Safety

Hello, friends.

It's been awhile since I wrote a blog post. There have been a few times that I've sat down to write, but it's always seemed like too much effort, and with no one to make me do it, it just hasn't happened. That's kind of how I feel about life these days. If no one is holding me accountable for something, and it's not essential to my life or my daughter's life... it just doesn't happen.

I've gotten around that a little bit with the help of my friend Lindsey. I had a list of phone calls to make last week, and I gave her the list and asked her to bug me about one or two calls per day. It helped. I got the calls made. The calls resulted in a long-overdue dentist appointment this morning, a meeting with my accountant this afternoon to go over my taxes, and the fact that I paid a lot of money to have my car fixed earlier... only for it to stall out on me yet again after I picked it up.

Yes, I'm going to take it in again tomorrow. But I'm frustrated and worn down and wishing someone else could pick up the slack. I'm also extremely paranoid while driving, which is a stressor that I really could do without. It feels like there's nowhere I can go to feel safe and nothing in particular I can do about that fact.

"Safety" has taken on new meaning for me in the last couple of years. I used to think of safety only in physical terms. If I wasn't in actual physical danger, I felt safe. Now, I have come to think of safety in emotional, mental, and spiritual terms. I feel safe when I'm confident in my job security, when I'm getting the parenting support that I need, when I can express the state of my mental health without fear of repercussions, when I'm able to rest and relax at home, when I have people around me that I trust. I haven't felt safe in a very long time. And now with my car issues... even that sense of physical safety is gone.

A leader of my church told me last year that I "just need to have more faith." Ignoring the fact that that's a terrible thing to tell someone with depression, he was also way off the mark. I don't need more faith. I am constantly relying on the faith I already have. Without my confidence that God loves and cares for me, that He called me and will never abandon me, that His plan is always far superior to mine - without my faith in God's unfailing promises, I would have given up long ago. But I have that faith. I trust my God. He will get me through this.