Freed from Depression

Posted by “dweezy” (user deleted due to non-current email).

When I was a little kid I used to talk to God in the mirror. One day he told me what was going to come as I became a teenager. I stopped talking to Him immediately after that.
Well, when I was about in the seventh grade I was told by a not so nice guy that my breath smelled. It may not seem like a major disease but it does have a social stigma attached and I began to feel very sorry for myself. I became severely depressed that I was offending people with my breath and I thought no one would like me especially girls, which is hard to accept for any teenage boy entering puberty. I thought all of my friends would start to not want to talk to me and not like me anymore. I became very lonely and withdrew from everybody that I knew, except during sports activities. I hated group activities in class when I had to speak to someone face to face. I especially hated talking to girls b/c I was afraid one might be like “eww your breath stinks” which would embarass me beyond repair. Eventually I started having recurring thoughts about jumping off the roof of my house and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what depression was until I got a little older.

My grades suffered, except during the spring time when my attitude would brighten up just enough to turn D’s and F’s into high C’s. I never had a social life and people wondered why I was so quiet, which was shocking to me b/c why would they want to smell my breath all day? The thoughts became worse and pretty much a daily thing. I hated everything about life, especially people. I couldn’t see through the depression the number of true friends that I really had and the opportunities with girls that I was missing. No one EVER stopped being my friend b/c of my own self-pity or halitosis and I never understood why. High school was like four of the worst years of my life.

Fast forward to several years later, November of 1996 to be exact. I had my first suicide attempt. It was about a week before Thanksgiving and two weeks before my 20th birthday. The next day I tried again to no avail. I tried again a couple of years later and yet I survived again. I didn’t go to counseling b/c I didn’t want to get better enough to try it. I just wanted to die, or so I thought.

I could feel God’s presence almost everyday. It’s like I was talking straight to Him when I woke up and my first thought was “I want to die”. It’s like I was mad at Him for giving me this disease when I thought He loved me. Every time I got really emotional I could just feel Him pulling me to Him. I would complain and tell Him I didn’t want to be a Christian I just want the bad breath gone. (Mostly b/c I wanted to run around and have sex with as many women as I could, but that’s another story).

So now it’s 2004 and I’m living with my little brother, not working, alone with my thoughts all day. Well one day I got seriously depressed to the point I thought I was going to attempt suicide again. I called the emergency hotline in the phone book and later that day checked into the mental ward at the hospital. After three days there I was able to go back home. Maybe a week or two later, an Elder friend of my mothers’ called me and told me he had gone through the same thing and explained to me that it was just the enemy all along and that God would never think like that, that those weren’t my thoughts after all. He prayed for me and I’ve never thought about attempting suicide again. Through the power of God’s Holy Spirit I was able to eliminate that as an option. No matter how bad life gets suicide will NEVER be an option.

After 10+ years of thinking I wanted to die everyday, even over something as small as hitting a red light on my way home from work or sitting in traffic, God freed me from the self-pity that Satan implanted into my thought process. I never thought when I was 17 that I would live past 21 until I had a dream, kind of like a deja vu, of me older(don’t ask me how I could tell how old I was) and all I could think that happened is God must’ve done something, cause I know it ain’t in my will to live that long. And God did do something. He gave me power over my own thought process and now I’m freed of depression and self-pity. And the thought of one day being married to a great woman when I never thought I would get any girl to date me makes me the happiest person in the world. I can’t stop smiling when I think of her and what God is really doing in my life. All I can say is praise the Lord!!! And thank you Father!!! And thank you Jesus!!! And thank you Holy Spirit!!! And thank you for reading, I hope it helped.