I've Never Been to Vegas, but My Luggage Has: Mishaps and Miracles on the Road to Happily Ever After

by Hale, Mandy

  “What’s wrong, Mandy?” my dad asked as my parents helped me make the final walk-through of my Murfreesboro apartment.

  I stopped furiously poking the Swiffer sweeper into a corner and turned to face my mom and dad. They both had matching looks of concern on their faces.

  “I don’t know,” I replied honestly, leaning against the wall before sinking to the floor. “I don’t know. I just feel anxious. Sad. Like I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing. It’s weird.”

  “Well, you can always cancel the move and stay here,” my mom responded hopefully. I knew she didn’t want me to go. I was her baby, and I was moving to the big city for the first time.

  “No,” I replied resolutely, standing to my feet and brushing the dust off my palms. “No. I’m just being a baby! It’s just the stress of the move, I’m sure. I’m ready for this. I’m excited. It’s time.”

  Sometimes in life you just have to learn your own lessons. I’m sure my parents sensed that all was not right with me. All hadn’t been right in some time. I wasn’t as close with them anymore, which was red flag number one. It’s as if I didn’t want them to ask about my relationship with God. I was afraid to really look them in the eyes and let them know that I had stopped praying and stopped reading my Bible and couldn’t remember the last time I asked for God’s guidance. I hadn’t even consulted Him (or them) on my move to Nashville. I’m sure my parents saw what a colossal mistake I was making, uprooting myself at such a vulnerable time from everything I’d known in order to chase my own selfish desires and ego-driven dreams. And I know they saw right through me. They knew me better and still know me better than anyone in the world. They had seen the joy go out of my eyes. They had seen the abrupt change in my behavior. They had seen my eagerness to get to Nashville and out from under their watchful, knowing, loving eyes.

  But they let me go anyway. Because sometimes, even when you see someone headed for a collision, all you can do is step out of the way and let it happen, hoping there will be something left to salvage after the wreckage is cleared.

  So I went, despite my parents’ reservations and despite my own hesitations. And I crashed and burned.

  A few weeks after I moved to Nashville, the embarrassing airplane incident occurred. I crawled back into the office afterward with my tail between my legs, hoping and praying no one would ask about my panic attack on the plane. They did, and I deflected. Made jokes out of it. Tried to laugh it off. Inside, I was dying.

  Even though my bosses acted as though they understood and promised they weren’t angry or disappointed with me and my failure to complete the flight, I think after that incident they really started to lose faith in me. I know I had certainly lost faith in me. And I’m sure my performance at work suffered as a result. I know my attitude did.

  A month or so later it was announced that new leadership had taken over at CMT, and there would be budget cuts and massive layoffs. The TV business in Nashville had really started to dry up. The economy was in the toilet. Jobs were being outsourced to cheaper production companies. No one felt safe, particularly me. Even though Jeremy and my other friends at work assured me that I was one of the best writers at CMT and there was no way they would even consider laying me off, I had a gnawing feeling in my gut. I felt as if everything had changed when I failed to make the flight to Vegas. I was getting weird vibes from my bosses, and I sensed something bad was coming.

  Three months after I moved to Nashville, on a Friday afternoon, I was called into the conference room at CMT and told they were eliminating my position, effective immediately. I was crushed. Physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually—crushed. My bosses wouldn’t look me in the eyes as hot tears started to roll down my cheeks.

  What else was there to do but pack up my desk, turn in my badge, and walk out the front doors of CMT?

  My TV career was over.

  A few days after my abrupt and heartbreaking dismissal, I received an e-mail from Chet Flippo. It read:

  You’re one of the good ones. You have what it takes to be a really good writer. Mainly: discipline, the ability to listen, the ability to observe, and the ability to tell the story without letting anything else get in the way. If you ever need a reference, remember me.

  To receive such a vote of confidence from someone I looked up to as a career icon was a soothing balm to my heart during the challenging days that would follow. Chet was a humble genius, a silent hero who led by example, and he showed me such immense kindness and graciousness during my time at CMT. It was something I never forgot.

  On June 19, 2013, Chet Flippo passed away, exactly eight years after the day he sent me that e-mail. I never had the pleasure of speaking to Chet again after my last day at CMT, but as he said to me in that e-mail I still have to this day: I will always remember you, Chet, as will the writing world. Thank you for believing in me at a moment when it felt like no one else did.

  Chapter 7

  A Crash Landing

  I had invested my entire heart and soul into my job at CMT, so when it came to an abrupt end, I was completely and utterly lost.

  All my friends were at CMT. My entire social circle was at CMT. My career was at CMT. I didn’t even like going home on weekends; that’s how much I loved it there. My complete identity had become wrapped up in CMT, and when it was gone, so was I.

  I didn’t understand this at the time, but here is what I know now, looking back. I was being called by God to do something very special with my life. He had blessed me and highly favored me in the area of my career. He had promoted me. He had placed my “hinds’ feet on high places.” He had blown open doors for me that most people knock on their entire lives. I was with Him in the valley, I was with Him on the climb, but I had gotten to the mountaintop and had forgotten all about who put me there. And now I was paying the price.

  Does this mean we serve a cruel God who is out to punish us at the first wrong move we make? No, this means we serve a God who gives us free will. He allows us to choose our paths, even when they lead us into darkness. And He can’t always magically swoop in and rescue us from the pits of hell when we make a conscious choice to travel there and without concern of how He feels about it. God had been my confidant, my copilot, my homeboy—until I got what I wanted. Then I got prideful, complacent, and completely, utterly satisfied. I was more concerned about earning the approval of country music stars than of the God who created the stars. If you make a conscious decision to follow Christ, it’s not suddenly a magical cure that means the rest of your life is going to be perfect. It’s actually quite often a hard and scary road paved with temptations and booby traps. The same job God had blessed me with became the very thing that lured me away from Him. And the road back to me wasn’t going to be easy. Why? Because God didn’t love me enough to come to my rescue? No, because He loved me too much not to allow me to learn the lesson I needed to learn so I would never again fall into the same sin.

  The Bible says, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap” (Gal. 6:7 nasb). For months I had been sowing pride, ego, conceit in my own abilities, and just plain rebellion, and I had a few months of reaping to do before I could expect to plant a new harvest.

  One of my toxic seeds coming to fruition was the apartment in Nashville I had taken on, against God’s will. The reason for me being in Nashville and needing the apartment was gone. I felt like a complete and utter failure. I had barely lived there three months, and now I was broke, jobless, and unable to make the rent. I was forced to break the lease, pack up, and move home with my parents.

  I felt so embarrassed and defeated by the loss of my job, I turned off my phone and stopped talking to even my closest friends. No one knew what had happened to me. I was already isolated and away from the place of business that had been my second home for almost a year and a half and had abandoned the apartment in Nashville that was literally home. Isolating myself further from the friends who loved me and cared about me quickly sent me into ful
l-blown depression. I never understood depression until I suffered from clinical depression. I think we tend to throw around the word depression too lightly, especially in America. If you’ve ever suffered from true depression, you know it’s not about eating too much ice cream or listening to sad songs or not getting out of bed for a day. It’s about not getting out of bed for a month. It’s about feeling like the very life has been sucked out of you. It’s about feeling like you’ll never feel joy again. It’s about losing the ability to laugh, or feel, or even care. I felt dead inside, and it terrified me.

  I also felt like the rug had been ripped out from under me, and that led to massive anxiety. You might be thinking, It was just a job. Get over it. But for me, I had allowed the job to become my world. I was young and clueless and had just lost my dream job and the friends, the new city, and the life that had come along with it. It felt as if everything had been taken from me in five seconds flat. As a control freak by nature, the complete and total loss of control over my own life sent me spiraling.

  Of course we’re never really in control. God is. But when you’ve turned your back on God and placed your worth, your joy, your livelihood, your entire sense of self in something as fleeting as a job, when that job is taken away, it feels like you’re left with nothing. That’s why it’s so dangerous to place our identities in anything other than Christ; people leave and die, jobs end, looks fade, and money is lost. Placing your entire life’s purpose and meaning in any of those things is like placing your entire bet on red and having the roulette wheel land on black. Everything vanishes right before your eyes, and you’re left empty-handed and just plain empty.

  I was empty. I was jobless. I was penniless. I was directionless. I had swallowed my pride and moved back home with my parents. And I was avoiding my friends. I had hit rock bottom.

  Over the next few weeks, I learned that rock bottom has many levels. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did. I started having massive anxiety attacks. The panic would hit and I would go into a tailspin, thinking I was having a heart attack or dying. That’s one of the really awesome side effects of panic attacks; they make you feel as if your heart is literally about to explode in your chest. These were different from the panic attack I suffered when I was dealing with Matt’s absence in college. These were more intense, more severe, more terrifying. Night after night, I made my dad rush me to the emergency room. I felt so hysterical and out of control. Hearing the doctor tell me time and time again that I was going to be okay somehow made me feel better, even as I racked up hospital bill after hospital bill.

  I also lost my appetite as a side effect of the depression. I stopped eating, and within weeks, dropped from 120 pounds to a scary 106. On a frame of five feet seven inches, 106 is not a healthy weight. I was even skinnier than I had been in high school. Even size zeroes started to droop from my skinny waist, leaving my parents heartsick with worry.

  It got to the point where I was afraid to leave the house for fear of having a massive panic attack. My world got smaller and smaller. I felt so hopeless, like this miserable existence was going to be my life and I would never be myself again, whoever that was. To make matters worse, I felt so ashamed about the way I had turned my back on God that I didn’t feel worthy of His help now. I continued to avoid Him, not out of pride as I had before, but out of shame.

  I was at the point where I was having full-blown panic attacks twenty-four hours a day and couldn’t stop hysterically crying when I realized I had to take drastic action. I will say that no matter how bad things got for me, I never became suicidal. I’m one of the fortunate ones who had a strong support system that assured me there would be a day in the future when I would feel normal again, no matter how bad things got. I never wanted to end my life; I just wanted to end that era of my life and find a way to stop hurting and feeling terrified all the time. I drove to my family doctor’s office one day and told him what was going on, spilling the full story as I wept, ending with: “I’m not leaving here until you find a way to help me.” I couldn’t go back home to another day of desperation, sadness, and fear. I needed help.

  God is so faithful, even when we’re not. He placed a team of doctors around me whom I credit with putting my life back together. My family doctor immediately got me in for an emergency session with a therapist he recommended, Dr. Thomas. I remember when I walked into Dr. Thomas’s office that first day with my dad, I was in full-blown panic mode, crying hysterically, and my hands were shaking too hard to even fill out the paperwork. By the time I left an hour and a half later, I was weeping tears of joy.

  “We’re going to fix you, Mandy,” Dr. Thomas had said, looking at me kindly.

  “You mean I’m fixable?” I whispered, wiping a tear from my eye. I had fallen so far, I had come to believe I was beyond all hope. I thought I was going to be living in this anxious, miserable bubble for the rest of my life.

  “You are 100 percent fixable. And we are going to fix you.”

  That was the first pebble of hope laid in the foundation of my new life. But I still had many more to go.

  I now had my family and my doctors behind me, pushing me to get well, and I knew it was time for me to get on board as well. Along with the loss of my job and the depression, anxiety, and panic attacks had come no small amount of self-loathing. I began to realize I had been so busy beating myself up, I was actually keeping myself on rock bottom by never bothering to give myself a boost. The whole world can be behind you and believe in you, but if you can’t believe in yourself, you’re only going to stay stuck. So I began to take active steps in my own recovery.

  I started where I always start: with research. I bought every book I could find on panic and fear and depression and anxiety, and I read every sentence, highlighting the parts that pertained the most to me. I created flash cards with positive affirmations and relaxation techniques that I carried with me every time I left the house. I began to take brisk walks around the block every morning to release tension and calm my nerves. It was during those walks that I began to have my first tentative conversations with God about everything that was going on. I journaled every night, as all the anxiety experts recommended, writing down my self-defeating and negative thoughts and replacing them with positive, powerful, self-affirming thoughts. I knew I had to purposefully change my thought patterns in order to stop the cycle of obsessive negative thoughts, so I worked diligently at staying focused on only the present moment right in front of me, not stressing over the past or obsessing over the future. I focused on the grass, the trees, and the birds as I walked. I focused on each word I was reading in every book as I read it instead of allowing myself to get lost in thought. I was absolutely relentless in my determination to get better.

  My precious dad also found a way to help me gain back the weight I had lost. He knew I had a sweet tooth, and he had a sweet spot for Waffle House chocolate pie. Though you can typically only order by the slice, my dad would bring home full-size chocolate pies, and the two of us would stand over the pie pan at the kitchen counter, forks in hand, and dig in. My mom eventually gave up trying to make us use plates like proper people. The pies, coupled with the antidepressants the doctor had prescribed me, quickly brought my weight back up to 120.

  Still, the dark days weren’t completely over. Despite the intensive therapy and the medication and the self-help work I was doing on my own, I had good days and bad days. I remember one bad day when my dad had driven me to the bookstore to buy some new self-help books. I had a panic attack, out of the blue, right there in the parking lot. Since a father’s job is to protect his children, my dad wanted so badly to make the fear go away for me. But he couldn’t. He was powerless to help. So what he did was the only thing he knew to do: he turned it over to the heavenly Father. We sat in the car that day at Barnes and Noble, and my dad took my hands in his and prayed, “Dear God, we have asked You to take this panic away, and it’s still here. So now we accept that maybe this is Mandy’s cross to bear. And if tha
t is the case, please give her the strength to endure it and the courage to learn the lesson from it.”

  Something about that sweet, simple, humble prayer from my earthly father to my heavenly one broke down the final wall between me and God, once and for all. I wept in my earthly father’s arms that day, feeling the love of my heavenly Father permeating every inch of that car. I cried for a long time in the parking lot, finally allowing myself to grieve over the job and the career and the dreams and the life that I had lost. I also found the courage later that night to get down on my knees before God and ask for His forgiveness for everything I had done to disappoint Him over the past few months, and to thank Him for loving me enough to pluck me out of my life of sin and put me on a new and better path. I had lost everything but regained my soul.

  Every day after that day in the car with my dad was a little bit better than the day before.

  You see, Jesus didn’t allow the cup to pass from me, as He prayed in His own hour of pain and torment in the Garden of Gethsemane. But He did give me the strength to carry it. And with the aid of doctors, therapy, love, family, and my own determination to get better, He eventually brought me out of the darkness and set me back on the right path: His path for my life. It was one of the hardest battles I have ever fought, and it wasn’t won overnight. But it was won.

  I’d like to be able to tell you that I was completely healed of anxiety and have never struggled with it again since that dark six months of my life, but that’s not true. I fought the battle with depression and won, and it has never returned; but the anxiety is another issue. Though these days it doesn’t often rear its ugly head, I am naturally a worrier and a control freak, and those two traits don’t mix well together. I have learned to manage my anxiety, however, and turn it over to God when it arises and not let it control my life. In some ways, it has become my strength, because every time I have faced down a fear and won, I’ve become a little bit better, a little bit wiser, and a little bit stronger.