years.

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