It's Upgrade time | Or is it?

The other day I received an email from O2 entitled: It's Upgrade time, Jessica. Which then proceeded to tell me about O2 refresh: 

'A new phone now.

A new phone whenever you want.'

Don't get me wrong, it's a great idea, no longer will people have to be locked into a contract with a phone they no longer like because it's no longer the latest model. But, what is wrong, is our attitude. Why should a perfectly good phone be deemed 'useless' just because it can't use 4G (or whatever the latest techy thing is) or because it's 6 months old so it now deemed 'old.' 

I don't understand this waste culture. My phone works fine, and want to know the reason I bought it in the first place, my old one (bought of a friend several years ago) had stopped working. I didn't ask for the latest model, as I didn't really care, but I did have one requirement: that my new phone stored the texts as a conversation, rather than individual messages.  

But now my two year contract has run out and society says I have two options. Get a new phone (and contract) or buy into this idea of O2 refresh, and get a new phone whenever I want. But the thing is my old phone works fine, it's a bit scratched and damaged, but it works. So what happens to it now. Does it just sit in my draw, a waste of some of the world's resources. Because while my one old phone in a draw doesn't make much differences, if everyone does it, well that's a lot of old phones sitting around all of which contain metals of some desciption. And why should we be wasting the world's limited resources like this?

So instead of following the crowd and going for an upgrade, I'm opting to stay with my phone, and just get a sim only contract. Because at the end of the day, I don't care. I don't own a phone to surf the net, check facebook and tweet, but to text and ring people. Radical I know. But I don't need an upgrade to do that. And if people care more about the model of my phone then me, I really don't see the point in texting them. Because my phone doesn't define me, it's just useful. So come a few weeks time, I'm going onto a Sim Only contract so I can do by bit to save the world's resources (and as an added bonus, save myself some pennies.) 

Faith, Depression and Lessons learnt.

It's a while since I last blogged, but in my previous blog, Living with Mental health | Depression and Faith, I said that I had learnt a lot of lessons about God through my depression, since then I've had my finals to revise for, then socialising to catch up on and then it ended up being now, and I realised that I had missed blogging, and that I had a promise to upkeep. So, here are some of the lessons I have learnt about the God that I follow, through my period of depression.

• God is a God of love. 

Sounds crazy? My depression was a period of my life where I struggled a lot with my identity, I felt unworthy of anyone's love, let alone a God's love. I was imperfect, struggling to do the simplest of tasks, so how could a God who created the Universe want to love me. And yet, I continued to believe that it was true, admittedly there were periods when I doubted but, in so many places the Bible is clear. God is a God of love. He loves me, he loves you, he loves the world.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believed in him shall not die but have eternal life."

John 3:16 

Verse like that kept me going in the dark times, but also this experience. One evening I was sat in church crying, praying out to God and I felt someone my place their hand on upper arm, I felt the reassuring pressure of their fingers. And yet there was no one there. It felt as thought they had their arm around me, holding me tight, making me feel loved and cared for. But, it wasn't the person next to me as they were using both their hands to hold mine. I believe that presence was God. 

• God keeps his promises

A few weeks after I had been diagnosed with depression, I had a strong conviction, that one day God would  heal me. And whilst I'm not quite there yet, I know my depression no longer affects my daily life, I can live the life I want to live with no fear of a lapse. Why? Because I know my God is with me where ever I go.

"When you pass through the waters,

I will be with you;

and when you pass through the rives,

they will not sweep you away.

When you walk through the fire,

you will not be burnt;

the flames will not set you ablaze."

Isaiah 43:2 

• God is a provider

I can safely say that I would not be where I am today it wasn't for God's provision. God provided me with an amazing, loving group of friends, my housemates, my course mates and my friends at church. All of these people have helped me stand on my own two feet. They have helped me stay on track, to pass each year, and to continue with my studying. 

• God is a God of hope

Sometimes, when I woke up I didn't want to get out of bed. I didn't want to face the day. I didn't want to face the pain and the hardship, I just want to stay cocoon in bed away from it all.  But sometimes, it got a lot worse than that, I didn't want to face my future. When I was really ill, the future resembled a long dark tunnel, and I couldn't face walking along it because it didn't look any better. But I knew that God would bring light into my situation and with the light he brought me hope. I know that whatever happens in my life, God will bring good out of it, and that gives me a hope to keep on going. 

Whilst you might think I'm mad, for believing in a God who has watched me suffer, I believe that he has suffered with me, and he has suffered more. Because he died for me upon a cross. And he was watched me cry every tear, felt with me the weight of my pain, and has kept loving me. Through my experience I have learnt many things, I have learnt things about myself, about the world and I have learnt about my faith. Whilst I would never wish to go through this again, I am glad that God has used this time of pain to bring goodness into my life.

Living with Mental Health | Depression and Faith

When I first got diagnosed with depression, I was incredibly angry at God. I felt that he should have prevented the situation which was one of the main causes of it. I couldn't understand how a God of love, could allow the suffering I went through. Now I'm out through the other side  I still don't understand but I know God has taught me lessons that I couldn't have learnt any other way, and I will talk about those lessons in another blog. Because what I want to talk about now is how my faith got me through.

Like I said, when I used to be very angry at God, but now I'm not. Even in the darkest of times, I kept going to Church. In fact, at my lowest points, I used to scream out to God blaming him for everything I was going through. Because, in my eyes, he was to blame. I started to read the Psalms (for those of you who don't know what they are, they are songs mainly written by David (the David who defeated Goliath). They are songs of pain and suffering, but also songs of conviction and statements of truth about God. At they helped me to feel justified about my anger and pain. I felt as a Christian I couldn't have pain and anger at God, at yet these songs that were included in the Bible had them. And my favourite thing about them was that they would often start in anger, but come round to the truths that, I as a Christian, believe about God.

I also found my faith to be strongest in the darkest times, I couldn't depend on myself and it was only through reaching out to God each day for help, even just to get out of bed, I managed to keep going. God also provided me with the most important things I needed to keep going. He provided me with amazing housemates that didn't bring up my depression, and yet were also there whenever I needed them. He provided me with friends on my course, that helped me hand in my work on time and made me laugh and keep enjoying Chemistry. But most importantly, God provided me with loads of different people in Church that kept me going, supporting me with all my problems an doubts, and loving me even when I ended each service in floods of tears.

I've found these past 18 months tough, but I know that I could have not managed to get through without my faith. It has been the rock that I have been able to cling to when everything else has seemed to be sinking sand. I'm not saying that I've not had doubts, because I have, I have doubted God's existence and his love for me, but at the end of the day, it's been what I'm holding onto.

"He lifted me out of the slimy pit,

out of the mud and mire,

he set my feet upon a rock,

and gave me a firm place to stand."

Psalm 40:2

Living with Mental Health | Depression and Friendship

I was diagnosed with depression in October of last year. In reality, it had most likely been going on for most of my teenage years but the summer after my first year of university was where things got bad enough that I couldn’t cope. My friends quite literally ordered me to go to the doctors – with one memorable threat that I’d be picked up and dragged there if I kept putting it off – as the changes in me managed to destroy my relationship with my then-boyfriend and were clearly visible to the people around me. In fact, that’s what this testimonial is about, really: my friends. Yes, anti-depressants and visits to the Open Door team helped me, but my friends have been the driving force behind my recovery so far.    There was one piece of advice I received shortly after diagnosis that has helped me more than anything: don’t let it be a secret. So many people see mental health issues as taboo, and keep them quiet, but if the people closest to don’t know what you’re dealing with, they can’t help you when you need them or cut you some slack when you’re at your worst.

Last year I was, to be perfectly blunt, a fairly rubbish friend. I missed birthdays and skipped meet-ups, and when I did show up, I spent most of the time sat in a corner feeling awful or trying to pretend everything was ok when I wanted to be back in bed ignoring the world. I was much the same with lectures – attending a 9.15 was a rarity, and workshops and tutorials pretty much ceased to even exist to me. But despite all this, my friends never once refused me notes to copy up or help with work and the invites to events kept coming. I honestly expected them to turn their backs on me, not through malice but just because being friends with me must have been akin to being friends with a brick wall or a goldfish.

I will forever be indebted to my best friend and housemate, who managed to curb the worst of my thoroughly self-destructive habits. I never self-harmed, but my sleep and eating habits became more messed up than I thought possible: some days I ate near-constantly, as if I was hoping to counter the deep, gnawing pain I felt with copious amounts of food. Other days, I would look at the clock and realize it was nine or ten o’clock at night, I hadn’t eaten a thing all day and I wasn’t hungry in the slightest. She kept me from eating only chocolate, reminded me – and occasionally outright ordered me – to eat something, and is probably the main reason I didn’t end up with severe nutritional issues, as I sometimes went days without wanting to eat. She also offered an ear, a shoulder and a hug whenever I needed it, and let me ramble on about what was going on inside my messed up little head without judging.

There are a few more people (who will probably know exactly who they are, if they happen to read this) who I will probably never be able to repay for their friendship. I have one friend who was pretty much the only person to get real smile out of me. Another who must have given me a few hundred hugs in the past two years. Yet another who would tell me outright if I wasn’t telling them the things they could actually help with and then give me solutions to the problems he could. These and others are the people who have kept me going, and the people that I could not have gotten through the last two years without.

To anyone reading this who is suffering: tell your friends. Don’t beat around the bush and hope they guess. Sit them down, and tell them you’ve been diagnosed with depression and exactly what that means. Let them know that if you don’t see them as much it’s not because you don’t want to, it’s because you can’t face the world today.

To my friends, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’m getting better now, but even if and when I’m fully recovered, I will NEVER stop owing you.

Anonymous