I am not okay

Experts were comparing it in intensity to Hurricane Katrina. I saw visions of flattened, devastated neighbourhoods and wondered if we’d still have a house in the morning. If anyone would. 

Lots of people were evacuating from the coast and fleeing to Rocky, or to the cyclone shelter in Yeppoon. Should we go? Should we stay? It had all happened so fast, I felt completely caught off guard. Only that morning on Facebook I’d been joking about the impending cyclone interfering with my social plans. All of a sudden, it was no longer a joke.

Thursday night, I hardly slept. 

First thing in the morning, we built ourselves a bunker in the Walk-in-Robe. We lined it with mattresses and stocked it with water, snacks, torches, and games for the kids. They thought it was fantastic. A secret hideout! Hooray! 

We tried to keep it lighthearted and make a game of it, but truthfully, I felt sick with anticipation. I had no idea what to expect in the next few hours. Would the windows shatter? Would the roof fly off? Would debris slice through the house? Would I be able to protect my kids?

We watched the trees in our backyard blown nearly horizontal from the force of the wind. The roar sounded like a freight train screaming past within inches of our home. 

And yet, the more intense the storm became, the calmer I felt. It was the oddest thing. 

Before the power went out I’d been talking to some friends on Facebook. I knew we had people praying for us from all over the world. I could actually feel the prayers. The sick panicked feeling slowly ebbed and subsided. During the worst of the storm, I lay down on the mattress with Allegra and we both fell fast asleep.

We woke to an altered world.

It took some time for us to register what had happened. Half a dozen trees in our backyard were snapped in two from the ferocity of the wind. But our house was fine. Our street was fine. The people sheltering down the road from us in the Rec Club were fine. There were trees down over the roads everywhere and a few fence panels blown out here and there, but the houses we saw in our neighbourhood were all remarkably intact. 

This was my father-in-law’s place after impact. The bedroom roof was torn off completely, leaving the room open to the sky.

The house was deemed unfit for habitation and taped off. They were told they couldn’t go back inside.

Thankfully the in-laws have a fully furnished second house which escaped unscathed, so they have somewhere to live. But needless to say, they were shaken by the experience. They were sheltering downstairs in the bathroom when the roof ripped away – I can only imagine how frightening that must have sounded.

It took us a while to understand what had happened: that the cyclone had grazed past the edge of us on the coast, and hit Rockhampton straight on. After seeing the devastation from a Category 3 direct hit in Rocky, I can only imagine how tragic the outcome could have been for everyone on the coast had we sustained a direct hit (as had been predicted) while the cyclone was still at Category 5. 

Without doubt, lives would have been lost. 

Even catching the side of the storm at its fully fledged fury, Yeppoon (just to the north of us) was hit hard and suffered some serious damage. But I believe it’s God’s grace that the path of the storm veered sideways, sparing the coast the most powerful winds at the height of the cyclone’s intensity.

With hundreds of power lines down in the wake of TC Marcia, the city and coast sweltered in the tropical heat. The power was out almost everywhere and would remain out for a week. No air-conditioning, no fans, no refrigerators. Food spoiled. The sound of generators became the noisy theme of the still nights. People queued for hours to buy petrol from the one or two servos with power. 

After a day in the dripping hot humidity on the coast, we fled to hubby’s Rockhampton office where miraculously the power was still on. The bliss of air-conditioning!! Those rooms became quite the drop-in centre. At night we had wall to wall bodies, upstairs and down. It felt good to be able to help others out. 

We knew we’d been incredibly fortunate. Some people had lost everything. Still, for the first couple of days after the cyclone, I kept catching myself tearing up at odd moments. I think it was delayed shock. My body saying, “What the hell just happened!” The terror of waiting for the storm to hit, the intensity of it all, the wash of weak relief afterward, the unsettling strangeness of driving around town seeing a familiar landscape made alien, ugly, scarred. Enormous trees ripped up whole by the roots. Piles of debris and branches on every street. A world in chaos.

In some way, the turmoil of the outside world matched the turmoil I had been feeling inside for quite some time. Months, actually. 

And here’s the hard part. The bit that’s scary and difficult for me to talk about.

The fact is, I’ve been struggling with depression.

There. I said it.

I am not okay.

I guess it really started last year, around the time we were getting ready to move. It was to be our third move in three years. I’d been planning for it, but everything changed at the last minute and all of a sudden we didn’t know where we would be moving to. 

We’d put all the pieces into place for a big move to the other end of the state, but an unexpected opportunity came up and we started seriously considering a local sea-change instead, from the city to the nearby coast.  We were relying on some specific external factors to help us make our decision, but the answers we needed never came. All of a sudden it was crunch time – schools needed to finalise the kids’ enrolments for the new year, and we had to make our choice.

I started having panic attacks. The first time it happened, it was triggered by someone at church asking about our plans for our move. Everyone was confused about what we were doing. Heck, we were confused about what we were doing.

I tried to answer, and found I couldn’t breathe. I could barely speak. It felt like my lungs were being squeezed and I couldn’t get enough air in. I felt dizzy. My heart battered in my chest like I was being chased. I burst into tears.

It got worse, to the point where trying to get the kids off to school in the morning was enough to trigger a panic attack. I felt anxious all the time. I’d never had anxiety before. I’d been stressed out before, of course, but this went so far beyond stress. It was a constant burning, churning in my gut. Heart galloping. A feeling of inexplicable dread and terror. It was horrible. And nothing touched the sides of the anxiety. Deep breathing didn’t do a thing. Nothing helped.

Our church held a two week revival, and things went really downhill at that point. The intensity of what I was going through reached a whole new level. I went to church every night, and every day the anxiety grew worse. I had never felt such an oppression in my entire life. I felt under attack.

Now, please understand that I’m not  saying ALL depression or anxiety is a spiritual attack. It’s a real thing, a physiological thing. I know – I grew up in a family where serious mental illness was a part of our lives. You wouldn’t tell a person with cancer that it was caused by some spiritual problem. Same goes for any illness of the mind. I feel really strongly about that.

However, during that particular week of my life, I definitely felt under spiritual attack. It made me get stubborn. I knew I had to keep attending the services. I received prayer and felt God move in tangible ways. But it wasn’t until after the revival ended, at a women’s Bible study meeting when my pastor’s wife began praying for me, praying with passionate authority against anxiety, that the power of God swept through me so strongly that I was left literally on the floor unable to stand up.

And the anxiety left.


Gone.

Instantly, completely and utterly gone. It was breathtaking. I could hardly dare believe it.

It has never been back.

I know without a doubt that God healed me. Pure grace, because I’m sure I wouldn’t have survived the chaos of the end of last year if things had continued the way they’d been going. I wouldn’t have coped.

In the end, we made our move blindly. Without the vital information we needed. Praying for guidance. Stepping out into thin air and hoping for the best. Feeling as if everything we’d expected to happen had been turned on its head.

And we entered a weird sort of limbo full of uncertainty and waiting.