Close friends, and probably, let’s be honest, casual observers, will know that I typically drag out this blog to analyse whatever total disaster has recently slammed me to the mat and left me picking up the mental health pieces. Hopefully they will therefore be glad that it has gone so long untouched, with those who wish me well interpreting that it is because I’m doing OK.
They would be correct in that assumption. I am thriving,
peaceful, happy, embedded in a network of loving, supportive relationships,
serving my church and following Christ as best I can. No one’s life is perfect,
but compared to the hellscape of my own intransigent emotions that I lived
through the first 34 or so years of my life, I’m doing pretty amazing.
And that in fact is why I am picking up my metaphorical pen
today. The human person who above all other people who, apart from Christ himself,
is responsible for the change I have experienced is retiring this year and I
want her, and everybody else, to know what she has done for me and the depths
of my gratitude for her and to her.
I know people often say this, but I genuinely mean it, I
doubt very much I would be alive today, much less as well as I am if it was not
for Annabel Heywood.
Annabel showed me love in the truest, Christlike sense of
the word love, beyond sense, reason and some would say wisdom. She loved me
when I was deeply unlovable. She loved me when I was dangerous, chaotic, ugly
and overwhelming. She loved me when it cost her more than I or most people would
believe it was reasonable to pay.
Other people in my journey have loved me well and they know
who they are, I hope and how I feel about them. But over 14 years of my life,
Annabel allied love, wisdom and courage in the determination that I would not
be eaten alive by my demons and by God’s grace, through Christ’s love and with
the Spirit’s power, she won.
I first properly met Annabel when I was 21, fleeing from
another church where I had created mess and mayhem with my out of control
emotions and had just flunked out of my PGCE because, as my mentor said, people
with mental health problems can become teachers, but not if they were that bad.
It was around 48 hours after I had trekked through A&E
having overdosed on iron tablets and antihistamines (that’s a hilarious combination
by the way). I knew I couldn’t go back to the church I had been at and a friend
of mine brought me to Ebbe’s that Sunday, walked me up to Annabel and said, “Hi
Annabel, this is Helen, she tried to kill herself this week” and walked away. Annabel
fished out her diary and said, “Shall we meet up then?”
We went to work, thrashing out my problems, doing Christian
CBT, asking what was true, what was real and where was Christ, her eternal
question to me, “Where is Jesus in this?” It stabilised my day-to-day, I got on
top of the worst of my crushing self-hatred, mostly stopped the chronic
self-harm and entirely stopped the nasty self-critical thoughts that had dominated
my brain since I was a child.
But it didn’t prevent the terrifying, unpredictable, cliff-edge,
death spirals of depression I would swing into over the next 10 years. When
those happened we would start meeting regularly again, I would come to the Rectory
sitting room, kick of my shoes and curl up on the sofa and we would talk for
hours and hours, wading through my pain, trying to make sense of my feelings,
trying to see Jesus and always ending in hopeful prayer.
The mental health crash when I was 31 was particularly bad
and particularly brutal for the bystanders. And it happened in Annabel’s house.
I was lodging with a family who were hitting all my triggers for anxiety hard
and I had started to spiral. Hearing, Annabel offered me her spare room for as long
as it took to find somewhere safe for me to live. It was a kindness I accepted
but I couldn’t deal with. I was already spiralling into being unwell and the
idea of being utterly dependent on the grace and kindness of another person was
terrifying.
I was desperately insecure, I watched myself in horror as I made
myself a burden with my fear of being a burden, constantly worrying that I
would reach her limit of grace and find myself on the street. I had half formed
plans for going to the homeless shelter when that happened. It was ridiculous
in retrospect, it never would have happened, but I wasn’t thinking straight.
It culminated with probably the closest I have ever come to ending
my life, by which I mean I was in the process of hanging myself from her bannisters
when Jesus spoke to me (a story for another day). I didn’t do it. She was on
holiday at the time and I was completely convinced – not without reason, you
might think - that the day she got back
and found out what I had almost done I was getting chucked out on my ear.
I remember vividly sitting on the sofa telling her the story
of what had happened and waiting for the axe to fall. I waited and waited. She
was very interested in talking about what had happened and how to prevent it
happening again, but nothing was being said about how I would obviously need to
move out immediately. In the end I asked. She looked at me in surprise. It had
honestly not occurred to her.
That incident was a breakthrough for me in two ways. It led
to me getting a new diagnosis that was immensely helpful for both of us to
understand what I was experiencing and to begin to apply gospel healing now
that we properly understood the hurt.
But it was a breakthrough in another way. I had gone so far
beyond what was acceptable, I had been so immensely difficult and scary and she
hadn’t rejected me. I felt really safe, for I think the first time in my life.
And things that I had long buried and twisted into unrecognisable shapes began
to emerge.
There was sin and ugliness I was able to face and to admit
to, because I had no fear of being judged, rejected and found wanting. There were
deeply buried hurts that were able to come to the surface because I didn’t have
to protect myself anymore, not with Annabel.
It got harder before it got easier, as is the way of things.
We had moments of conflict and chaos, moments of I’m pretty sure on her part,
utter frustration, as I couldn’t get the words out to talk about how I was
feeling, when I couldn’t put things to one side, when they were all consuming
and no respecter of other people’s frailty and limitations.
But there were moments of light shining into the darkness, ways
the truth of Scripture began to pierce through the maelstrom of emotion. A slow
climb out of the valley of death.
Annabel persevered with me when I was ungrateful, when I
made progress one day and slid all the way back the next, when I was demanding,
difficult, distressing and damaging to everyone around me. She persevered, I happen
to know, in the face of people who told her she was wrong to get involved, that
someone as unwell as me needed to be left to the ‘experts’. I can never, ever
be grateful enough that she ignored them. She persevered when she was probably
being told that she was an idiot to do so – although if that is true, she was
kind enough not to tell me.
Annabel pioneered Christian Counselling before really any of
us knew what that was. She knew that deeply, seriously unwell people need
Jesus, that there is no place or part of life, however disordered, chaotic,
frightening or not normal that he doesn’t have something to say. She knew that
mentally ill people were not exempt from being sinners, that although mental
illness isn’t caused by sin, sin informs how we respond as mentally ill people
and that we all need to grow in repentance and faith in God’s grace to
us.
She didn’t make me ashamed, she showed me how grace could
set me free. How love could set me free. How truth could set me free. She
showed me Jesus. And it changed me in ways that medical professionals would consider
not possible. Or perhaps, the correct way to say it is that he changed me. For then
we will become like him, for we will see him as his is.
Because of Annabel, today I was able to welcome a foster
child into my home for the first time. Because of Annabel I hope I know how to
love them, whatever challenges they bring.
This blogpost will probably thoroughly embarrass Annabel because
humility is the first prerequisite to doing anybody any good, but I don’t care.
The world needs more Annabels and for that to happen we need to know it’s
possible. We need role models and trailblazers. We need people in pastoral
ministry who pour themselves out and who truly believe that Jesus is the
answer.
So, in this year that she retires, here is my challenge to you,
reading this now. Be more Annabel.
