Be Well Presents: A Coping Conversation - "Grace"

Are you in need of grace? Listen in to our Coping Conversation with Melinda, who shares her powerful story of grace.

Kevin: Welcome. I'm Chaplain Kevin, and today I'm talking with Melinda, who, from an early age, battled insecurity and anxiety. In the midst of her challenging circumstances and overwhelming emotions, her journey to find grace led her back home. This is “Coping”. 

Melinda, thank you so much for being with me today. I'm so glad to have you here, and I'm excited to hear more about your story

Melinda: Thank you so much. It's awesome to be here.

Kevin: You know, as I read your story, I did pick up on the main theme of grace. How do you define grace? What does that word mean to you?

Melinda: I equate grace with the action and feeling of coming home, where home is a place that is welcome. It's safe, it's secure, and it's full of forgiveness. And the reason I chose that is because in one of the hardest seasons of my life, grace called me home physically and spiritually.

Kevin: So where in your life have you had to find this kind of grace? When I look back, I definitely remember being nervous a lot of the time, and I don't think we called it anxiety. I was growing up. Maybe somebody else did, but not in my family or church. It wasn't a word that you knew. There wasn't a way to define what I was experiencing. So, for me, the best way I knew to deal with it was to…I'm kind of an emotional person, so I definitely would cry it out with my parents or by myself in my bedroom.

Kevin: How did you know that what you were struggling with was anxiety as opposed to just the normal angst that any teenager might feel? 

Melinda: That's a really good question. I definitely think it was dealing with anxiety because was even though it didn't show up on the outside, probably to other people, it was very emotionally for me on the inside. I think it's because it inhibited me from forming deeper relationships with people, and I'm naturally an introverted person. And so I think I leaned into sometimes pulling away.

Kevin: The anxiety for you was very internal. You perhaps weren't the stereotypical anxious person. It was something internal that was preventing you from connecting with people, making real connections, and perhaps getting the support that you really needed. 

Melinda: Exactly.

Kevin: Where did your journey take you next?

Melinda: Well, I did theater, and I loved it. It was so freeing to be able to express myself and find my voice on stage. And one of the things that really stuck out to me and I think helped me is that in theater, when you do your part, you're just supposed to do your part. And when everyone does their part, it makes this beautiful piece. And that was really freeing to me. Whereas anxiety would have you believe that you had to do more than just your part.

Being in love with theater, I worked at a theater company in Houston, and then from there, I decided I wanted to dig a little deeper. And so I went to grad school, and I got my Masters in theater. And so from there I moved to New York City to pursue acting on the stage and had a great time there. And then I moved to Los Angeles because I wanted to do more film and TV, and that had just been a lifelong dream. And when I got here, things were, of course, amazing. Bright lights and hot Hollywood sunshine. So that's why I moved to Los Angeles.

Kevin: And so as you were transitioning to LA. how did you get plugged into a community of support?

Melinda: It's pretty cool. When I first moved here, a friend in New York actually put me in touch with this lady, her and her husband and her kids. They had a house in the Culver City area, and the whole purpose was to give spiritually minded women a place to stay while they found their footing in Los Angeles. So when I got here, I met that lady and her wonderful family, and the rent was really cheap. And so I had about three to four months to find a place to live and meet people. And I had family nearby that reached out to me, and I was able to reconnect with them. 

Kevin: Yeah. So it sounds like the transition was going pretty well. You were getting plugged into a good network of support, you had a good living situation, you were meeting new people. Where did your journey take you next?

Melinda: So now we're fast forward to 2016. 

Kevin: How many years have you been in LA?

Melinda: That would have been a year and a half to two years. So I'm still pursuing acting. I've met an agent and I have a manager. I'm attending a really cool church I like. And I made it a priority to meet someone. And I did meet someone. And I'm in love for the first time. We all can remember what being in love for the first time is. That definitely adds a whole other layer to whatever you're going through. 

 I'm getting called in and called back for Netflix shows and other fun projects. I'm meeting casting directors that have been on my list to meet. And I keep chasing my dreams. I keep setting those goals. I'm crossing them off. I'm going to networking events, and it's the same thing on repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. And I think the anxiety really came in when I wasn't booking those jobs. I wasn't bringing in any money from acting. 

All of this hard work, it's basically a full time job, like pursuing work and doing these creative projects in hopes that you'll make it. And I wasn't seeing any fruit of that. And then I had to find they call it a survival job, right? 

For actors, you want that survival job so you can pay the bills, so you can do acting. And then it just hit me one day, like, I'm not really enjoying this whole process. I feel really lonely. I feel like I've met cool people, but I am not having deep relationships with them. I feel far from God.

Kevin: So it sounds like you were running around doing a lot of things to be successful. Why did you feel that all of a sudden it hit you that you weren't happy?

Melinda: I think I was looking for a place to belong, looking for a home, in a sense. And that's where grace, I think, started to call me and point those things out to me. So then I've realized these things, and to be honest, I'm in a lot of debt, and I'm not making enough money to cover my bills and not ask for help. And as you get older every year in life, that becomes a little embarrassing, and you're like, okay, I need to now. I need to become an adult. So I decided to stop doing acting and to figure out what full time career I should be doing. 

Not having learned anything from the past, I kept striving. I jumped in even harder. I was in this mindset of, it doesn't matter what, I'm just going to make anything work. And so I decided to do digital marketing. I landed my first job, and doing marketing, I hated it, so I quit. And then without taking any time to slow down or listen, and I say listen, because I was definitely praying a lot, but I wasn't listening. I didn't stop. I didn't listen. I just kept going, I have to figure this out. I have to get out of debt. I have to make something work. And I took a position doing social media marketing, and it was a dream job, honestly, but it turned into a nightmare. And it was totally on me because I didn't ask the right questions in the job interview, because I just so badly wanted the job. It was completely wrong.

Kevin: How does anxiety play into all of this? 

Melinda: Well, at the time, I don't think I realized that it was anxiety. So in order to combat those feelings. I just ignored them, to be honest.

Kevin: And that was allowing the anxiety to build and to be played out in poor decision making and not stopping to deal with it, because maybe subconsciously, you knew it was so big that if you stopped, it would be pretty overwhelming to try to start dealing with. 

Melinda: Yeah. And the other piece to that puzzle is that I was very much in love with one of the most amazing person I've ever met. He is kind and loving and super supportive, and I didn't want to lose him because I couldn't figure this out. But I also felt like, I don't want to tell him what's really going on inside of me because then maybe he won't love me. And I think that grace came along and was, like, knocking at my door, going, you just have to listen to me and take, like Emily Freeman says, the next right step. 

But the anxiety comes in because there's that terror there of what is the next right step? I just accepted this job. It's all wrong for me. If I quit it, what will happen to this amazing thing I found? 

I'm, like, tearing up. It's like reliving all those emotions all over again. Sorry. 

Kevin No, it's okay. We'll be right back.

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Kevin: Welcome back. 

Melinda: So I was completely determined that this job was going to be right for me because I didn't want to accept that it wasn't and lose what I had found or what God had brought into my life. So I worked a lot of overtime. I drank a lot of coffee, which, if you deal with anxiety in general, you know, coffee is not the thing to do. I would go into the office early. I would leave late. I would work at home a lot to prove to myself and to the people that had hired me that they didn't make a mistake, that I didn't make a mistake. But all the while, there's that underlying fear all day, all night. And then it finally came to a breaking point one day, and I felt lightheaded. I couldn't stop crying. I remember my body was shaking and I didn't want to go to the job. I didn't want to go in. I think it was a weekend, and I knew what was waiting for me on Monday. And I couldn't keep up. I couldn't keep up with the job. I couldn't make sense of it. It was just making me crazy. I felt like I was going crazy, and I didn't know what else to do. And I was in my apartment and I was all by myself, and this wave of emotions just came over me, and I couldn't reframe my thinking, and I couldn't calm down. 

I didn't know what else to do. So I called my parents and woof. And it's interesting to me because the first person I didn't call was this man that I love, because I didn't want to be rejected by him.

Kevin: The risk of telling him what was going on and how hard things were for you, it felt a little bit too vulnerable and risky that he might see a different side of you and not love that side of you.

Melinda: Yes, exactly. And also, I had gotten into this pattern of accepting a job, quitting it. Accepting it, quitting it, accepting it, quitting it. And so to admit to him that I needed to quit yet another job was almost too much. 

Kevin: So you called your parents and what happened next?

Melinda: Yeah, so, of course. They're amazing. And they were really worried about me. They had never heard me quite like this. They encouraged me the best they knew how. But we finally decided that it would be best if I came home. And so I packed up my bags and I drove all the way from LA to Houston in two days. And I remember I didn't listen to any music. I just gave my parents updates so they knew I was safe. I kind of just took in the scenery of being on the open road.

Kevin: Why was it so important to you at that time?

Melinda: I think I had so many emotions that I didn't know how to process them. It was kind of like this bottleneck we're experiencing in the distribution line. Because of COVID I feel like my emotions were stuck somewhere they couldn't get out. And I did cry a lot on the way home. I'm sure I prayed a lot.

Kevin: Yeah. And when you prayed, what were you praying? 

Melinda: Well, in addition to just asking for help, I think a part of my prayer life that was missing was just listening. I just needed to listen. And the only thing I heard was go home. So that's what I did. 

Kevin: Back to your definition of grace. You heard God say go home. What happened next?

Melinda:  So I made it home. And of course my parents want to help me as best they can. And this is the time where I formulated my thoughts that I had had a panic attack and was dealing with anxiety. And I think it was freeing to name it, to give it a name instead of feeling like there's just forever this thing wrong with me. Forever. This deep internal battle I'm having with myself all the time. 

Kevin: And once you name something, you can get help.

Melinda: Sure. So that's what I did. And in Texas, there are several megachurches. They all have counseling departments where you can apply to get free counseling. And as you know, I was broke and didn't have a lot of money to spend on that. And so I think through my family, through community, through a counselor, I felt like I was starting to put roots into the things that mattered. 

I had been home for about two months, and I felt like the tears had finally stopped. I felt very grounded. So I came back to Los Angeles in March 2019. My sweet boyfriend accepted me. We had a lot to talk through, and I think to know that I could trust him with that information was a game changer in our relationship. 

And then we got married in September of 2019. And so I'm newly married. I'm still kind of figuring out my career and what's happening with that. And then not but six months later, we're dealt this pandemic coming to the US. 

Kevin: And two years into the pandemic, how are you doing with your anxiety? How's everything now?

Melinda: The beginning of it was pretty hard for me. I definitely freaked out. And for anyone struggling with anxiety, the thoughts and fears of the unknown are pretty much like would drive it. But I would say that everything is going really well. And the reason for that is the very beginning of the pandemic. I knew that I needed to reach out for help, and so I knew I was coming in with this named Anxiety, but we dug into it a little bit more. We dug into how to process it. Who I am as a person. What are the things that can trigger it for me? And how, with my personality, can I process that? 

I actually found a career where I became a professional organizer, and part of my business is helping people create space.

Kevin: Does that allow room for breathing? That allow room for listening? It's almost as if you are helping other people find home in the way that you were able to find it. 

Melinda: Yes. That's always my prayer before each session when I work with clients, that I am able to give them the best of myself, but also that I can help their homes become a sacred place to lead them to grace, that they need to move forward in their lives. Because you're right. Home is where I was led back to grace and was able to restore my faith.

Kevin: Yeah. So what advice do you have for those that may be struggling with grace in their own lives? What do you say to them? 

Melinda: I would say to just stop the striving; to just stop. And oftentimes that's followed by breathing. Don't forget to breathe. Yeah. Physically breathing. And then when you've stopped, I find that I've created space because I've stopped to take the next step. 

And for me, that is to drive yourself home. I physically drove myself home, and then when I needed to during the pandemic, I figuratively drove myself to help, to get someone to come alongside me and help me process. And so home can be different to you. Maybe it's being outside in nature. Maybe it's calling that friend, whatever it is. I would just say drive yourself home. Melinda, thank you so much for sharing your story with me today. 

Kevin: Thank you for your vulnerability, your life lessons that I know will touch so many as we continue to endure in this very stress-filled world. Thank you, Melinda.

Melinda: Thank you so much for having me.