You have a choice

 I don’t remember ever not hearing the voices in my head. When I was 10, 11, 12, I would sit up in the middle of the night, in the middle of my mattress with my knees pulled up tightly against my chest, rocking with sobs as I saw the hands coming up over my mattress trying to pull me down, down to the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth. When I was a teenager those voices changed, telling me I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t worthy, I was unlovable. I was the reason my parents were screaming and fighting all the time. I would never have a boyfriend because I was too fat and angry. I wasn’t smart enough so there was no point in trying to get into college. A couple years after my husband Damon was killed, I found myself driving cross country in an RV with my three small children in the back. One day in the middle of nowhere I was driving across a high steeply curved bridge and I heard a voice in my head tell me to just turn the wheel and go over the edge of that bridge, that it wouldn’t matter anymore, that it wouldn’t hurt anymore. I argued with that voice in my head, “what about my children,” “Doesn’t matter, they’ll be dead too.” “But what if my children survive, what if they just get hurt, what if they become orphans.” That word “orphans” kept my hands on that steering wheel, driving straight across that bridge. A few months later I recognized that something was wrong with me. I felt like I was going crazy. I was sure I had schizophrenia or some other mental health issue and I needed to get help. I went through grief counseling, I even started a prescription of an anti-depressant, something to help me. But I couldn’t stand the way it made me feel, nothing, like a zombie. So, I went back to my trusted coping mechanism of getting lost in a book. I don’t know how I came across the book series, The Great and Terrible. The only thing I knew about the author Chris Stewart was that he was LDS, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, like me. The book is about the war in heaven, our relationships with our brothers and sisters, with Jehovah and Lucifer. The book continues to our relationships here on earth, those continued relationships and those fallen angels who chose to follow Lucifer and how they are now on earth, here with us, whispering in our ears lies, deceit, manipulations, to get us to choose to do something to make us fall, down like them. Something resonated deep in my soul. I knew it was true and it took me back behind that steering wheel in that RV, driving across the bridge, and I recognized that voice in my head, that insistent, whiny, manipulative voice was not my voice. I did not want to kill myself. I did not want to kill my children. And I was not crazy. I recognized that I had a choice, a choice to listen or a choice to not listen to those voices. I recognized that that choice, that agency, was taking the power back from Satan. My children have grown up. I’ve been able to teach them how to recognize those voices, how to recognize those lies. Those voices haven’t stopped. My 16-year-old daughter struggles with hearing those voices. And I’ve recognized that I am her mother for a reason. I’m here to teach her, and to help you know that you have a choice. And that you can choose to live.