A Million Skies

Secure in God's Strength When Your Mind Can't Rest

Abigail Alleman

• Publisher: Leafwood Publishers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781684264001
• eBook ISBN: 9781684269365
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In A Million Skies, Abigail shares her journey to gain a true vision about the mental illness that radically altered her life: bipolar disorder. After facing several near-death experiences and a tumultuous fallout from her initial diagnosis, she was left with little of the life she had known. In time, Abigail has found victory in her mind, but that has meant that she has had to shift her views of herself, others, life, and God.
More than one woman's story, A Million Skies is an invitation to understand mental illness in new ways. The reader who enters the pages of A Million Skies will find the author's contagious courage, inspiring journey, and words of challenge compelling them forward.

1

Mental Illness Doesn’t Write My Story

From Weakness to Strength

November 2015

I shifted nervously on the caramel-colored couch in my therapist’s office. The Florida sunshine fell as a gentle waterfall that autumn day. But I wasn’t shining. I was battling burdens of guilt, shame, and fear while trying to come to grips with my bipolar disorder.

I had been diagnosed only a few months earlier, in the wake of devastation and trauma. The identification of my mental illness had removed a boulder from my chest, giving me something concrete to explain what I had been experiencing for fifteen years. Yet, as can easily happen with a mental illness, I began allowing myself to be defined by my diagnosis.

This label didn’t reveal itself as neon letters scrawled across my life. Instead, it subtly weaved insidious roots into the core of my being, making me feel as though each day held shadow, something lurking that was bigger than life. I feared a pending storm would either wreak full-blown destruction or ratchet up my anxiety as the tempest skirted around me.

On this particular morning of mundane—all drama held at bay—I folded my notes from the session and put them in my purse. As I prepared to leave, my therapist said, “I want you to begin to see your bipolar disorder as a blessing, a strength.”

I paused and blinked. She might as well have told me to hang the stars. It was an impossible thing, what she was asking. How would I even begin?

Mood disorders like bipolar trap people on a roller coaster of emotions, plunging them from dizzying highs to bottomless lows. Each person’s experience is slightly different, but I think many can relate when I describe my own experiences.

I have been through seasons of “hypomania” filled with an exhilarating explosion of ideas and creative processes. However, this intense mental stimulation cannot be sustained, and is eventually followed by sleeplessness. This lack of sleep, coupled with a continual cycling of thoughts, lead me to delusional thinking, spiritual visions, and hallucinations. I’ve been hospitalized twice in this state because I lost touch with reality and the world around me.

The proverbial truth that what goes up must come down is demonstrated in mood swings that produce volatility and irrationality among other behaviors. When my mania abates, I then feel the weight of depression. As I am writing this book, I have more than twenty years of experience with bipolar disorder. I have spent about 95 percent of my unstable times in depression and 5 percent in bouts of mania. However, that 5 percent of time has produced the most devastating experiences. With my strong tendency toward depression, trying to stabilize after a manic episode felt like trying to stand upright while shouldering two-ton weights.

In light of this knowledge, I drove home pondering my therapist’s words. How could my erratic behavior, which hurt those I loved most, be viewed as a blessing? How could the same chemical imbalance that landed me in a foreign hospital for two weeks be seen as a strength? In so many ways, I had absolutely no idea.

Unnaming Reflection

Yet, looking deeper into my recent journey with mental illness, I inched toward my therapist’s words. I realized I had seen myself at my worst in the last year and I had survived this intense time with my sanity intact. Therefore, there was a strength to be found beyond all the mess, and maybe there was a way to see my journey with bipolar disorder positively. For all the pain and struggle, I had come through stronger, more resilient. It was easy to fear that mental illness would defeat me once and for all. So, in a paradoxical way, I was grateful for the experience of bipolar disorder because it made an understanding of inward strength possible.

I felt a touch of open space, the grace to crack the door to this new perspective, this sky of promise. I thought that if I could capture one moment—one layer of warm brightness—at a time, I could illuminate the darkness. But I didn’t know how to make that goal a reality.

I could still see clearly the whole picture of my tumultuous journey, the traumatic events of my hospital stay, and the weeks leading up to it. As a person who believes in the spiritual realm, I see a connection between the lies we believe and the nature of an illness like bipolar disorder. When stable, I believe I can hear the voice of God and his truth. When in a state of mania or depression, my judgment is off, and it is easy to believe lies, which are generated by the evil one. In my worst days, these lies took up residence, and they undid me.

Dan B. Allender refers to this evil as “unnaming.” He writes, “In those moments of unnaming, when we have lost ourselves, we must remember to return to our past redemptions to find God’s marks of glory on our abandonment, betrayal and shame.”¹ In the episodes in my recent past, an unnaming process had occurred. The essentials of true identity were lost. My diagnosis and its milieu took the precious gift of Abigail, Hebrew for source of joy, and all the meaning that my name entailed. Bipolar was a dark lens defining and confining me.

That dark state was not what my loved ones wanted for me and definitely not what an intimate, personal, naming God desired for me. Even when I was soul-weary, truth declared there was something more. I needed to make a fundamental change in how I viewed my life. And right now was the time to do it.

In the days, months, and years after the therapist startled me with her words, I sifted through my memories and reflected on my past. And I came to see clearly that my life had been saved repeatedly. In fact, the redemptions have been too many to count.

Of course, God had placed ongoing gifts in my life:

• A twin sister to walk alongside me through our family’s difficult circumstances and the parts of me triggered by those circumstances.
• The faith of generations passed down by grandmothers who crocheted blankets and handmade lace doilies with beautiful intricacy.
• The ever-present bowed head of my daddy as he stormed the gates of heaven.
• The delicious delight of my mom’s homemade savory and sweet creations, made with worn hands and a heart full of love.

All these gifts spoke of an intentional care that was so tender and freely given. Graces like these rained down like falling stars to collect.

And there were more dramatic events. My sharp-witted, cool-under-pressure mother had saved me from choking to death when I was four years old. And I survived without a scratch on me or my car when I spun out in heavy traffic on Interstate 95 near Boston, doing a cycle of 360s. When I was safe at home, I had called my mother and wept. I had survived at ages four and at twenty-four. Surely, I concluded, God meant for me to be alive.

And just a few months before my pivotal therapist appointment, I had nearly died, most likely due to an allergic reaction to a heavy dose of sedative, a story that I tell in more detail in Chapter Two. During my near-death days in a hospital in Budapest, Hungary, a thousand and more voices had been lifted in prayer for me. There, too, God was speaking life. At least these three times, I had balanced on death’s edge—yet, I lived. During my recovery from the trauma in Hungary, I could almost hear the Spirit whisper, “I don’t want you to just survive your life—I want you to thrive in it.”

I again felt that Spirit-sentiment palpably as I grappled with the radical words of my therapist: “I want you to begin to see your bipolar disorder as a blessing, a strength.” As I began to embrace God’s desire for me to truly live, I was starting to unfurl in those shame-ridden places, opening to the faintest pinprick of a brightening sky. By no means was I going to stop any time soon.

Beautifully Made

A couple weeks after that mind-shifting appointment with my therapist, I was walking on the sidewalk outside our apartment. It wasn’t the place I would expect to receive a grand revelation, but it is the place I received one while listening to an audiobook by Timothy Keller about prayer.

At one point, Keller explained that no one person could have written the Bible, with its various emotions, intellectual connections, and manifestations of wisdom.² The implication of what he was saying stunned me, and I could feel a dawning enlightenment of how I should view myself. While I certainly could not have written all of the Bible, the ways I’m wired make it easier for me to understand certain parts. For example, in the Psalms, I connect with both the heights of praise and the depths of crying out. This isn’t incidental, given the cycles of highs and lows fostered by my bipolar disorder. Also, the left, analytical side of my brain connects with the books of the law and the right side of my brain treasures the artistry of the prophetic books. In this moment, I started to see that when I was stable and treated, the heights and depths of my emotions and my ways of thinking could shine like the assets they were.

As I was listening to Keller, the Holy Spirit began helping me understand how I was made and how I could reclaim my past. I had been beautifully made, and I began to take ownership of my story. I began to recognize that when a great, chilling darkness hovered over my memory, hissing ugly words like relapse, breakdown, and insanity, the evil one was conspiring to hold me hostage. But now I was hearing a new voice, and a battle cry started welling up within me: “No more!”

My friend, when we stare down evil, we must declare, “You will not have me!” Our next step must be to trust in the goodness of our Creator, to see how we have been made and recognize that we are made for so much more.

Taking on an Active Role

When I worked at a camp for children who had special needs, I learned the “hand over hand” method for helping kids cut, color, eat, and do just about anything else. I would place my hand over theirs, assisting them to make a craft or get nutrients into their precious bodies. I have used the same technique with my own children, feeling their darling, chubby hands underneath mine as they learned how to write their name, draw a person, shoot a basketball, play tennis, and more.

And so it is with us and God. He’s hand over hand in all the minutiae of our lives, showing us how to make the next move, pen the next mark on the paper, hit the ball, pick up the phone. He is authoring my story and yours, and he calls forth our deepest selves to write with him. Sometimes as we grow in exquisite ways, it’s difficult to distinguish between hands because our movements have become fused with his.

The strength I gain from my bipolar disorder—I know now—is that my struggle allows me to see my past and present more fully, more victoriously. Granted, my struggle sometimes takes me into a dark abyss, but I believe that God can and does redeem the pain, even the torture that I’ve endured. And I have faith that he will offer that redemption again and again.

While we might think we would be better off escaping what has happened in the past, I agree with Allender when he says, “Without our past we are hollow and plastic beings who have only common names and conventional stories. When we enter into our story at the point we lost our name, we are most likely to hear the whisper of our new name. Remember, God is still writing.”³

We’re more than the bleak skies of our low points. We’re more than the torment of our mental storms. We’re more than forecasts of gray skies like those I experienced in the long, damp winters in Hungary. From deep within me rises a force of will that calls me to be fully alive to the clear, crisp, glorious nature of longed-for days. I’m choosing life over death, promise over destruction, love over hate—an azure sky over the black of night.

I want to inspire you to take a white-knuckled hold on the redemption of your story. Open the eyes of your heart to see what has been “bought back” or redeemed. This has become the linchpin by which my entire world of thinking and seeing holds together. Jesus and his redemption.

Always Present

The true light, Jesus the Word who took on flesh, came and faced all the horrors and alienation of our world (John 1:14). He faced the all-out temptation of Satan at the peak of his weakness and hunger from forty days without food and drink (Matt. 4:1–11). He breathed the healing life into the sick and weak. At the cross, he faced the darkest sky ever known, when his intimate, always-existing relationship with his Father was completely severed. Yet he overcame.

His story is the one that ultimately owns my story and yours too. His resurrection life, defeating death and the grave, speaks acutely into my journey with mental illness. Jesus must be the focus of my eyes, the perception of my skies, no matter what they hold or how deep their darkness. Because of who he is and his guarantee that I’ve been made in his image, my created light has found his, piercing every layer of gray and black.

The belief that God could and would redeem the rampant brokenness of my life has fundamentally changed me. I have leaned hard into the promise and called forth a more-precious-than-gold and steelier resolve to cry out with Job: “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes” (Job 19:25–27).

Whose words on grief, life destruction, and redemption could stand taller than Job’s? Although none of his issues described in the Bible include diagnosed mental illness, Job nearly lost his mind because of the pain he endured. Yet in the thick of his emotional turmoil, he clung to and cried out with those words of enduring faith.

My friend, I know you are hurting, but you aren’t meant to linger in a dark, damp corner, folded up in pain and feeling utterly alone. You’re meant to bask in the sunshine and its healing warmth. You are made for something more than suffering. Your struggles were not—and are not—against flesh and blood. Instead, they are against the powers of darkness that want to take you down. My friend, the evil one is planning to wreck and destroy your life. But God is present. Look to the skies and don’t be afraid of the storm.

As my therapist challenged me, so I challenge you. Think of your mental illness, your hardship, as a strength. It does not need to define you or limit you. Your story is still being written, and good is present. Are you able to believe that something greater is waiting for you if you stay the course and refuse to lose heart?

2

Learning How to See

From Despair to Hope

February 2015

Light funneled through the thick-paned window of Szent Imre Kórház (St. Henry’s Hospital), winding its way over various machines and hospital beds before rising to touch my eyelids. I awoke. After three days of sedatives and mental mayhem, I clearly and brightly came alive to a new day.

Kati, a doctor who loved Jesus, sat beside my bed, hands folded. When she saw me open my eyes, she said, “I am so happy you are awake. I have been praying for you.” With that simple sentence, the Holy Spirit greeted me with one of the more than thousand voices that had been praying for my life.

As myriad tubes were removed from my body, I felt the presence of God. It was no accident that I was alive. I had been unable to breathe when I was rushed to the ICU. I could remember only a couple...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Ready for a New Day
• 1 Mental Illness Doesn't Write My Story: From Weakness to Strength
• 2 Learning How to See: From Despair to Hope
• 3 The Openness of the Morning: From Endings to Beginnings
• 4 Warm Hues Beckon: From Exile to Homecoming
• 5 The Colors of Your Mind: From Isolation to Intimacy
• 6 Brighter Days Coming: From Shame to Freedom
• 7 Crimson Covers the Darkness: From Fear to Love
• 8 Dancing at Sunrise: From Sorrow to Joy
• 9 The Beauty of Stillness: From War to Peace
• 10 All Turns Golden: From Suffering to Redemption
• 11 The Sun Is Rising: From Closed to Open
• 12 The Brilliance of Overcoming: From Defeat to Triumph
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Discussion Questions