Sonja’s Story

Authors Note: This post is part of a series I’m writing about other people’s experience with mental illness. I so appreciate Sonja, her brave heart and her willingness to share her story with fellow sufferers. If you’d like to share your story, email me at megcrish@gmail.com, and we can set up an interview.

There is nothing more awkward than being fourteen years old.

Unless you’re a 14-year-old homeschooled redhead with clinical depression.

And while I’m completely kidding about the redheaded-homeschool part, Sonja Carlson possessed all four traits.

Sonja was at a campout with her private homeschool friends when her mom, who was a chaperone on the trip, noticed she was behaving differently.

“There was no good way to explain how I was feeling, but my mom took me out to the car and said ‘What’s going on? I think you’re depressed,'” Sonja said. “I felt sad and I felt different but I didn’t want to admit there was something wrong.”

It took two years before Sonja admitted she should go to the doctor.

And from the moment her doctor informed her the chemicals in her brain were imbalanced, a variety of medicine flew on and off the shelves in her bathroom, though none of them seemed to work.

At age 17, her depression worsened.

It was days before her high school graduation and her friend Isaac had just asked her to be his girlfriend.

But the elated feeling of being somebody’s girlfriend quickly wore off when Isaac’s brother and his best friend were killed in a car accident that night.

“The next few months were really hard,” Sonja said. “We had a lot of friends that were affected by it, and a lot of them grew up together for a long time.”

A few days after the accident, several of those friends gathered together to talk and lean on each other for strength.

Sonja recalls one of her friends mothers telling them “you are all having to grow up really quickly.”

“She was so right,” Sonja said. “That’s when I realized I was growing up. That’s not something every teenager has to go through.”

Sonja was scheduled to start college at BYU-Idaho that fall.

“I was all set to go,” Sonja said. “But I was 17. I graduated a year early, so I was already feeling like I wasn’t prepared to go. I was signing up for classes and couldn’t get what I wanted. I was feeling uneasy.”

When summer turned to autumn, Sonja decided to defer from college for one semester so she could continue therapy and stabilize her mental condition.

“I started therapy, which I hated really bad,” Sonja said. “I was so far [emotionally] gone I was like this wall. I hated my therapist, so at least there was some emotion.”

Sonja’s days were blurred together and resulted in her and Isaac breaking up and a struggle with a borderline eating disorder.

To this day, she barely remembers her therapy sessions, apart from two.

“At one point, she told me if I kept living like I was I’d end up in the hospital. But I didn’t really care,” Sonja said. “At another point, she told me I needed to become more spiritual. I was upset, but it hit me like a ton of bricks. I knew that’s what i needed to hear, but it was hard to hear it from someone who wasn’t my bishop or my mom.”

When January came, Sonja was cleared by her therapist and her parents to move from Portland, Oregon to Rexburg, Idaho for school.

Although she still wasn’t thriving, they decided the best medicine would be to send her out into the world to be independent.

“At school, I was blessed with a fantastic group of roommates who I’m still close with to this day,” Sonja said. “I loved school and BYU-I and the people I was meeting. It was exactly what I needed.”

The same year Sonja started college, her close friend Risa was diagnosed with cancer.

Risa hosted cancer in her body for most of her life, but it went undetected until 2010.

Her cancer was so advanced that when she had a PET scan the doctors couldn’t tell what was and wasn’t cancer in her abdomen.

“I was up at school the entire time she was going through the whole process,” Sonja said. My grandpa had passed away ten years before with cancer, so I’d known since a child that cancer wasn’t something you mess around with.”

Early on, Sonja prepared herself for another friend’s death. And although it made her feel like she didn’t have enough faith, she didn’t feel like she could handle being shocked again.

“It was really hard not to be with her like my other friends were,” Sonja said.

Less than one year after Risa’s diagnosis, Sonja ran into one of her Oregon friends at school.

“She sat me down in a practice room in the music building and told me Risa’s liver was failing and that the doctors said she had about one week.”

On March 31, 2011 Risa returned to her father in heaven.

It was during finals week at BYU-Idaho that Sonja received the news.

“During that week and a half when she was dying, I remember having a conversation with my mom on the phone and I was beside myself,” Sonja said. “I told her ‘Mom, I can’t go through this again. It’s going to ruin me.’ She said, ‘Sonja, you’ve been through this before, shouldn’t it be easier this time?’ Of course she meant well by that, but in that moment, I realized it was going to be harder. Gabe and Grant had passed away two years before so I almost felt like I could expect it every two years.”

During that time, Sonja experienced something special.

After Risa’s death, she felt closer to God than she ever had.

“She was the most perfect person I have ever met on this earth,” Sonja said. “I believe it was her time to go because she was ready for it and that kind of helped.”

Though the years succeeding Risa’s death brought heartache and depression, Sonja learned to rely more on her faith for comfort.

Last October, Sonja’s life was rocked even harder when her uncle passed away from a disease he’d been sick with for a long time.

She had just started her final semester of college, she was living with her best friends and she had a top position at the school paper.

Suddenly the semester she had looked forward to most turned into the worst of her college career.

“My uncle treated me like his own daughter,” Sonja said. “He would message me on Facebook just to tell me how proud he was of me.”

To date, her uncle’s death has been the hardest thing she’s experienced in her life.

“I know without a doubt that I will be able to see my loved ones again somebody,” Sonja said. “But knowing that is really hard, because I’m still on this earth and have to go through each and everyday without them here.”

Sonja said she constantly worried that her friends at school were judging her for not coping as well as she should have.

“The pain wasn’t what I had experienced before, it was just intensified,” Sonja said. “The only way I’ve been able to pull out of it is the Savior and the Atonement and knowing that the Atonement works for them and for me too.”

Although Sonja still struggles with her uncle’s death and her depression, she has found strength in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

“I literally do not know how people who have depression and don’t have faith in the Gospel or don’t know the Gospel exists even get on with their lives,” Sonja said. “I know I’ll be healed eventually, and if it’s not tomorrow, it’s still eventually.”

Sonja would like to encourage others who have depression to doubt not the importance of their own diagnosis.

“There is opposition in all things,” Sonja said. “I know Risa will be able to dance again someday without pain because she will have a perfect body. My uncle will be able to walk on a regular basis. Gabe and Grant have probably been doing so much missionary work.”

Faith, trust and a little bit of pixie dust

“Happiness is a choice….you’re as happy as you choose to be.”

This mantra does not sit well with me.

It seems to litter social media with the frequency of cat videos, yet it doesn’t seem to warrant any success for the humans who sugarcoat their lives with an Instagram filter.  

I’d like to preface this post by saying that while, yes, I do believe attitude is the catalyst of what might be a good or bad day, I do not cast the blame on an individual for simply “choosing to be depressed.”

Why would anybody willingly choose depression when happiness is (apparently) just one positive thought away?

These thoughts have been tethered to my brain all summer, but it wasn’t until last month that I discovered another choice that may seem just as impossible to make, but delivers far more promising results.

It was August 4th.

I had just returned from a vacation that was mandatory to my sanity, and I was feeling equal parts sun-dried and exfoliated. 

For the past few months, I’d felt like a science experiment with a grim hypothesis. In every equation, I was the dependent variable. Dependent on the world to lift and love my authenticity. But I didn’t love myself. 

And yet, on the fourth day of the eighth month, I no longer felt this way.

I entered my workplace with a vigorous energy, willing my inner Christiane Amanpour to the surface to properly produce news stories to one and all. 

Although I was feeling melancholy upon returning from my own personal Kokomo, I was filled with the desire to live more fully and to make a difference in the world.

I felt free, happy even.

It was as if the depression that had plagued my soul for two years had vanished. 

Was I still on my vacation high?

Was it the non-stop dosage of Rainbow Rowell books the weekend before?

I quickly discarded the suspicious inquiry as to why I felt this strange new feeling of utter contentedness and decided to embrace it.

The ensuing days were tacked with the kind of happiness and gratitude that require no filter.

It was Thursday, August 7th, when my happiness hit a peak.

I was concluding a successful work day and waiting for my family to pick me up to go hang out with Sir Paul McCartney live in concert when I stopped for a moment to inhale the sweet blessing that was my life.

I had a great family, great friends and I felt like strapping on a flapper’s dress and bursting into melodic chorus, for who could ask for anything more?

As I headed out of work for the night, I carried a silent prayer of thanks, awestruck for the lucky lady I was.

Minutes later, my family pulled up to the curb to pick me up, and I felt a palpable shift from singsong to somber as I entered the car.

My parents, brother, and sister-in-law had just come from visiting my grandma, who was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer earlier in the summer.

Her condition had worsened in greater strides than any of the doctors thought it would, and we knew it wouldn’t be long before she returned to our Father in Heaven.

I asked how she was doing, and though the syllables were vague, my parents and brother’s body language told me she wasn’t doing well.

I tried to swallow the worry and harness the faith that had accompanied me so loyally over the last few days, but my brave face seemed to ride solo.

It was at dinner that we received the sobering news.

My precious Granma had completed her mortal journey.

Reality seemed to stir me harder as the distance closed between our car and my grandparents home. 

I couldn’t imagine a life without my Granma, a world where babies born into wouldn’t know the voice of that Irish lass.

And yet, underneath a thick layer of grief was an even thicker layer of faith.

Of gratitude. Of happiness.

Because I knew where my Granma was.

She wasn’t somewhere over the rainbow, nor was she gone away.

She was, and is, in heaven.

Suddenly, the happiness that trailed my shadow the entire week made sense.

It didn’t come from books.

It didn’t come from “packages, boxes or bags.”

It came from God.

The God I had been so angry with for so many months.

The God whom I thought had forsaken me, had forgotten me.

The God who sent his Son to die for me, to atone for my sins in addition to my grief and my pain, so that I could turn to Him and say “I know you understand how much this hurts.”

The God whom I spoke angry words at just weeks before had sent me the most tangible gift that’s unseen on this earth. 

He sent me The Comforter. 

Heaven felt immeasurably closer that week.

I leaned on His strength through the viewing, the funeral and the insurmountable tears.

Almost immediately following the funeral service, I felt that added strength quietly subside, prodding me to lean upon my newfound faith and press forward.

It’s been over a month and the ease with which The Comforter entered my heart has faded to its usual still small voice, ever reliable when I ask for it.

Though it wasn’t meant for us to feel heaven that close on a daily basis, I know now that God sends us pockets of paradise when we can’t go it alone. 

Because He will not leave us comfortless.

It may be beyond our power to simply choose to be happy.

But we can always choose faith.

For one day we will rest from our labors, and look back laughing, realizing that our adversity was indeed, but a small moment.