Finding Hope in Purpose

At my first therapy session of the new semester, I had to admit that I had little to talk about.  Christmas had gone better than expected.  Some of the things that had been weighing on me had been confronted and put away.  I felt good.

My therapist asked how I would scale my depressive symptoms against how I felt when I first started therapy.  "I was probably a seven in the fall.  Now...I think I'm a two."

"A two?" she said.  "That's really low.  That's great.  What do you think changed?"

I didn't know.  But the more I think about it, I realized that I have purpose this semester.  My depression is almost always wound around feelings of hopelessness and purposelessness.  Now that I am starting to see clients, my life has meaning.  I am doing the thing for which I came to Dallas and entered graduate school.  All these things I've been cramming into my brain are coming out.  Instead of talking about stepping into people's pain and wondering what that will be like in the nebulous future, I'm experiencing it right now.

It's terrifying, counseling people.  But the good sort of terror, the kind when you see a person and you think, "You're going to change my life," or when the camel you're on lurches to its feet or when you stare at the clouds and feel so small and so massive.  It's terrifying, but it is mine.  It is what I am made to do, I have not one shred of doubt. 

God crafted me into a sensitive, empathetic person.  With every book I devoured, I learned to place myself in someone else's shoes.  With every person who ignored me, I burned with a passion to give voice to the voiceless.  With my heightened sense of disunity, I cried against the separation of heart and head before I ever had a place where I could sit with someone and say, "It's okay to feel things."

So although this first step into the next leg of my journey is stupid scary, I am so excited.  And that excitement that I have found from doing what I was made to do--that is what has healed me.