On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

by Alan Noble

It was only when I read the work of the Christian philosopher Josef Pieper that I became convicted that I really must love myself, that it is an offense to God not to love myself.

Pieper describes love as the act of saying, “It’s good that you exist; how wonderful

We know that He delights in our existence because He created us! So how could we not echo His “It is good” by also loving ourselves, by affirming that it is lovely that we exist?

But even when we feel despair, depression, or anxiety, we can know that it is good that we exist, and act on that knowledge. We love ourselves because we are lovely before God, and what other opinion could possibly matter more than God’s?

That belief is not countermanded by my experience, my emotions, or the opinions of others.

To love myself I must hope all things. This hope is founded on the promises of God, not on my own ability to fix myself or control my circumstances or solve the problems of the world.

But so long as we experience the ability to choose, we have the responsibility to act on that ability.

When someone loses their life to a mental illness, it is not our place to question whether they fought hard enough, whether it was really the illness

And Christ’s work on the cross is more than sufficient for them, just as it is sufficient for your grievous sins and mine. It is presumptuous and uncharitable for us to judge their actions.

Instead, we ought to focus on two things that are our business. First, we ought to bear one another’s burdens. We can’t save someone else, but we are responsible to love our neighbor.

Second, we must not excuse or overlook our sin because of a mental affliction. Your affliction does not give you the right to hurt other people, to abuse them, to neglect them, or to mistreat yourself.

Where did we get the idea that our responsibilities to one another are optional, rather than given by God?

You must accept that your existence is a blessing even when it seems like a curse. Sometimes the humility you need is not a kind of smallness of spirit or sense of your own weakness but the faith to act as if your life is a blessing—because it is.

Instead, it’s to form habits that in their very nature affirm what you know to be true when you don’t feel it to be true.

you come to believe that your suffering is yours alone, you will believe that you are the problem. The world would be better off without you

So when you feel worthless or overwhelmed with anxiety, it’s not a sign that you lack faith or are not a true or good Christian. Millions of your brothers and sisters in Christ feel the same way right now.

We love them, which means we feel the goodness of their existence even when we can’t feel the goodness of our own.

Because life itself is a good gift given by a loving God who even now preserves your every breath. Because your life and the lives of those around you are living testaments to God’s love, and to destroy that testament would be to make a mockery of God and to lie to your neighbor about the sacredness of their life.

You also need to know how to live with the mundane burden of a mental illness. Because answering this question doesn’t make your depression or anxieties or fears disappear.

Or you are afraid to hope because at any moment the darkness may return,

To live with a chronic mental illness is to always be on edge.

Living with a mental illness looks a lot like falling into the same hole day after day. It’s mundane and awful and tedious and inexplicable to those around you.

Their joy makes your own despondency seem all the more dramatic by contrast, which is why it’s often hard to be around happy people when you feel bad. The sound of your own children giggling and being silly can feel like nails on a chalkboard.

The life that goes on around you still involves and requires your attention.

You can’t expect or ask your community to absolve you of your responsibility to them, of your love for them, just because you are in mental agony.

Your responsibilities to others cannot make your suffering disappear any more than your mental state excuses you from your responsibilities.

Your burden is a blessing for them to bear (they might not always agree, but it’s true anyway).

It is pride and selfishness not to allow others to enter into your suffering. Who are you to hinder someone’s chance to sacrificially love you? Besides, none of us can make it without the help of others.

If you refuse to have grace for yourself or to accept help from others, you will fall deeper into despair and have less and less strength to care for those around you.

Your loved ones don’t stop needing you just because you’re suffering and stuck in your head or pinned to the bed. You can’t know exactly how much freedom you have to fight back against the darkness, against your own mind, and choose to be present with those who need you.

You can’t leave them alone while you lose yourself in despair. You don’t get to renounce your brother and sister, or your son and daughter, or your friends and neighbors, even when you feel like you have nothing to give them.

because the world cannot and will not stop for you. And it needs you, whether or not you want it to need you.

But you don’t always have to give it. You can try to make space for others. And you need to try because other people really need you.

Your life is a witness.

And they need to see you endure.

Hiding your suffering from everyone is no better (and can be a good deal worse)

Enduring doesn’t mean fake smiles and denial of suffering. It also doesn’t mean dramatizing your condition or leveraging it for attention. Maybe it sounds insensitive or offensive to suggest that some people fall in love with their own mental suffering.

You can suffer for legitimate reasons (a personal tragedy, an ailment, a mental illness), and you can go beyond that suffering or come to desire it because in some petty, perverse way you find the illness comforting. And whenever we suffer, we long to be comforted.

You may discover, through therapy or deep introspection, that the very anxiety you dread is a kind of familiar friend, something awful but predictable. Something overwhelming but containable.

is not pleasant to discover that you have come to love the condition by which you are tormented.

Our hearts are capable of incredible contortions, especially when we are desperate for affirmation or to feel alive. And it is not uncommon for us to desire the things that hurt us most.

What makes you worthy of love and compassion is the objective reality that God created you in His image and is preserving you right now. Neither a wildly successful life of fame and achievements nor a painfully tragic life of suffering and misfortune makes you any more valued, any more alive,

We too often turn to self-destructive habits in a desperate effort to feel like we have the very thing we always already have: a life that means something real.

A false humility says that you shouldn’t share your burdens, because if you do you may feed your ego