Brandon Appelhans Guest Posts: "Identity & Mental Health"

Brandon reached out to me recently and is a mutual friend of Pastor Brad Hoefs. After researching his website, MyQuietCave.org, I invited Brandon to guest post for us here at BipolarBrave.com. I hope his story is encouraging to you and reminds you where your true identity comes from.

Yesterday I heard a story of a girl who is still in elementary school.

She has been told her entire life she was autistic. Recently she shared her diagnosis, but her face told a different story. She had already been given an identity, she is and will always be autistic. She knew the name was hers but did not know what it meant. When she shared her disorder, she was really saying, “This is who I am, but I do not know what it means. Here is my identity, please define me.”

Who am I? I have been told I am this thing. Now please, tell me who I am.

I wish I had never had this conversation before, never heard it from people about bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, borderline, DID, schizophrenia, PSTD, or anything else. But I’ve heard it with all of them and more.

Who I am is a really big question. It dictates what I am going to be capable of for the rest of my life. It dictates how I am going to process, and what that is going to feel like. It dictates how I see myself, which affects my moods, thoughts, relationships, and behaviors. It dictates whether I feel I am dysfunctional, which changes everything about me. Am I one of “those people”?

Today I met with someone who is struggling with mental illness. After an hour, I began to see that the real problem had nothing to do with mental health. She felt she was defined by her mistakes, and because of them, she pulled back from God. God felt far off, so she was alone and rejected.

For years I ran the same way. I felt like a chronic disappointment. God may have come to love all of humanity, and I believed that He loved everyone else, but I couldn’t find it in myself to believe that the God of the universe could ever love someone like me. I knew myself. All of the ugly bits. The way I ran. The way I couldn’t sit. The way I felt like I didn’t have control, discipline, or the ability to help people know Jesus. The ways I had hurt my family and my friends. The way I had to please everyone around me. The ways I was weak. The hundreds of ways I believed I wasn’t good enough.

I have taken a number of identities throughout my life. I have been the “helpful friend,” the “nice guy,” the “disappointment,” the “bipolar guy,” and countless others. All of my identities came out of a desire to be somebody. I became the “nice guy“ and the “helpful friend” to appease people so they would like me. I became the “disappointment” because I felt I was never enough, and if I was a disappointment, I didn’t have to live up to other people’s expectations. I became the “bipolar guy” later in life to open up opportunities for other people to speak, because when I was in the throes of episodes, I never felt like I had a voice.

After wearing so many identities, I started to see a counselor, and realized for the first time that I had been wearing masks for so long that I didn’t know who I was underneath all of them. Someone was in there, but I didn’t know who. I also started to realize that my masks had all been an attempt to try to feel like I was somebody when deep inside I hated who I was. I was filled with shame and regret. I felt it had always needed to be perfect. I wasn’t.

Meeting with that counselor and my mentor, I began a journey to begin to see myself the way God saw me. It meant that I had to remove every mask I had worn and come to terms with why I had worn them. I had to reintegrate my life by allowing myself to begin to see how God saw the broken parts of me and begin to love those parts as He loved them. And in the process, I became more and more whole, able to process life like I had always wanted.

When God looked at Adam and Eve at the end of Genesis 1, He said that everything He had created was good. Everything. Including Adam and Eve, who hadn’t accomplished anything. They were just good.

Somewhere in the way the gospel had been presented to me, everything circled around whether or not a person did good things. Person equals sinner, and they need to be saved by grace because God cannot tolerate the sinner or the sin. The story is so close, but also a little off.

The story of God is not a story of God trying to eradicate the bad in the universe and find ways to tolerate the sinners, though that is the story I believed for years. The story of God is a relentless pursuit of creatures he desperately cares for, who are made in his image and likeness. In that story, he pursued Israel for generations, then became incarnate, coming to be a man Himself in order to bring His reign back to earth and help people experience eternal life in the kingdom now and forever. It was for all people.

In Jonah 4. God spoke of the Ninevites, who were in that day the most brutal enemy of all that was good in the Near East. During the Cold War they would have been the USSR. Today, maybe they would have been an equivalent to ISIS. But of those people, the enemies of God’s chosen nation, He says:

“And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?” Jonah 4:11 NIV.

God is the one who is always caring for us when we are pushing away. He is the one who is always close. He is the one who never gives up on us even when we are at our worst.

And to that God, I said, “You can’t possibly love me. I’m such a disappointment,” and so have most of the people I have spoken to who have been diagnosed with mental illness. Their voices resonate, “How could God love a disappointment like me?”

The story I heard that people called the gospel missed something critical. Before Adam was a sinner who needed saving, he was a masterpiece of divine creative energy so valuable that he was made in the very image of God. And before we were all sinners, or disappointments, we were all beloved sons and daughters, also made in the image of God.

If you struggle with mental illness, or if you have been diagnosed and are asking the question, “This is my definition, what does it mean?” I would challenge those notions. You are first and foremost always a beloved son or daughter, even when you can’t get out of bed, or you yelled at your kids or your spouse, or you relapsed again, or you feel you can’t trust your brain because of mental illness, or you feel hopeless or worthless because you can’t perform in life anymore.

Just like me, it is easy to carry all of our identities as everything wrong with us, but God sees us in a different lens. And when we begin to see ourselves in that lens, we can work the rest of life knowing we are important, we do have an advocate, and the very God of the universe is crying with us when it hurts, and rooting for us to overcome.