They Gave Me Thirty

The bag was white with a folded top and a label stapled on and Erin was nineteen and it was for her wisdom teeth.

That is the whole beginning. There is no dramatic scene anywhere in this. She had four teeth out on a Thursday under general anesthetic because her jaw was too small, which is a completely ordinary thing that happens to thousands of nineteen year olds, and she went home with her mother and a bag of frozen peas and a white paper bag with thirty in it.

She took them as directed. She was a good patient. She was, at nineteen, a girl who read the leaflet.

Her face healed in about ten days. There were nineteen left.

And here is the part she has never been able to explain to anybody, and it is the part that has kept her from saying any of this out loud for eleven years: nothing bad happened. Nobody hurt her. She was not sad. She had a good family and a place at university and a boyfriend she liked.

She just noticed, at about day twelve, that she had taken one for a headache and that the day had gone differently, and that she had not felt that particular way before, and that she had nineteen left.

She is thirty now. There has been a long and complicated route between that bag and this morning, and it has involved several doctors and one very bad year and a period she does not talk about, and she is currently sitting on the end of her bed with her phone in her hand not calling anybody.

I cannot say this out loud, because there is no reason for it. It started with wisdom teeth.

And here is where I stop talking about Erin, because yours began with something ordinary too. A back. A knee. A birth. A surgery a surgeon has done nine hundred times. And the ordinariness of the beginning is exactly what has kept you quiet.

So let me say the first thing before anything else, and say it plainly: what happened to you is common, it is documented, it is well understood by the people whose job it is, and it is not a hidden flaw in your character that revealed itself at nineteen.

The lifting is not yours to do

Let me set the strongest thing down first, because you are sitting on the end of a bed and you have been sitting there a while.

You are not stuck. That is the sentence you have been carrying and it is not true of you. And the reason it is not true is not that you have more strength in reserve than you think. It is that the lifting was never your job: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

He brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2

Look at who is doing every verb in that sentence. He brought up. He set. He established. There is not one action in it performed by the person in the clay, and that is not an accident of translation, it is the whole shape of the psalm.

And notice the clay. The image is not a cliff you failed to climb. It is a substance that holds a foot, which is exactly what this is: not a lack of effort but a thing that grips.

So you are not being asked to climb out of something that grips, and Scripture is where I get that rather than my own encouragement, and God's Spirit is not standing at the edge assessing why you are still down there. The Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into the room you are actually in.

An ordinary beginning is not a secret verdict

Now the silence, because that is doing as much damage as anything and nobody names it.

You have not told anybody, and the reason is not shame about the substance. It is that you cannot supply a story that would justify it. You did not have a terrible childhood. You were not in agony. You were a nineteen year old with a small jaw and a white paper bag.

And so you have concluded that if there was no reason outside you, the reason must be inside you, and that it is something about what you are.

That reasoning is wrong and it is worth taking apart. What happened at day twelve was a body meeting a molecule. It is chemistry with a long, well documented literature, and it happens to careful people who read leaflets, and it is the exact reason the guidance around these bottles has changed so much in the last decade.

So hear this: you are not a person with a defect that was exposed by a bag of tablets. You are a person God brought up out of clay, and what you are is settled by Him rather than by how a molecule met a nervous system at nineteen. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can stand on rather than something you would like to believe.

And now the part that matters most practically, and I am going to be exact, because getting this wrong is dangerous. Do not stop or reduce anything you have been prescribed on your own. Do not ration it, do not hide it, do not skip doses to prove something, and do not throw a bottle away in a moment of resolve. Coming off some of these without medical supervision is genuinely dangerous, and the way through this is a prescriber who knows the truth. Say the real amount, the real frequency, and the day at day twelve when you noticed. That sentence, said in a consulting room, is not a confession. It is a person handing a real problem to somebody equipped for it. And if you are ever in danger, if you have taken more than you meant to, or the thought has turned toward not being here, get medical help now and tell one person today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. There are people awake right now.