Confirmation

Photo by Olga Dudareva on Unsplash

Ever wonder what your kid thinks about you? I mean really thinks about you? My 13-year-old daughter asked to be confirmed, which in the Catholic Church is a sacrament in which a person freely chooses to become a member of the church. As part of the sacrament the person chooses a confirmation name - the name of a saint who inspires her. My daughter chose St Christina the Astonishing. The essay she had to write about her gives insight into the life of a child of a parent with mental illness. I’m a blessed man. Here is her essay:

Saint Christina the Astonishing is the patron saint of mental health workers and people with mental health disorders. Her story heavily inspires me because someone in my immediate family that I am very close with struggles with bipolar disorder, which is a severe mental illness. Saint Christina the Astonishing’s life began around 1150 in modern day Belgium.

The start of her story was when she had a seizure so strong that it left her dead. During her funeral mass, she came back to life and levitated up to the ceiling of the Church. Given to her by angels, Christina was presented with 2 difficult choices: to go straight to heaven or to return to Earth to save the souls of sinners. She chose the 2^nd option: to save the souls of sinners so that they could eventually reach heaven and God’s kingdom. She was an empathetic soul and wanted to save more of the Earth’s sinners because she saw the potential in them.

I can connect this to my life because I see a great potential in my father, and I know that he is very good at managing his mental illness. I have known about it my whole life, but I never really saw any serious signs of him having it. What I mean is, he is so good at managing it that you would have no clue he had it unless he told you. Subsequent to her seizure, Saint Christina was thrown in jail and she devoted her life to the practice of extreme penance. People who knew her personally claimed that she was very weird. She did things like living on the street in rags and levitating away from sinners because she claimed they had a rancid smell. While she was doing all of these things, everyone constantly judged her and thought she was completely crazy.

I relate this experience that she had to go through to my personal life because when people hear the term “mental illness”, they immediately think the person who has it is a bad person. I disagree completely and I think that mental illness is just a small part of who my father is. Obviously, you would have to get to know him to know that, but he is sometimes excluded from people’s friend groups and conversations because of his mental illness. I think Saint Christina went through this exact thing. She was shamed and called weird by people who barely even knew her and she did not understand why. My father struggles with this as well, but he is truly an amazing person. He is so good at managing his mental illness and is very confident about the people in his life that he knows love him no matter what, such as me, my mother, and his close friends. Saint Christina did not have anyone to love or confide in, and I think that is why everyone feared her and called her names without even knowing half of who she is.

You might be thinking, why would I choose to write about this and connect it to my dad? Well, Her and my father’s story are similar in many ways, and I think her story perfectly portrays the stereotype that society has created of people who have a mental illness. The difference between Saint Christina and my dad is that my dad has people in his life to support him. Saint Christina had no one, and I believe that having people in your life to love makes the biggest difference in anyone.

The moral of my essay is that the term “mental illness” is not crazy or weird like many people portray it as, yet it is just a thing that some people have. Just like some people have brown hair and that doesn’t make them “crazy” mental illness is the same thing. It all depends on perspective, and the people Saint Christina was surrounded by her whole life did not understand her or want anything to do with her, yet they still shamed her. The way you depict someone in your mind can change their entire life and opinion of themselves, whether you agree with me or not. You never know how good of a person someone really is behind closed doors, and Saint Christina continues to spread that exact message even today.