My Little Way

“I am perfectly content to go on suffering in body and soul for years, if that would please God.  I am not in the least afraid of living a long time; I am ready to go on fighting.”

Not going to lie, this past week has been ROUGH. Between finals, having a bad doctor’s appointment, trying to figure out what to do next year, and trying to gain back the weight I lost, this week has made my anxiety go through the roof. On top of that, even after months of appeals and arguments, insurance still won’t accept and approve the treatment that I need to get better, so we will have to wait what could be another month or so. My depression has been getting worse and it has affected how I’ve been seeing the situation with my stomach, my classes, and just life in general. I have been feeling so defeated and too tired to keep on going. I am one of those people who always feel guilty for things like that and it makes me feel terrible about myself. Why am I not strong enough to keep going? I’ve been in a constant state of supposedly “not caring.” However, I feel like that has been my way of trying to avoid how serious this condition is getting or a way for me to block it out and hide my anxiety and fear.

One of the reasons why I feel so close to St. Therese and sometimes see parts of myself in her is that she also suffered from depression. Between all of the loss she had throughout her life and her battle with tuberculosis, everything took a toll on her mental health. She even extremely doubted God’s existence because of all of this. After years of suffering tuberculosis, these doubts and her depression became worse and she was even tempted to commit suicide. One thing that gives me hope sometimes in my darkest and most painful times is that even though St. Therese experienced these same kinds of feelings, she did not give up faith. She didn’t necessarily always have the feeling of faith, but she still held onto it, no matter how hard it was. She didn’t do it because she thought that if she had faith she would be healed, or God somehow appeared to her and said He would heal her if she had faith. Those both would have been nice for her to hear in the moment, but she did it because of her strong persistence to believe. She said, “While I do not have the joy of faith, I am trying to carry out its works at least. I believe that I have made more acts of faith in this past year than all through my whole life.” Just because I may not feel consoled in my time of pain by the thought of faith, I still need to have it, and live my life through it.

I also feel connected to St. Therese because of her struggle with anxiety. When she was 12, she suffered from scrupulosity, which is a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. People who suffer from this have symptoms such as being excessively fearful of being punished for wrongs, believing actions that are not sinful to be sinful, and doubting forgiveness after having been forgiven. These symptoms tortured young Therese and it brought on a lot of anxiety. She had a lot of anxiety, fear, and uncertainty in her life because of this, and it helps knowing that I have someone to look up to that knows exactly how I am feeling. Sometimes I feel like St. Therese is a big sister to me, and that I can always look to her because she has gone through it already and knows how I feel.

She didn’t let her mental illness or her physical illness define her. Yeah, today a big part of her story is that she died at 24 from tuberculosis, but the main reason people remember her are for her works. St. Therese is a model of how physical or mental illness isn’t a form of weakness and that it can also exist in a life of holiness. Seeing how St. Therese, a Doctor of the Church, experienced these kind of feelings and sufferings shows us how saints had human experiences too. It gives me hope and helps me to know that a saint as great as she struggled with the same things I am struggling with. It makes the life of a great saint less intimidating, and inspires me to make the most out of suffering like she did. Her story shows us how mental and physical illness doesn’t mean we can’t be holy and that we’re seen differently by God. In fact, instead of illness breaking us down, I feel as if it makes us whole. I wish I could be like St. Therese and to be able to keep fighting and have that strong will, but sometimes it’s just too hard. It’s in those times when we feel most discouraged and weak that we should turn to Christ and see him in his suffering and how He didn’t give up on us. The Little Flower didn’t wilt, and neither should we.