Sushi saved my life.  I know you’re waiting for the punch line.  The fact is there isn’t one.  Sushi really did save my life and I’m not talking about Omega-3’s or vitamins or any other trendy health crap.  I’m talking about I was going to die and sushi intervened like an action hero.  Ok, maybe that part is over the top but eating sushi is why I still draw breath today.

I first experienced depression at the age of five and it, like so few other things, stuck with me for the next 20 years of my life.  I can’t say much else for depression but it was committed.  I’ll give it that.  One of the innumerable therapists I talked to asked me to tell him about the times in my life when I was depressed.  I told him it would be easier to tell him about the times I wasn’t depressed.  I could count them on one hand and, frankly, I couldn’t afford the fees he’d have charged to go over all my depressed moments.  Bill Gates couldn’t afford those fees.

Depression is like dying on the inside but the outside looks normal to everyone around you.  Like an apple that’s shiny and red on its skin but is rotten at its core.  You’re so lost and isolated and the people closest to you don’t understand what’s going on inside of you.  They just see your knee jerk reactions to situations they’d take in stride.  They don’t know that it took all your energy, strength and courage just to get out of bed.  When the tire goes flat on the car, they don’t understand why that should send you to your knees.  It’s because whatever energy you had to deal with that situation was spent days, hours or weeks before and all you want to do is go back home and crawl under the covers.

I lived like that for 20 years, dreading the moments in life where things got difficult and wasting the good moments worrying about the bad times past and the bad times yet to come.  I lost so many hours of sleep to worry.  Depression spawned anxiety.  All of my minutes were steeped in fear.  It was sheer agony.  It’s no wonder, thinking back, that I tried to kill myself.  It’s not that I wanted to die.  It’s that I didn’t want to live.  Not like that at any rate.

Then, things got even worse.  I’d graduated college and found a job I loved in a field I was excited about.  I was newly married with a cute cottage to decorate and things should have been great but they weren’t.  I lost the job and had to go back to retail (which I swore I’d never do).  There are animals who probably make more money than I made at that job.  We were totally broke save the $50 a month my husband spent to rent a band room.  That left me with zero spending money.  Don’t think my husband is a jerk for spending the money on band rent, though.  I don’t begrudge him a penny.  I’ll come back to that $50 in a minute.

When you’re broke, you don’t go do things.  Things cost money.  So I spent a lot of time in the cute cottage with no money, no real job, no job prospects, and even less self-esteem.  To kill time, I’d sleep.  I spent a lot of time in bed, which is a great place to worry about things because there’s not much to interrupt you when you’re laying in bed and worry likes a free rein. 

Things got so bad; I came to a place where I knew that if I didn’t destroy depression, it would destroy me.  It was like the epic battle at the end of a movie, like Frodo trying to throw the ring into the fires of Mt. Doom, but it wasn’t fiction.  I knew I was literally fighting for my life.  Luckily, I’m a really poor loser.  I got mad.  Had depression been a living person I’d have put my hands around his throat and squeezed till there was nothing left all while beating his head on the floor.  You may think that’s just a clever (or not so clever depending on your taste) metaphor that I stuck in while writing but you’d be wrong.  That image dominated all my thoughts on depression.  Would that depression were tangible so I could do it physical harm.  I swear I would.  Instead of being human, my enemy was an idea, an illness and I had to be clever in my strategy to overcome it. 

There was one thing that kept bugging me, kept me from stabbing myself with a knife, I couldn’t figure out why God would bother to create me to live in such misery.  I began to wonder if maybe I was missing something somewhere.  I don’t know what you believe about God, but it’s been my experience that He’s loving.  He’s patient with me.  He wants me to love Him in return.  So if He sat down at an easel or a computer on some other plane somewhere to create “Jennifer” why would He program me to be such a wreck?  What possible good could the sniveling weakling I was be to God? 

I started to examine my life, the things I did and didn’t do, the things I thought about.  I realized that many of the things I did actually made my depression and anxiety worse than they had to be.  It was like I was the victim of a poisoning who kept drinking little shots of poison.  It wasn’t enough to be depressed, I thought about being depressed.  I assigned blame for the depression to events in my life.  I thought about things that were hurtful to me.  I said things to myself that were depressing.  I’d invent things to worry about. 

Please don’t misunderstand me and someone always does.  I’m not saying that the things I did caused my depression and anxiety.  I’m saying they made what was already there worse.  There’s always someone who wants to take my words to a friend or loved one with depression and tell them that it’s their fault they’re sick.  It’s not their fault.  Please don’t use my words to hurt your loved one.  I’m saying that like a person with a heart condition has to watch what they eat, I had to watch what I thought. 

I dare you to control your thoughts for one day.  It’s not easy.  We think like we breathe.  We just do it.  But when I really got down to it I realized that if nothing else, I could ease my pain by examining my thoughts and only thinking about things that were helpful to me.  The things that were harmful I did not allow in.  This is actually a Biblical way of thinking.  2 Corinthians 10:5 says to “take every thought captive” which is what I was doing when I stopped to consider the advantages and disadvantages of each of my thoughts.  Philippians 4:8 says, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things,” which is what I absolutely was not doing when I worried about things and shot myself down.  When I began adjusting my thoughts so they were in accordance with how God wanted me to think, I began to see real change in myself, change that no therapist or drug had ever brought.  I was beginning to be happy and I was choking the life out of depression.

Here’s the part where sushi comes in.  Changing the way I thought and changing my habits were hard.  This is life altering stuff here.  You can’t just decide to be different.  You have to work at it.  I knew I had to get out of my bed and out of my house but money was tight.  I figured since Brian got that $50 a month for band rent, I could review the budget and find $50 a month for myself.  I did and I decided to spend it on sushi. 

Once a week I would plan a day, drag myself out of bed and go eat sushi at my favorite restaurant.  I even had rules I made for myself, no half-assed hair and makeup.  I had to get up and get myself ready like I was going to see someone who’s opinion of me I might care about.  You wouldn’t believe how hard that is when you’re depressed.  It took me hours not because I’m particular about how my hair and makeup look but because when you’re that run down everything is utterly exhausting.  It just took that long to drag myself though the steps.  Once I got to the restaurant, I turned my phone off.  There would be no phone calls or text messages during sushi.  Finally, I only ate by myself.  I didn’t have to entertain anyone or worry about what anyone else thought and I always read a book that was just for fun.  It was my time, claimed by me for me. 

It worked brilliantly.  Some days I’d spend an hour and half eating sushi and turning pages.  It was so restorative.  I felt recharged when I left.  It was so good that some days it wasn’t enough and I go get coffee somewhere and keep reading and resting.  Then it progressed to coffee outings on days in between sushi.  It got easier to get out of bed.  It got easier to get dressed.  It got easier to stop thinking negative thoughts.  It began to look a lot more like life and a lot less like death. 

I don’t know if God made me to experience depression on purpose or not.  Maybe we just live in a world where things are broken and this is the effect, my lot to bear.  Maybe He wanted me to overcome it so I can tell others about how things can be better for them.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that even in depression, God has provided a way for us to overcome. 

The church likes to talk a lot about living in community.  For those not in the church that means that we all have to help each other out in life.  Sometimes, the church is guilty of making community seem like something that only happens inside its doors or that your job is only of value to other Christians if you’re a preacher or another worker in the church.  That’s wrong.  There’s a sushi chef out there who’s part of my community.  Someone who’s daily routine of serving rice and seaweed had a profound effect on my life, more than any preacher or therapist has had.  Whatever you do, whoever you are, do it to the best of your abilities.  You never know what affect you may have on someone out there.  Maybe one day you’ll read about how your job saved someone else’s life.