When will the roses not have thorns?

Most days, I wake up ready for the day. I wake up with a wife who loves me. A good job. A relationship with God which fills and sustains me. I laugh with friends. I smile when it rains. I’m learning to let go of the things in the world which anger me. I’m learning that there is balance between joy and the grief felt from loss. I’m learning. And yet…

Some days I wake up and the same thoughts and feelings which have held me down for so long gnaw at the edges of my mind. I notice it in happy moments, a shadow in the back of my mind. And I know the next few days will be a battle. I wake up fearing I will lose my wife. Either to illness or that I will fail her. These thoughts are mostly irrational. Yet they still scare me. My job becomes a fear as well—I’m not good enough. I don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes I’m not totally sure those ones are irrational. Sometimes I feel I’m drifting God. It isn’t so much that I don’t trust Him as it is I don’t trust myself. Which is the whole point—I’m supposed to trust His faithfulness where I’m falling short. Yet it’s so hard to feel that as well as know it.

The title is my question: when will good days not be marred by the shadows in my mind? When will I heal enough that my brain no longer decides what will be a good day and what will be a bad day? That the gloom doesn’t settle on my mind just because it decides it’s time.

I don’t know if there’s an answer to that. And I may wish I hadn’t wrote this tomorrow. Maybe the answer lies somewhere in understanding why I fall back into bad frames of mind. I feel moody at the moment and I want to know why. My therapist tells me that feeling things deeply is my superpower, not my weakness. Sometimes I’d prefer a different power.

I hope this makes sense, but it feels a little bit better to get it out. I think I’m healing, but nights like tonight don’t feel like healing.