The voices in my head

This might be a hard post for me to write and may not even make much sense when I’m done. But I hope that others can get something out of it.

Last week was a really hard week for me. I’m not even really sure why or how it all started. But I can tell you that somewhere in there I started listening to the voices in my head again and, maybe more importantly, believing what they had to say.

For most of my life, I’ve dealt with depression and one of the things that comes along with it for me, is an issue with self-doubt.

I’ve never really believed that I was very good at anything, and no matter how many times other people tell me I am I still find myself falling back into the habits of doubting myself and thinking that I don’t matter.

Most of the time I can handle these voices and put them in their place. I can see that they are just trying to keep me from doing anything with my life.

But last week the voices got really really loud and I had a really hard time blocking them out.

If you asked my wife she could tell you that I probably seemed a little off. I stopped wanting to be around other people and just retracted back into myself.

Looking back on it now, I can see that I was overreacting to everything. Getting mad at the kids for little things. Snapping at my wife for some perceived slight.

These voices told me that nobody really cared what I had to say.

Plus who was I to tell anybody anything about God?

I’m just a sinner. Look at your anger. How can you speak of God’s love with all that anger in you?

I have all of these ideas for things to do. hat I feel are what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. But yet I find myself doing none of them, because this doubt has built up so high inside me that I can’t see over it anymore.

I doubt that God really has any use for me.

I doubt that anyone is even paying attention to me or cares at all.

With all of this going on, I realized on Friday, that I couldn’t remember when the last time I had taken my meds was. So I started taking them again and realized that the voices in my head were just that.

Then I got some words of affirmation this weekend that people were listening and cared about what I was doing.

It was all I could do not to cry.

God heard my doubts and listened and answered them.