Before I got Lyme disease, I based my identity on external things. 

I was a writer. I could sit down and spin stories and I loved it. It was what I wanted to be, and I staked so much of my identity within the sphere of writing.

I was a reader. I would eat up books like pudding, reveling in the stories and characters I discovered within the inky pages of my novels. To most everyone I knew, I was a bookworm.

I was a good student. I read through my assignments and, while I had to wrestle with the lessons at times, I did pretty well for the most part, and learning usually came easy.

I was proud of these things. Maybe a little too proud. 

Then, one summer, I got Lyme disease, and from the start, I had two false ideas on what I was dealing with. I thought that the antibiotics would knock it right out, and I thought that the symptoms were purely physical.

Little did I know of the fatigue, of the brain fog, and of the constant, plaguing anxiety that would overcome me that fall. These symptoms slowly but surely began to take away the things I loved to do and the things I had staked my identity on. 

Writing became painful. Everytime I sat down to work, my anxiety would flare and leave me pacing, wanting to do anything but work on my stories.

Reading became a chore. I would sit down to read and fall asleep. When I wasn’t sleeping, I would get strange, annoying sensations that I shouldn’t be reading.

School became difficult. I couldn’t concentrate on my work, and I couldn’t focus on my assignments. I began to fall behind, not understanding the homework, and panicking because of it.

I was once the writer, the reader, the student, the healthy girl, and now I wasn’t. As these things crumbled before me, I felt myself crumbling right alongside me. If I couldn’t sit and spin a story, if I couldn’t read, if I couldn’t achieve my goals in school, then who was I? The things I had put so much of my identity in were lost, and so was I. I didn’t know who I was anymore. This may sound melodramatic, but was true. For so long, I had told myself the lie that I was these things. And now these things were gone. 

So…who was I? 

Flash forward a few months later. I attended a weekend-long religious retreat. And it was there, within those few days, that the Lord saved me from the dark pit I had fallen into. It was there that I was reminded of who I was.

I was not just a writer. I was not just a reader. I was not just a student. 

First and foremost, above anything else, I am a child of the Creator of the World. I am the daughter of Jesus Christ, the conqueror of sin and death. 

That’s a pretty amazing identity.

Before, my identity had been staked upon things that shift and change and disappear. I was so wrapped up in those things that I had forgotten who I was. I had no strong foundation in my life, and now, looking back, it’s no wonder how I toppled over and fell apart.

There is no stronger foundation than Jesus Christ. There is no surer identity than the one that He bestows upon each and every one of us when he calls us His children. Things change, and people change; things that once seemed so certain in our lives may be undone at any moment. The only thing that cannot be shaken is the fact that, no matter what, we are children of the one true God.