2025 was a hard year, spent recovering from burnout (slowly) and dealing with anxiety (badly). I worked full-time at a stressful job and lived in a three-bedroom house with eleven other people. Every waking moment was spent working, dreading work, and escaping the dread of work. Every sleeping moment was spent fitfully. There was no time to sleep, really, but I was so tired.

Moving was my ticket to peace, I thought. I’d have space of my own, a quiet house, a new job. I’d be pursuing my dream of a writing career. But I wasn’t thinking of anxiety as an illness. An illness doesn’t just go away because you go to a different state. You have to heal from an illness, and it takes time. And illness, especially a chronic illness, wrecks your life.

You might think, “Anxiety is just being worried about something.” Everyone gets anxious, and it’s usually rational: if you’re late to your meeting, that could effect your work; if you can’t find your driver’s license, you can’t use your car; if you have a sore throat, you might be getting sick. But anxiety disorder focuses you on things that aren’t always rational. I have a loft bed close to the ceiling, and at night I sometimes wonder if the ceiling will come crashing down on me. Part of my brain tells me that’s highly unlikely, but the other part is stuck on the what-if. Anxiety takes that to a hundred and messes with everything: your sleep, your appetite, even your physical senses. I notice my tinnitus gets louder when I’m spiraling, and for a while last year, I’d get painful adrenaline rushes. It goes on and on.

And then you start healing. You change your lifestyle, you cut out a trigger, you get people praying for you. And you have a day where you wake up relaxed. You do something that used to scare you and find it’s not so bad. You spiral for a few days, but it goes away. You remember what normal life is.

Is it just me, or is healing even worse than the illness? I look back at months where I worried myself sick over finances for no good reason. Why couldn’t I have just been still and known? I think about how I yelled at people I loved, trying to hurt them, because as much as you yell at anxiety, you can’t hurt it back. And I’m so afraid it’ll come back. I don’t think I could live like that again.

I’ve improved. I’m doing good in a lot of ways. But I’m not better. I crave being better. Why can’t I be healed? God, am I not believing enough? Am I asking for the wrong things? I don’t think You want us to suffer, so WHY AM I SUFFERING? This is the cry of people all over the world, a cry coming from destroyed bodies, minds, and souls.

The last thing I want this to be is destructive, so let me build you up. I came across this quote by author O. Alan Noble, who writes candidly about his life with obsessive-compulsive disorder. He writes, “If you are struggling with a mental health condition, you also need to acknowledge that whether other people show you grace or not, there is grace for your suffering and weakness. You are going to have bad days. You are going to have weak moments where you forget to use your tools and respond properly to negative thoughts or anxiety.”

There is grace.

I think this is something even Christians forget about mental illness. We know it’s a symptom of our fallen world, we know to pray against it, but when was the last time someone told you there is grace for anxiety? There is grace for depression? There is grace for OCD? We form habits in our illness that take a long time to unlearn. We become quick-tempered or low on patience or antisocial, we hurt the people around us, and we hurt ourselves. There is grace for all that. There is forgiveness. The One sweating blood in the garden has strength and patience for each one of us.

And it’s okay to ask, “Will I ever be all right again?” Yeshua asked why God had forsaken Him. I used to imagine Him weeping on the cross; now I imagine Him screaming in soul-shattered despair. He begged God to let it pass, and God didn’t, and everything was horrible and it wouldn’t stop. Then it did, and it was the most beautiful thing.

You have permission to hurt. You have permission to question. I have lost things that I’m not sure I’ll ever get back. I don’t know why I haven’t been fully healed, and I don’t want to rush to the conclusion that I’ll never be better. But if that is my future, I’ll be all right, only by the grace of God.