Sunrise Tantalize

For the last month or so, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. As in, I can’t fall asleep until 5 or 6 in the morning when I am so exhausted my mind can’t keep me awake anymore. I am and have been so anxious! And it’s not something I can control. These anxious thoughts about moving keep entering my head. Once they’re there, I can control them. I tell myself to STOP! And the thought goes away just to be replaced by another one. This all wasn’t helped by trying to go off one of my anti-depressants (on my psychiatrist’s recommendation). After trying to do that for two weeks, not being able to contact my psychiatrist, being so miserable one night that I was considering going to the psych ER because I was so sleep-deprived, my psychiatrist finally called me back and said, “I think you should go back on the wellbutrin.” Gee, you think?! So I have and it has helped somewhat. But apparently moving is so stressful that the meds cannot overcome it.

Moving is extremely stressful. I move in less than two weeks. This is the first time I’m moving away from my family. Even though I didn’t live at home, I went to college in the same town that my parents live in. If I really, really needed my family, they were there. I’m also moving away from my friends though I’ve done that several times before. Once I move, I’ll be starting a busy, stressful program at a school that it about 1/32 the size of my old school, and I won’t have time to miss anything if my depression kicks in next winter. But I did really want to get into this program and I am excited about it. And I’ll only be two hours away from the Boy, instead of 12 hours away. That means we can see each other on weekends! That means we’ll finally see each other after 10 weeks of not seeing each other. I keep telling myself that I’ll be okay, and I know I’ll be fine once I move, but until then it seems that I am destined to be sleepless.

Last night I was reading the Joseph Smith book because it was distracting enough to make my anxious thoughts go away. Yes, yes, I know I’m a dork. At about 4 am, I decide that I should probably stop watching tv/ reading and go to bed. So I lay in bed for an hour praying to God to take away my anxiety so I can sleep. I was also praying about why do people get sick, have chronic illnesses, and disabilities. I’ve been thinking this one over due to my own annual bouts of depression, finding out a ward member’s daughter has cancer, and hearing someone say that Melanie Roach said that her child with autism chose to come to her family when he was a spirit.  At 5 am I am still wide awake. Grumbling, I reach for the Joseph Smith book again because it’s nonfiction and nonfiction generally makes me sleepy. I open a page at random and find myself looking at the chapter called, “Stand fast through the Storms of Life.” There are my answers. We struggle because we must be tested before we can receive the blessings of the atonement. But God will support us. So did I just randomly happen to flip open to the right page? Maybe, maybe not. I think it wasn’t an accident. After reading the chapter I switched off my light, closed my eyes, and slept.

Now I leave you with a quote from Joseph Smith, “Stand fast, ye Saints of God, hold on a little while longer, and the storm of life will be past..” It’s only two more weeks; I can make it.

A lot of the LDS-related things I write on Sunrise Tantalize question the LDS Church or point out things I disagree with. However, LDS theology is comforting to me and helps me deal with my depression. Luckily it is May which means my seasonal affective disorder (SAD) symptoms are going away. However, depression follows me around like a rain cloud throughout the year and hovers in the distance in the summer.

First, I like the thought that we will all be perfect against after the Resurrection. I won’t have this anymore. I won’t have to take medicines or use my special sun lamp. I won’t cry over daily stresses. Sometimes I cry about nothing in particular. There were days in February where I would cry all day. But now I can think to myself, all I have to do is make it through this life and some day I won’t have to worry about being depressed anymore. It gives me hope.

Another comfort comes from repentance. For my entire life, even before I was depressed, I would obsessively worry over my mistakes. Or what I perceived as mistakes. For example, when I’m really “not feeling well” (i.e. depressed) I sometimes obsess about an incident in first grade where I spelled grandma as “gramma” because that’s how my mom told me to spell it. I thought I was so clever because no one else in my class could spell grandma. I was so disappointed to find that my teacher spelled it “grandma”. That ‘mistake’ is from 15 years ago. You can just imagine how much I obsess over recent errors. And I can’t stop thoughts like that from coming into my head when I’m upset. I yell at myself, “Sunlize, stop!” as my CBT therapist taught me too. And I can stop the thought from progressing, but I can’t stop future thoughts from entering my head. Fortunately cymbalta seems to help in this area.

Anyhow, while the missionaries taught me about repentance, one of them mentioned that after we truly repent, the atonement allows God to forgive us and forgets our sin. But we don’t forget our mistakes because we need to remember not to repeat them. We don’t need to worry about them or feel guilty, we just need to acknowledge that it happened. This relieves a huge amount of pressure. I can give my guilt up and know that I am forgiven. I don’t need to obsessively worry about past mistakes because I am forgiven. And that makes me feel so relieved.

And now for something completely different! Today’s post is on getting admitted to a school after your grades have suffered due to a long-term illness.

When I was applying for my second degree, I searched the web for something that would help me deal with the extreme dip in my grades due to my chronic illness. There are lots of resources for those who had dealt with a short-term dip due to incidents like accidents, short and severe illness, death of a loved one, being immature and drinking too much. But almost nothing for people in my situation. I want to offer my experience to anyone who is in a similar situation where a long-term illness, family/ relationship issue, etc. has damaged your grades.

I’ll tell you the whole story of dealing with depression in college some other time. Let’s focus on admissions. So here’s what helped me.

• Stop worrying about your current GPA! It’s in the past and there’s nothing you can change in the past. Move on. (FYI - I got had a 2.7 GPA when I applied to schools. But I did very well in my nursing classes and classes for my major.)
• Get awesome recommendations from profs and employers who know you well. Be sure that they will write wonderful things about you before giving them the forms though.
• Focus on getting good grades (A’s and B’s) for your remaining semesters. Remember, what they are looking for is improvement.
• If you did horribly in one of your prerequisite classes then consider retaking the course.
• Write excellent application essays - this is a game of telling them what they want to hear but still coming off authentic. Get someone(s) to proofread your essays before you send them out.
• Research where you are applying. Make sure you have 1 or 2 schools that accept less typical students and who seem receptive to helping students succeed despite their past circumstances. The school I decided to attend clearly wanted to attract less traditional students and valued them for their life experiences and insights.
• Consider writing a letter to the admissions committee explaining why your grades dropped due to your condition. I did this after I got rejected from two schools. I figured they probably looked at my transcript and figured I partied my sophomore and junior years. In the letter I briefly explained what my illness was and said that it effected my grades significantly. I told them that I was now receiving treatment and I knew that I could be successful in their program. I also pointed out my recently improved grades.
• Hope, wish, pray and wait. Continue to work on your grades in case things don’t work out. If possible have a friend like Kay who told me, “So what if you don’t get in? What’s the worst that could happen. You’re smart and determined. Just reapply for the next round of deadlines. You’ll be fine.” Somehow I find Kay’s comments more comforting that those that say, “What? Of course you’ll get in! Who wouldn’t want you?”

Questions, comments, concerns? I’d be glad to address them. And good luck to those of you who are in the application process!

It seems like whenever some finds out I’m an investigating the LDS church, their first question is, “So how did you hear about us? Why are you interested?” I always want to say something about how those questions make the LDS church sound like some kind of secret group. No, I did not have a missionary knock on my door. No, I was not handed a pamphlet as I walked across town. No, I did not see some cheesy infomercial on the church. I went looking for the church and it spoke to me.

I grew up in very old Presbyterian church. I think it had its 350th birthday a few years back. I loved that church. By the time we left I knew every inch of it. We weren’t very involved when I was younger. We occasionally went to church, but not often. In middle school, I started dealing with seasonal affective disorder (a type of depression), but I didn’t realize why I was feeling so bad. I found myself investigating Wicca. It wasn’t something I really believed in. I was looking for something to make me feel better. Obviously God had failed, so perhaps another type of religion had the answer. My mom found out about it (Wicca, not the depression) and flipped out. She told me that until I was 18, I was to attend the church that they wanted me to go to. Within a year I stopped looking into Wicca, but the depression made me feel like God had left me.

My family became more involved in church life as I entered my teenage years. I sang in the choir, did church musicals, attended middle school and high school youth group, and got confirmed. My last two years at the church were the best. In our “Sunday school class” we talked about all sorts of issues - sex, drinking, drugs, homosexuality, gay marriage, ordination of gay pastors, the death penalty, evolution, our crazy parents, et cetera. Sometimes we had guest speakers like the woman whose child was murdered and made a plea in court for the killer’s life to be spared. The pastor’s son came out to us before anyone else. I heard that he and his partner had a commitment ceremony earlier this year. And the best part about the senior high group was that we had Dunkin Donuts, orange juice, and milk every week. I still believed that God was out there somewhere, but I didn’t feel connected to him.

When we moved to the Midwest we had to leave our church behind. We tried attending another church here but the people weren’t very nice. When I was 17 and the war in Iraq was brewing I got in an argument with my pastor about the war. He basically wanted to go over there and beat the crap out of those darn Iraqis. First of all, that is no way for a pastor to speak. What happened to “love thy neighbor?” I wanted him to realize that as a country we would be killing many innocent people. He told me he didn’t care about civilians. He seemed to think that it was their own fault for living under such a dictator. What kind of pastor endorses the killing of innocent men, women and children?

So after that I stopped going to church. I told my parents what happened and they didn’t push the issue. I think they stayed with the church so that my brother and sister could get confirmed. At 18, my parents told me that I had religious freedom. I could go to any church I wanted to. I decided to try out the Society of Friends (aka Quaker) meetings. They didn’t seem right for me. Too much quiet and a little too…weird. I liked them as people though. Over the next four years I’d sporadically visit a new church - Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Unitarian Universalist. I’d go once or twice and then stop.

Then I got really sick this year and no one knew what was wrong. I started freaking out and thinking that I had some weird fatal illness. My entire world perspective shifted. I stopped getting upset about little things. I rang up my ex-boyfriend and we met for coffee and talked politics because I wanted to see him before I left town. Luckily, the physicians found out that one of my endocrine glands was malfunctioning and secreting too much hormone, which isn’t fatal. It’s just annoying and I get to put up with it until I get the gland out in May. Anyhow, this experience jump-started my search for faith. Exactly HOW did I find the LDS church? Well I had been researching faiths but nothing caught my eye. One night I watched this show called, “Secret Lives of Women.” The episode was about polygamy and plural marriages. While the show made the point that the LDS does not condone plural marriage, I still thought to myself, “Wow, these people are weird. I bet regular Mormons are weird too. What’s the history behind Mormons and plural marriages?” To confirm my belief, I pulled up the info on LDS beliefs. And as I read I thought, “huh. Some of this makes sense. Some of this matches what I believe.” So I found the LDS church by trying to validate my opinion that Mormon beliefs are weird. Instead I ended up finding a church that touched my soul and brought God back into my life. (Ok, don’t flip out now. I’ll explain more in the next post. I promise.)

Of course I don’t tell this story to the missionaries. I don’t tell anyone exactly what happened. I just smile and say, “Oh, I’m just looking at different churches and this one seems to interest me.”