Category: Depression

What is Depression?

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I hate depression so much. Its presence in my life has become part of me. The eyes through which I see life. Looking back, I can remember my first episode of depression after high school. I got no help.  My parents encouraged me to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and I did that. I got on with the life they prescribed for me. Until I’m in sunny California, going to college, getting over dating a baseball player, and I had another episode. This time, my friend called my parents. A medical doctor diagnosed Anemia.

It gets harder to recover as time goes on, and though a dark cloud followed me around from time to time throughout my 20s, I didn’t really suffer again until my thirties. Postpartum, maybe, though no one talked about it. I’ve written a lot about those years elsewhere in this blog. The drinking didn’t help. I’d say that was a symptom of the illness, an attempt to make it all disappear. Not my life but my feelings about it.

Suffice it to say, I have been trying to recover from Depression for most of the rest of my adult life.

I’ve learned with this illness, that circumstances don’t matter, and though medication keeps me “stable” (not wanting to kill myself), it does not make me happy. I flatline in an average place, with few highs and fewer low, lows.

And now my life is beautiful. My family is stable. I do not have to work. Isn’t the American dream to retire and be financially comfortable? I need nothing. I don’t even have migraines anymore the whole reason for retiring. I think I should be overjoyed, pursuing my passions, reading endlessly, traveling, and volunteering. And yet I have never been so low.

I can’t raise my arms up to carry laundry, so I find myself sitting a lot. Though I can turn off my brain and wander through a thrift store, I don’t need anything. I buy books. I can’t read more than a few pages. I’ve started reading half a dozen in the last day or two. I want knowledge. Crave it. Love it. But it just sits on my skin, I can’t absorb it. I help my kids learn to drive and talk through difficult decisions, yet later, I can’t move for hours at a time. I take too much melatonin to sleep and wake up exhausted. I am frozen in time, and my life is wasting away. It feels catastrophic, and it is, sometimes.

“Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to self-to the mediating intellect-as to verge close to being beyond description.” William Styron, Darkness Visible:A Memoir of Madness.

The danger of depression is ignoring it. But I don’t want to make a fuss.

Things I’ve Learned About Myself Along the Way

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More and more, probably because of the lull that I had in writing, hardly anyone is reading what I write.

Ironically I stopped writing around 2015 at a time when life was falling apart — our business partner imbezzled, we were bankrupt, our family was in shambles, my mom was diagnosed with dementia and I was her medical POA, and I went back to work, in the company, to help Tom.

My kids were of the age where it mattered what I said about them. I didn’t want to be the writer that regretted telling my kids stories. I couldn’t yet write about the business. Stuff with my mom was complicated. And I was busy!

I gave up my career at a local non-profit to (more closely) raise our kids. But truthfully, mainly, we were just trying to save money on daycare with three kids in diapers and one in middle school. The American dream. Although my “staying at home” was a good choice that I’m glad we made because I can see now how that time was important both to my kids and to the person that I was becoming. I was a workaholic before I quit. And long after. Those were hard years.

It was hard to be at home. This was before social media dominated people’s days.  Before cell phones were attached to us. From 2001 to 2015, I was lonely, hurting, a recovering alcoholic, a workaholic, depressed, anxious and bored.

As I have written copiously about I suffered from depression, and my husband suffered from my depression. This morning he was sharing a song with me, there’s many he’s written, about my depression from his perspective. It’s so sad. I’ve hurt him. The lyrics are beautiful. (See below.)

So I’m comfortable with a small readership, hello reader. I still don’t know what I’m writing for but I have learned a few things about myself in the last decade.

One, I have copious courage and it’s built into my DNA and I don’t fear the opinions of others. I’m more afraid of the idea of sounding stupid or ignorant than of expressing myself. I love expressing myself. Not verbally persay. I’ve gotten more introverted and anxious since retirement. I loathe it, and shall have to overcome it.

Two, I’m an empath. My heart breaks for people. Injustice hurts me, physically sometimes.  I haven’t learned how to control it or protect myself from it yet.

Three I’m generous. I’ll give away the shirt on my back if it would help. I’ll give my last $20 in my wallet. I’ll give generously to a charity as I’m moved. Not frivolously, but carefully. Not when asked directly, that makes me uncomfortable, but as people talk about the needs around me I give.

Four, I love learning. That’s saving me in my “migraine retirement.” Everything I read or listen to leads to further learning. A million more authors, topics, places, and histories. It’s endless. I have a disorganized library at home. I love saving used books the older the better.

Five, I see. The world. People. Hearts. Pain. God.  Bad. This trait has a through line to 1-4. Sometimes that includes my photography or travel. But lately, it has stalled as I’ve been working on my migraines and trying not to despair of ever traveling again. I have a dog, my husband’s dog, who is old but still with us, very anxious without one of us. Tom’s waiting till Comet dies to travel. So I read and collect travel novels. Would love suggestions for the first place to travel to. Or I may go alone.

Six, I can be wise.

I observe well, I am unafraid to express myself, I read, and I may have things to say. We’ll see.

P.S. About my accident, my face is healing with very little scarring. I’m fortunate there.  Now I’m afraid to go for a walk. It’s annoying.

IN THE MEANTIME BY TOM HANSON

In the mean time I am waiting
Through the winter without you
On this thin ice I am skating
Am I falling through?

In the desert I am crawling
In the mean time without you
Is this penance, is it stalling?
Don’t be cruel, don’t be cruel
I miss you

In the mean time I am fading
Won’t you tell me what to do?
A single word persuading
And I’ll wade through
A world of blue
And the waning moon

I know who you are
Yes I know what you are
And I know you won’t go too far
In the mean time

Now in your mean time I’ll be waiting
In these long days without you
Pray your rainclouds will be breaking
‘Cause I miss you
You know I do
I need you

This is year six.

Do you remember when I last saw Holly? It was around this time, six years ago, in late February 2018, and despite the challenges she was going through, she was determined to keep her kids’ lives as normal as possible. She drove over to Couer d’Alene,  ID, from Washington with her kids. We had about half a day, so we ate breakfast, let the kids swim in the resort’s pool, and hung out. It was inspiring to witness her strength, but I recall she was pretty depleted from all the adversity she faced with the divorce. Although I was feeling drained from our social commitments and meetings, I remain grateful for the last memories and Tom and I having had the opportunity to be there for her during such a difficult time.

I have been struggling with migraines for the past three years, which has been quite discouraging. Despite receiving countless recommendations from various individuals, I have tried many remedies with some success. However, my life has been heavily impacted and many activities have become difficult to manage with migraines, including travel, communication, productivity, reading, writing, creativity, work (both personal and professional), shopping, cleaning, caring for others, and taking care of my own well-being. According to my neurologist/headache specialist, the headaches I’ve been experiencing are likely a result of the chronic stress I’ve been under for the past decade.

I “retired” to tackle migraines head-on, not to mention it had become impossible to work. By now, I presumed I would be better at spending my time doing something fun and creative, but that didn’t happen, and I have a chronic illness because otherwise. I find myself once again nosediving straight into a mental health crisis. If you know my story, you comprehend how frightened I am.

Yesterday, I acknowledged to myself that I need a non-negotiable daily routine. I began with walking. Cleaned my study for the first time since Christmas.

I’m thinking, for self-care:

Sleep hygiene by setting a bedtime and wake time, getting sunlight first thing, movement, nutrition, eating breakfast, getting dressed for the day, limiting the people and things in my life that vex me, spending time in nature a couple of times a week, and stress management.

How do you manage self-care? What are your daily non-negotiables?

Melody

The Problem of Pain is Not Pain

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The problem of pain is not pain. It is that nothing and no one prepared me for pain. Nothing in my life taught me how to face my sister’s murder, especially not my faith, or community or parents or anything in my life up to that point. And I am not a particularly fragile person. In fact, most would say I am resilient.

We have faced hard things in our marriage, like all marriages, with our children, like most children, in my upbringing, the most dysfunctional upbringing, in our company with fraud. My approach was always to get stronger and stronger, if that was possible. Apply more grit. Dig deeper for more reserves.

Build more scar tissue. But nothing made the deep cut of Holly’s death less painful. And nothing had prepared me for the suffering.

My beloved sister, torn from this earth, from her beautiful children, from a life of service, from me. I needed her. She was my friend. A confidant. We laughed at life together. She coached me on raising a child on the spectrum, how do they learn in public schools? I coached her on being married to someone with depression, though I am no expert. I have just experienced depression, lived with it, lived through it, survived it though it nearly destroyed me. I fought back. And I was loved. I had something to live for beyond myself. My partner, children, mother, sisters. I fought back from the black dog that nips at me all the live long day. The dog that barks at me telling me “It’s not worth it, this living.” I know it is a lie. But a believable one on dark days. But I didn’t see clearly enough what they were going through.

The problem of pain is not pain. I suppose we all expect that life will bring some ups and downs. But nothing in my life prepared me for murder. The violence, the atrocity, the apparent hatred, the cruelty. Knowing my brother-in-law sits in prison only fuels my rage. He doesn’t deserve to live if she is dead.

The problem of pain is that people don’t know how to be with you. They grow uncomfortable with your suffering. They fade away. The isolation of pain is the problem of pain. I am left alone, inside my head, with my howling grief ripping and tearing me to shreds.

And I realized today, trying to express myself to someone, that I am afraid. I am terrified to live. I am paralyzed by the trauma of losing my sister. I’ve got my heart locked down so “safe” that I’m hardly human. Except in church – where without my permission – the grief is leaking out. It streams down my face in an embarrassing fashion.  And though I wish I could make it stop, a part of me is so grateful to feel a relief and a release.

I am not fit for humans, I am thinking.

Where do you want to get connected in church, I am asked.

I’ll do anything. But I don’t think you want me to I am so damaged.

The problem of pain isn’t pain. It is that people don’t like to watch someone in pain. Or be with you. Perhaps because they don’t know how to help. But today I sat with someone who just listened. Who without saying much communicated to me that it is okay that I feel afraid, anxious, sad, angry and alone.

The problem of pain is not pain. It is that we don’t know how to be with someone in pain.

The Monster was Caged & Resting

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I asked my son to write about his depression. I am trying to save him.

I want to know what it is like to be inside him. Him specifically because every person’s suffering is different. I know the exercise of putting words down on paper heals.

But I know depression only too well. It chases me. It’s never far. Though it’s been a good long while. The monster has been resting.

It’s been glorious to wake without it heavy on my bones.

If I’m lucky enough to live a while in peace, I fill my mind with other things, books, music poetry, and people who tell a different story one of liberation from the destruction, heavy, crushing demolition.

When I slow down now to remember – for I told him I would write, too and put down the words of depression – it feels like letting a monster out of its cage to play a while. A dangerous game. The monster only wants to kill. But if I visit, like in the zoo, perhaps I can view it from a safe distance.

Depression is dogged, relentless. It won’t let me sleep well, and the more fitful the sleep, the longer the dark days awake. Depression hurts me in my bones. It’s a deep ache, heavy, as if I’m full of sand. Each step, each breath, each thought more difficult than the last.

Yesterday, I heard it knocking, I learned I’ll be seeing someone, a family member, who has declared me unfit, unworthy of their love (and time), and the monster came to sit on my chest. Instantly, I was immobilized by anxiety. Meanwhile, it laughed deeply and ironically and climbed on top of me.

As I drove through the Wisconsin countryside, fighting to stay awake from a long day, a great big, emorphous tonnage of a monster crept up and pounced. I feel it now, the next day. On my ribcage. I can’t see it, only I feel it make itself at home on my ribcage. I can’t fling it off, too heavy, but also like water between my fingers, shape-shifting, magical but hideous.

So I am in danger right now. I’m at risk if i keep it to myself. I’ve never achieved anything important by myself when it comes to this monster.

I can distract myself, but that’s a dangerous addiction for me. I can retell my worthiness to myself, but the monster on my chest is about my value, and I’m no match on my own.

But pride always keeps me from speaking. I’m mute against the danger, the suffering which I know will come in the days ahead if I don’t speak aloud. “I am in danger.”

As I chase something truer than her lies, I’m already tired.

I’m already afraid.

I’m already beaten.

I know one of these times the monster will win.

Do I fight?

For now, she settles in. Ignores me. That is her superpower satisfied with scaring me close to death then slowly crushing the air from my lungs. I know if I don’t fight, she’ll more than ravage. Or maim. More than lay waste.

She will consume and kill me slowly, as asphyxiation finishes the job.

Right here, in this moment, being tired already, I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll go sit in the sunshine. That’s a microchoice toward life.

Alternatively

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I have often wondered about my mind. How it plays tricks on me. Foggy, crushing, chaos, creating doubt, self-hatred, despair; dragging my life down into depression.

I have learned to fake it, to pretend. Everything will be alright. The pills work. I must be okay. What is the alternative?

Everyone has faith in me to survive. I ask God for help as everyone was slowly stripped away from me by death.

There is only me and God to wrestle this archenemy depression. The anger that sits inside me threatens. Every day, we win if I get up. Again and again.

To choose generosity, to be a good person, to see beauty, to love. There is no good inside me unless God resides there. That’s my life. That’s enough for today.

If Anyone

If anyone was likely

To die early, it was me.

The black dog brought me close

More than once. But she’s gone and I

Must live, a mother who lives

Forever.

Violence and Mental Illness

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As many of you know, we have mental illness in our family lineage. The details don’t matter in this case, I think. But it is important for people who know nothing about it to know that mental illness can be in any family and violence is not directly correlated with it. Despair and lack of hope, maybe. Many things come together, mental health being just one of them, to create a situation where a person does a violent act.

My brother in law was a mostly gentle person in my experience. Of course I wasn’t married to him and my sister is gone, but from our lived experiences I believe she would agree. Verbal abuse is something that did occur which was painful to be a child in their household. But my sister struggled with verbal anger too, a legacy from my father.

We were verbally abused most of our lives into adulthood up until his death.

When we asked Holly if she was comfortable with Paul having a gun in their home, she said she was because he kept it in a safe. I am sure she was thinking a child wouldn’t stumble on it, don’t we all think that about guns at home? Keep them away from the kids. She was offered a restraining order during the divorce which she declined. She did not believe he was violent in that way.

But he murdered her. He took his gun, did some target practice (we didn’t know this until afterward from the police), tricked his way into Holly’s home, laid in wait upstairs and then killed her.

I have many sleepless nights thinking about that. Of course, we could have said something. We just listened, when more than a year before her murder when she told us about the gun. Paul was not a violent person. It was shocking to us that he thought he needed a gun in a suburban neighborhood of Seattle. But we just listened. At that point I didn’t know my brother in law very well. He was depressed for many years through out their seventeen years of marriage. A few times I tried to help.

“There’s no shame in seeking help. Antidepressants do change you. They don’t feel good. I am struggling with that myself, for much of my adult life. I don’t like how they make me unable to feel much. But they also help me out of the passive suicidality of major depression.”

Our situation is unique. But aren’t they all and I suppose that’s my point. The people that are out there killing, who have mental illness of some sort in their history, are unique humans. Their upbringing, their financial situation, their lack of healthy relationships, their solitude, their access to mental health support, joblessness, access to medicine, therapy, doctors all create a moment of time where anything is possible. And being poor, to get help almost impossible to resolve.

It is more difficult to get mental health support in this country than to buy a gun.

Psychology Today

Mental health support needs to be continuous, it is very dependant on the person’s access to help as well as all the things I listed above.

For many years we fought the system to get our daughter help and when we in our most despondent, when all we could think of was to take her to the ER, we were told she has to be a direct threat to herself (actively suicidal) or to others. Do you know how hard that is to prove? Much less wanting to declare that about your loved one.

Mental health and violence to yourself or others is an impenetrable labyrinth.

Hey, How are You? My Sister is Dead.

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My sister’s murder shut me down, I have had to close off the pain. It is the only way to keep going. And go we must. It is not like I don’t want to go on. Life holds plenty of goodness. But living in a world where a husband can kill a wife with a gun, well, that is unimaginable to me. I have spend many, many hours thinking about how to go on.

We must not only imagine it, we must live it.

With all the killings this week, I have to admit, I’m shook up. There are so many hard memories that I have put away in a safe box and the news takes that box and shakes it hard. Pain comes flying out at the most unexpected and inconvenient moments.

And then things that shouldn’t be hard, become hard. “I chose the number 73 on my football jersey because it is the year mom was born.”

“What a wonderful way to remember her,” I say with my heart crackling like it is on fire and my head spinning.

We are coming up on three years, in June. Three years later it is still a hard lump in my throat and I find myself avoiding conversation with everyone today because I don’t want to answer “How are you?” People just mean “hey” or “how was your night?” and I want to say “My face is burning hot right now, to be honest, because I just remembered my sister is dead and I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

But I won’t be rude. “Hey back,” I’ll reply, “Great Bucks game last night.”

What Is a Good Life?

For months the words have toiled and churned inside me.
The black letters absent from the page.
A heavy, nagging problem. A writer’s liability.
Rather than anguishing over this loss I have lived.

Then with an intimate slow unfurling
I deliberate on these first scarce stanzas.
I feel their drumming.
Echoes in the chambers of my heart.

Still I have a constant awareness.

Sufferings, anxieties and troubles have come to be our life.
Both waking and sleeping.
Still delight and joy are wondrously present.
Each day’s lesson cracks me open bringing a Spirit-filled reliance.

To live, to love, to be, to give, to fear, to hold, to weep, to laugh,
to wait, to hope, to doubt, to accept.
The silence teaches.
Life is lived in the moments in between.
And all together this is a Good Life.

Still, I Want More

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I am spoiled. Wasted. Ruined.
Continuously wondering what is the purpose of this one life of mine?
To love God above all.And love your neighbor. As You Love Yourself.
I worry, I’m tainted, and I am lost.  How do I love?
I don’t choose it, but my mind cannot let it go.
The thought is present as I wake. Even now I am defeated and lost.

Depression sucks the marrow of my bones, unhurriedly.
I’ve wanted nothing more than to be useful.
Or have I lied to myself, even now.
Have I wanted importance? Recognition.  Esteem. Significance.
Dare I admit motherhood was never enough?

And as I struggled with deep-rooted interior, from childhood grief, in ruins.
My soul further decays.

So I pray. And Prayer becomes a mantra, habitual and constant.
Bursting with the ache, the existential whys.

The catastrophe is long over, decades ago.
He’s been dead
another decade as well.
Still, the Destruction stands on top of me. Crushing daily energy,

Still, I want more.
Where is the freedom that comes from all this mindfulness?
I fell like I am captive to my past, my psyche ruined.

Or is it only in my mind?

My Very Little Faith

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cropped-2796253209_98caa0e57e_o.jpg1.

As it turns out I have A Very Little Faith. Perhaps I am a product of my human father who believed personal greatness was achieved through his tenacious hard work. Having a false humility, showing off A Very Big Faith, I saw that it was one that didn’t fundamentally change his character. Not really. This was my experience.

Still doubting his own goodness at the end of his life, my father died longing to hear “Well done.”

2.

All of my life I have feared the thought of not really knowing. What do I believe? Feared this very thing: A Very Little Faith. Consequently my prayer life has been frantic and hapless.  There’s a weariness in faith achieved by your effort. And yet, this is faith. Not knowing, striving.  the balance needs to be in how much is human effort and how much is laying down, in relief, our human need.

When strife hit us it struck like a cold winter’s storm. Those of us who live where the seasons always come know that winter is expected.When adversity came and set up camp in our lives, at first I thought, “Of course.” And “I deserve this, somehow.”

3.

Then, as time went on, I came to understand something entirely different. A realization about myself that only adversity has brought. I’ve done a lot of my spiritual life in my strength. The work of living with clinical depression and occasionally overcoming at least for seasons. The strength of mothering with depression. The control required to get sober. And stay sober for seven years. And live sober daily. All me.

Our child three years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. A great effort required me to find and work with all kinds of doctors, psychiatrists and therapists. To wrangle with the school system. All to advocate for my child’s current and future health. To hold on to hope in the middle of destruction and pain, singular sorrow, a mother’s grief, all took my personal strength and wits. There is the constant not knowing how to receive help and not allowing others in, to protect my child’s privacy, How does one receive encouragement and take help for a while to share the load? Almost impossible. Layered atop it, helping my mother in the last two years of her rapid decline, physically and mentally. All required doggedness and charity and choosing to do the right thing.  Too much of me.  And over time this has weakened me, isolated in unhelpful ways, the searing fear and solitude.

4.

Prayer then is what? I have struggled to understand. My Little Faith drove me to my knees, humbled. Hurt and pressed in by all this pain.  Call it suffering if you like, most people would but I’ve become uncomfortable with the comparison.

As if life isn’t just hard. For good people and bad alike, life brings good and bad things. Calling it suffering presupposes that somehow I don’t deserve hardship.  And that’s not the point. It simply is what it is.

5.

I don’t want to know how will it all turn out?  That question remains unspoken, becomes the greatest test of My Very Little Faith. Erroneously, for as I said, life is hard. For good people and bad.

Will we be okay?  Will she grow out of her mental illness?  Will he or she ever grow up to work and live on their own?  Will the business survive?  Will I stay sober?  Will I ever be free of depression? How will my mother’s last years disappear into the fog of her memories?

I don’t ask God to explain.

I think it, I wonder about it. But these are not prayers.

I’m afraid to pound on God’s chest which assumes an intimacy I wonder if we have ever shared.

Turns out I have A Very Little Faith.

6.

I do have Hope. An unreasonable belief that we will get through this.  Life may yet give us a reprieve. Life may not.

This is the tension of being human. Hope, I suppose, is a freedom to not be dejected by it all. To not be destroyed. Ultimately, to be content in this, too. To grow comfortable with life enough to pray something altogether different.  I accept this.

Hope is believing God is good and longs to share goodness with us all. Do I know what this means, not really. Is it enough to believe that God is faithful to us? To let go of the how, the why and the when, all existential?  Hope is based on the premise that God only gives what is good, which is not the same as gives all the good things that I can imagine to ask for.  Peace is found in the release of open hands, willing for anything to come–the unimaginable. Even something better than my limited imagination and Very Little Faith allows.

The unseen is ahead, the future is unclear, the mist heavy and yet the person of hope finds peace which is beyond intellectual understanding.

The prayers of a Very Little Faith faith weakens my soul. Corrupts the possibility of a good future. All my attention on the present moment and not on the One who is good beyond my comprehension.

Whether we ask and we question, or we rail against God and we ask again. Or we thank or praise. It comes to this. Is it a prayer made in hope or A Very Little Faith?

7.

For months now, even years, my spiritual life is stagnated by fear of more pain than I can handle. My Very Little Faith holding to a pattern of foggy, doubting emptiness.

Henri Nouwen says, in this moment “Spiritually you are dead. There can be life and movement only when you no longer accept things as they are now, and you look ahead toward that which is not yet.”

How much of the spiritual life is wrongly asking but not hoping for what is not yet? What we want will surely never come. For we long for peace, for comfort, for good health, for success and happiness for our children, for all the good things we feel promised somehow.  Not promised by God, surely but by a fractured, ill, witless weak culture. We subconsciously buy in and are subsequently dismayed with our lives. Or are we thinking wrongly again. Yes, with certainty.

And in the end people of A Very Little Faith are compelled to open our hands to God in hope.

Simple hope. This, then, is A Very Big Faith grown in us without our doing anything at all.

Amen

P.S. I’ve been reading With Open Hands (Ava Maria Press, 1972) by Henri J. M. Nouwen which has heavily influenced the laudable parts of what I’ve thought here.  The foolishness is all my own.

I’ve been honored to be a part of a collaborative book titled Disquiet Time: Rants and Reflections on the Good Book by the Skeptical, the Faithful, and a Few Scoundrels. I wrote on my ideas of prayer based on my understanding of 1 Thessalonians 5 that we are to pray without ceasing.

disquiettimecover

Award-winning religion columnist Cathleen Falsani (Chicago Sun-Times, Religion News Service, Orange County Register) and Jennifer Grant edited this labor of love, the new anthology Disquiet Time.

In their words:

At its conception, we wondered,

“What if we asked a subset of our most intelligent, inventive, and faithful (and/or scoundrelly) friends to reflect in a deep way about how the Good Book has affected them?”

We decided that we needed to give them room to be snarky, to dig deeply, and to stray away from a PG rating if needed.

And so, almost two years after our first, funny email exchange about the idea, we present a book comprised of more than forty contributors including Dale Hanson Bourke, Eugene Peterson, Margot Starbuck, Jay Emerson Johnson, Debbie Blue, Brian McLaren, Amy Julia Becker, Karen Swallow Prior, Christian Piatt, Carla Barnhill, and many other talented writers and Island of the Misfit Toys-souls who describe themselves as Christian, post-Christian, Jewish, Zen Buddhist, Anglobaptist, or “none of the above.”

That’s kind of the point of Disquiet Time.

I do hope you will look for it.

It’s not about theological or ideological labels or conformity, but, instead, about hearing stories you might not otherwise have been in the room to hear.

It’s about giving thoughtful people the opportunity to tell their faith stories, as rough or incomplete or irreverant or sincere as these stories might be.

Read, enjoy, and be a little braver when you tell your own story of faith and/or doubt.

The book launched last week and (although our publisher Hachette and Amazon are currently arm-wrestling, and Amazon isn’t making it easy to order Disquiet Time), our friends at independent booksellers, and Barnes and Noble and iTunes (among other generous and author-loving places) will cheerfully honor your order of our book.