The slump

and the supposed cure

I am in a creative slump.

There. I said it out loud. I have not written anything worth publishing in a solid month—April 22 to May 22. (Now that I’m editing this, it’s more than a month. But who’s counting?) I’ve lived plenty of life in that time, but it doesn’t seem to be saying much to me.

My stated goal here is to write about mental health from a Christian’s perspective with the occasional farm update and a little of my own Bible study thrown in. And honestly whatever else strikes me in the moment, but these days there is no striking.

I have had mental health in the last month. The farm has been updated. I have read and studied the Bible and done other interesting things.

So what’s the problem? Why the creative block? If I knew, I could write a book and make a million dollars. But alas, the words they are not coming.

I’ve tried to ignore the slump by reading a lot. Mostly fiction, some brain candy, but also a couple of thought-provokers.

What I’ve been reading

When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén is the story of an elderly man whose wife is in a nursing home with dementia and doesn’t know who he is. The man still lives at home with his dog, and his adult son checks on him. When the man begins having trouble actually caring for the dog, the son steps in to “make things easier.” But how much help is too much? A heartbreaking look into the old man’s mind and the difference between what he thinks and what he actually says. I wish I’d read this book before my brothers and I spent a year and a half losing my parents. I wish I could go back and find out what they were really thinking. This story was originally written in Swedish and translated into English. (Language warning.)

Twice by Mitch Albom was quite a surprise. I’d read his Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven. But Twice was not like anything I’ve read before. Without giving it all away, the main character finds, at the tender age of eight years old, that he has the ability to re-live any moment. He gets a do-over whenever he wants one, but only one. If he chooses a re-do, he has to live with the consequences of it. There’s no re-doing a do-over. And he remembers the first time the event occurred, but no one else does. So if he fails a test in school, he can re-live that day, knowing what will be on the test, but he will always remember both the first and second times he took it.

The obvious question it leaves the reader with is what in my life would I do over, what would the consequences be, and would I be willing to live with those consequences? I am still thinking about this one.

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The farm

The farm update includes 50 49 adorable chicks that will be in our freezer in eight weeks plus a second dairy cow because we don’t have enough going on. We lost one of the Rhode Island Red hens to we don’t know what. I just found her in the chicken yard dead. No signs of attack or struggle. We know she was healthy enough to lay an egg the morning she died, and I never saw anything that would make me think she had a problem. Such is the life of a chicken tender. (I’m so sorry for that pun. It just . . . came out.) So now we’re down to 14 egg layers.

Future chicken tenders.

The garden is planted (except for corn and green beans) with Lowe’s plants because the seeds I started never grew. They sprouted, but that was all they did. No matter the heat, grow light, or water, they refused to get more than 1/4” tall. It took me a few weeks to remember that time several years ago when most of the potting soil in the country was tainted and this was the widespread result. The moral of the story is don’t buy off-brand potting soil, even if the label says organic. And also, Lowe’s to the rescue. Thank you for your hybrid plants.

I love rocks in my garden—I am my mother.

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Sad shoes

My podiatrist has recommended specific sandals to help support my very high arches in my old age, specifically Oofos. Have you seen them? They are a cross between moon boots and clown shoes, decidedly ugly. So truly awful and also apparently all the rage. They feel like walking on a bosu, those squishy exercise half-balls that you can’t balance on. I will buy a pair for my feet’s sake but will absolutely not wear them outside of my house. If you come by I will hide them and lie about owning a pair.

Sad that I’m going to spend money on these.

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Current events

I Mammoth Marched with daughter #3 at Fall Creek Falls State Park in middle Tennessee earlier this month. In case you haven’t heard of these, a Mammoth March is a 20-mile hike that you presumably finish in 8 hours. I did one in Virginia in early April with my oldest daughter and we finished in exactly 8 hours. We had so much fun we signed up for another one. Unfortunately, she was having a problem with her knee and could not participate in the second one, so she called her youngest sister and asked begged her to please hike with me. Youngest said yes, and so there we were on May 3rd experiencing what she calls “type-2 fun.” That’s the kind of fun that is painful and you are miserable while it’s happening, but you like it anyway and can’t wait to do it again. We finished this one in 7 hours 52 minutes. A PR for me!

Youngest wants to know when the next one is.

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Mental health

On the mental health front, there is not much to report. But Ben got home from a trip to preach at a family camp in Iowa yesterday, so today we went out for lunch just to get out and have a day date since we are too old for nighttime dates anymore.

He said he’d been having a conversation with some folks there about mental health and how there is such a stigma around seeking help for it. We don’t hesitate to see a doctor if we’re sick or have a broken bone, but when our mental processes are not functioning well, we feel the need to hide it, to cover the so-called shame, particularly in the Christian community. Why is that?

I think one reason is that sickness and broken bones are obviously physical. It’s easy to see that there is something wrong with the body that is beyond our control.

Mental health is different. It is unseen, and for whatever reasons, Christians overwhelmingly tend to spiritualize it. You don’t pray enough. You don’t read or believe your Bible enough. You don’t have enough faith. You are thinking on the wrong things, listening to the wrong music, hanging out with the wrong people. There is something wrong with YOU and it’s your fault.

Mental health difficulties can surely arise because of physical trauma: a concussion does physical damage to the brain and changes the way it operates until it heals itself.

But emotional and psychological trauma—the kind you can’t see, the kind that is kept behind closed doors, the kind that happens to 33% of married women and 25% of married men at the hands of their spouses—also cause physical changes in the brain that have their own repercussions.

cPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, is the result of long-term emotional and psychological abuse, and it shows up far too much to be an accident. fMRI studies have shown that people who have been victims of this type of abuse (remember, we’re not talking about physical abuse) have a smaller hippocampus and a larger amygdala.

And remember, the hippocampus is the seat of short-term memory and learning. The amygdala is the home of your fight-or-flight response. The place where emotions are processed.

So less short-term memory and learning, more fight-or-flight, more rage, more anxiety, more crying “for no reason.”

Why would we not seek medical help for these things? They are not spiritual problems. They are every bit as physical as a broken bone.

I’ll get off my soapbox now, but only temporarily, until the next person gaslights me about mental health.

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Whew! It’s not an essay, but I’ve heard that one way to break a creative slump is to challenge yourself to do something not quite within your comfort zone. My challenge to myself this week was to get 1500 words in print and actually publish them.

Thank you for listening. (1501 words 🎉)