The Invisible Becoming Visible
A lot has kept me away from writing this past year. This year has been oddly difficult, and in some ways, extremely heavy. This is a space where I usually come to externally process different moments in my life, and where the Lord always happens to speak to me - showing me through my writing how He showed up for me, even when I didn’t initially see it. I can make excuses all day long for why I haven’t allowed myself to write, but the only real and honest reason was fear. I was afraid to bring my pain to the Lord in this space. I was afraid to hear how He worked through the brokenness that I just want to keep hidden.
Well, I guess here I am now, so He has something to add to my version of the story…
After graduating college in May 2022, I had written Healing is a Journey. I was in a much more hopeful state of mind then, with this whole “healing from a brain injury” process. I did learn quite a bit that year about healing and recovery, taking the time to rest, and even uniting my sufferings to Christ. But boy was that only the beginning of my suffering. The only difference I can see now between the year of “recovery” and the year post-college was that I had lost my hope. The same hope that I had just written about a year ago.
I went from a college student with a strong community and a way to engage my mind to someone whose community had seemingly vanished and now I had to find a job and a place to live. To add another layer, my team of doctors had released me from their weekly care and told me I now had the tools to manage my symptoms on my own… but what I wasn’t prepared to manage on my own were the hidden symptoms of one struggling with their mental health. Physical pain came first, mental and emotional pain were shoved to the side…
From then on, I felt isolated, forgotten, and dismissed. I felt like nobody could help me or even begin to understand what I was going through. I felt invisible, just like the nature of my injury.
As someone who has suffered from many TBIs/Concussions, I can testify to how much they really change you. The part of me that had changed the most was the mental battles I was constantly going through. Over time, my hope was destroyed again and again and I was left with a heaviness that continued to make me feel more and more alone. I started to feel distant from God. I was angry. I really wasn’t willing to suffer anymore…especially for the sake of the Cross like I had been so reliant on before.
I felt like a fraud. Spiritually, I was in constant darkness. I let the enemy isolate me and convince me that there are ways for my pain to end for good. He built a strong brick wall around me and enclosed me in darkness. It had only made my pain worse, and now I was far from the source of my hope and strength.
When you have a brain injury, you face two battles. The injury itself, and living in a world where so few understand what you’re up against. On the outside, I seemed fine, maybe a little uncomfortable to those who knew me, but to everyone else, I was fine. I wasn’t fine. I was suffering from chronic pain. I was hurting deeply inside. Afraid of my thoughts. Ashamed of them. How did I get here? Why am I feeling so hopeless?
One day this winter, I had been so tempted to give up, but through Divine Providence, an encounter with my roommate might have just saved me. This happened a few times over the course of the year, and praise God for His interventions.
We were having one of our normal living room “check-in chats” and I was feeling pretty far away. The Holy Spirit was definitely present in our conversation as we found ourselves diving deeper into the current state of our hearts. I was still numb… but eventually I found myself sharing this image of me trapped behind this brick wall in darkness. The longer I was behind it, the more heavy and numb I was becoming. I could still feel a sliver of hope from certain parts of my life that kept me pushing. This tiny bit of hope helped me to hit the wall with all I had. It wouldn’t fall - wouldn’t even crack. But then, something (the Holy Spirit) prompted me to reach out my hand and touch one of the bricks. It had fallen and a powerful light shone through. On the other side was the Lord, encouraging me and reminding me that He was still there and that He could see how greatly I was suffering. He encouraged me that it only takes small steps of faith to let the light back in, to knock the bricks down. With His peaceful words, I knew that it would take some time to knock down the rest of the brick wall, but with the help of the Holy Spirit, I could take on brick by brick until the whole thing was gone.
The light had become visible for the first time in a long while. It wasn’t an instant demolition, and there may still be some bricks there today, but I was reminded that all of my “invisible suffering” was at least visible to the Lord and that He was suffering with me. Through His gentle grace, I am still here today. Although there are parts of the wall that are still up, I am making progress in learning how to lean on my faith again in this battle with chronic pain. Without the Lord, my family, or my amazing friends surrounding me, it could’ve been a much different story.
