more space for depression and grace

I’ve been (very slowly) digitizing old journals, letters, and other text-based keepsakes over the past few years. This involves both scanning the original documents but also typing them up to enter into my Day One journaling app (and make them searchable). Because a solid majority of the letters and keepsakes that I had were related to my time as a Mormon missionary, I’m still chipping away at that era of my life. Fifteen(ish) years later, it’s fascinating to go back to this formative part of my life and see what’s changed.

Yesterday, I spent some time typing up a letter from a friend I’d grown up with. They apologized for not writing a letter in a while and mentioned a recent letter that they had written out before destroying:

I was in a state of depression in my situation, and used that letter to vent to a friend and write out all my sorrows, but when I looked at it, I knew I couldn’t send it with all the good work you’ve been writing about each week. I don’t want to send my depression across the seas, that’s for sure, and certainly don’t need to give you something to worry about!

There’s a lot that’s painful to read in this letter, because with fifteen years hindsight, I wish so badly that things had been different. I wish my friend felt more comfortable sharing their depression with me. I wish I had done more to communicate that to them. I don’t have a copy of whatever response I wrote to this letter, but I hope I pushed back some on the idea that they couldn’t send that first letter, that I was ready to read it and provide support. I wish I had talked to them about not feeling pressure about serving their own mission or becoming a parent—things I know now would be challenges for them in the future.

What’s more, I wish I’d been more clear to my friend—and realized myself!—just how much my mental health was struggling on my mission despite my apparently cheery letters and emails home. When I read journal entries and letters from this time in my life, it’s clear that I was struggling in a way that I wasn’t ready to reckon with. This isn’t to say that my mission was devoid of good experiences and happy times, and I know that my mission president was attentive to the possibility that I was having some mental health struggles, but it would take a decade for me to really recognize and deal with this in my life. It would have been nice for that to happen earlier.

For both of us, I wish the religious environment and broader culture that surrounded us had created more space for depression and more space for grace.

• macro
• Communities
• Mormonism
• grace
• mental health
• Latter-day Saint missionaries
• Day One
• journaling