The Light Bulb Has to Want to Change
It's a tired old joke. It's also true. It's a truth I avoided until I was 24: I needed help. I was not coping with adult life, especially post-college adult life, whether as a grad student, a struggling first-year (and, as a result of that struggle, almost only year) teacher, then a seminarian. Each year, the loneliness and depression deepened, until finally I walked into the campus mental health center at SMU and was assigned a therapist. He helped me get over my difficulties with dating (primarily that I didn't know how to do it). Once I'd been on a few dates, and gotten serious, I proposed to my first real girlfriend, and felt so good that I pronounced myself cured. Five years later, my marriage and career in ministry were falling apart, and I finally went back to therapy. This time I stuck with it: there were interruptions, but it was nineteen years before I decided I'd really done all the therapy I needed. All told, between 1985 and 2010, I...