Ministry and Depression

Welcome to the Believe Again podcast, powered by Parable Bookkeeping & Accounting, with your hosts, Josh and Amy Roberie! On this show, we discuss the challenges and triumphs of ministry, offering hope and practical insights for pastors and leaders everywhere. Our goal is to explore the heart of what it means to believe again and lead well in every season of ministry.

In this episode we are addressing a topic that many in ministry struggle with but often hesitate to discuss: depression. Depression, or major depressive disorder, is a common yet serious mental health condition that affects millions, including those who serve in ministry. In ministry, the weight of depression can be especially heavy, impacting not just the individual but their families, congregations, and the broader faith community.

In this episode, we’re going to explore why it’s crucial to talk openly about depression in ministry, the unique pressures that make ministry leaders particularly vulnerable, and how acknowledging and addressing these challenges can lead to healthier lives and more effective leadership. Whether you’re a pastor, a leader, or believer impacted by depression in some way, we hope this conversation will shine a light on the importance of mental health.

This is part one of two episodes on this topic

Join the many pastors who trust Parable to handle their finances with care and expertise. Visit liveyourparable.com/believeagain to learn more. Right now, Parable is offering 25% off onboarding fees exclusively for Believe Again listeners, so connect with them today!

Transcript

Josh Roberie  0:00  
Okay, here we go.

Welcome to the believe again podcast, powered by parable, bookkeeping and accounting with your host Josh. And now I'm so happy to include Amy roberie.

Amy Roberie  0:19  
That's right, I am joining this season of the believe again podcast. And on this show, we discuss the challenges and triumphs of ministry, offering hope and practical insights for pastors and leaders everywhere. Our goal is to explore the heart of what it means to believe again and lead well in every season of ministry.

Josh Roberie  0:37  
Well today, we're discussing a topic that it's a sometimes a struggle to discuss. It was even hard for me. It's really right, but it's the topic of depression. So depression, or major depressive disorder, is a common yet serious mental health condition that affects millions, including those who serve in ministry. It's characterized by persistent feelings of sadness, loss of interest in activities and difficulties in daily functioning in ministry, the weight of depression can be easily heavy impacting not just individual but their families and their faith communities. Amy as an Enneagram seven, how did it feel for you to hear all those heavy words? Right off the bat,

Amy Roberie  1:17  
you know, it's a challenge, but I'm here for it, okay,

Josh Roberie  1:21  
but that's what we're going to do.

We're going to jump into this crucial talk. I'm going to be sharing a lot. Amy is going to be asking me some questions about it because of my journey with depression. But I think it's important for us to talk about this. There's unique pressures that ministry leaders face, and I think when we address these, we not only live healthier lives, but we're more effective as leaders. So whether you're a pastor, a leader, or someone who supports those in ministry, or really anyone that's a believer that has faced this illness, we hope this conversation will shine light on the importance of mental health and provide some practical steps towards healing so But before we dive in, why don't we, why don't we go into a little bit of a lighter topic, and I'm, I'm going to ask you, Amy, since you're new to the you know, being permanent host, you've been on each season, I think, at least once, but let's find out a little bit about you. So I'm going to ask you a question. I want to find out maybe about a hobby that you have that maybe might surprise everybody else, and then I'm going to tell you, I'm gonna pick a different hobby and talk about it, and then you're gonna ask me the same thing. Okay, so why don't you tell them about a hobby you have that might surprise them, or maybe not a lot of people know about?

Amy Roberie  2:33  
Well, I think a lot of people probably know. But my biggest hobby that I'm into, that I follow, that I might be slightly obsessed with is football. And it started out just being college football, but over the years, it's also now begun to be the NFL as well. So I do love it. It's fun. And, you know, it's kind of bled into like baseball and some other things, yeah, so, but sports in general, yeah. And I think most people would say, Hey, Josh is living the dream. He got a beautiful wife. She loves sports, but imagine that dream going to such an extreme that it's, it's actually a distraction. So that's, that's where it's at. Now, she's more into it than me, for sure. And okay, I'll, I'll mention a hobby that you have, and is, when we first got married, the best thing you made for dinner was out of a box. Well, reservations, yes, true, but everything else out of a box or a frozen, like something frozen

Josh Roberie  3:31  
when we, when we left our ministry job in Baton Rouge for two years, you stayed at home and and then eventually you went back to work, I guess, like a year and a half year or so you were, you were at home, and you love watching Food Network, and you became the best cook that I could ever I don't

Amy Roberie  3:47  
think I'm the best, but I did get an interest, and I had, I had time. I think that's

Josh Roberie  3:53  
your hobby, because the the love and the attention the detail that you put in your cooking goes beyond just making a good meal. Last night, you made chicken bog, and you put the little green onions on there, add a little color and flavor, and you just, you always put a little, you know, handmade gourmet touch on your food. So I think cooking is actually a hobby of yours, yeah, okay, I

Amy Roberie  4:12  
agree. What about you, Josh, what's a hobby that you have that not many people know about?

Josh Roberie  4:18  
You know, I think a hobby that I have that not a lot of people know about is gardening. Oh yes, that's true. And you love to garden. I love to garden. It's come a long way. When we first got married, I remember you came out in the yard, you saw I'd cut some bushes, and you started crying because you didn't, you didn't trust or believe, and I really didn't know I was I was ignorantly out there just slashing away at these bushes. But I like doing landscaping, and we've always had small yards, and now we have a giant yard, and it's kicking my butt, but it's something we kind of do together, because I do the landscape, but you supervise and you interject, I

am the supervisor of all of our home projects. Yes, sure, yes. Indoor or out,

whether I want you to be the supervisor or not. Okay, alright, so that's a little bit, you know, about our hobbies or whatever, and but let's, let's talk about something a little bit more serious, and that is ministry and depression. I read a book recently when darkness is my closest friend, which, again, I know it's Enneagram seven. You probably would never pick that book up, but I was doing some research for this episode. I found a book on ministry and depression, and it says from this pastor who deals with depression. I was just looking for quotes and research, but it was, it was really good, and the reason why I liked it so much is because, basically, it wasn't about fixing depression. It was more about describing what it's like, and it really, which really helps someone like me that deals with it, and also, I think it helps people who doesn't deal with it, maybe understand how to interact and deal with people who deal with depression. And so I'm going to be referencing that book throughout it, throughout this conversation, the name of the book again, when darkness is my closest friend. And so it sounds like, oh, how could it? But it's actually, that's, that's a part of a scripture that's taken from the Bible, that statement and and so that's, that's where it came from. But one thing I wanted to start off with, it's kind of like a definition I shared earlier on depression, but another one that's from Rosalyn Clark and Stafford UK, and she says anyone who has suffered with mental ill health will know that an insignificant part of the not an insignificant part of the problem is the inability to explain it. The words don't work to convey the reality of experience to those who have never been in that particular pit. And when I when I read that, I was like, Oh my gosh, that is exactly it. Because I always feel like I have a hard time explaining it, and I doubt the way that I experience it is the same as everyone else I know. I know my depression is very unique, because people can hardly tell I was having very much depressed feelings today. And you know, I doubt anyone knows. Sometimes you can tell them, we'll talk about that. When this feeling starts thinking that Amy, you went to like a little deep thought there you're watching,

Amy Roberie  7:08  
yeah, no, I was just thinking about how hard it it is for you, especially at first, early on in that journey, to explain how you were feeling to me, especially when I would still see you function in some daily tasks and activities, but for you to adequately be able to convey some of the feelings that you are experiencing. And now, though we've been married 17 years, I I can, I can pick up on it, and I can see, even just maybe, by the way, sometimes you might be walking first thing in the morning around the house, you know? And I can tell. And so it's interesting. I'm

Josh Roberie  7:45  
always like, how does she know? How does How you doing right now? And I'm like, How do you know I'm not even talking or doing anything? Yes, but yeah, there's, there's definitely, and I've become more self aware. I mean, that's part of the problem, right? Is I don't think people are even aware. They're dealing with depression. I think they Oh, I have some anxiety. No, bro, you're dealing with something, and we'll talk about that more in just a second.

Amy Roberie  8:04  
Yeah. So why is it important to talk about ministry and depression? Well,

Josh Roberie  8:07  
I think there's three reasons why it's important talk about ministry and depression. One is the the statistics bear out that it's affecting people, right? Uh, secondly, I think that if it goes unaddressed, it's it impacts you, your family, your faith community, and the larger church at large, in a bigger way than you can ever imagine. And then finally, because of my own experience, and so I guess, like, one of the things I'm looking forward to in this podcast is, for years I've wanted to talk about this. I wanted to find the right way, the right time to do it. And of course, there's always a stigma whenever you talk about, hey, I deal with with mental health. You know, I know there is, and I know that, you know, once I tell people about this, they're going to look at me differently, and that's fine, but I think it's just really, really important to share this, and I'm looking forward to diving into it a little bit more. So

Amy Roberie  8:58  
the statistics, yeah, research indicates that a significant percentage of people in ministry experience depression. Studies have shown that about 23 to 28% of pastors and ministry leaders have reported dealing with some form of depression. This rate is higher than what is comprised of the general population, so that means there's a higher rate of people who are pastors of ministry leaders experiencing depression in their daily life. This is likely due to the unique pressures and challenges associated with pastoral work, such as emotional burdens, isolation and the constant demands of leadership. The people

Josh Roberie  9:34  
who say, well, passions are hard. You read the Bible, you pray, you know, you go eat lunch with people. But the thing about it is is one of the things that psychologists have found is that it's more traumatizing for you to experience someone else's trauma than it is your own. Because when it's your own trauma, there's these mechanisms that kick in to to protect right

Amy Roberie  9:54  
the way that God's created our bodies and our and the responses that happen even the hormones that are released. When you're in flight or flight, flight or fight, hormones even that that are released in trauma, but you don't have that in a secondary way, right hearing it.

Josh Roberie  10:08  
So that's something pastors are dealing with. The other thing that I would say it's important to talk about this is because when someone is carrying wounds that are not healed, sometimes they seek to cover those things up in ministry, and they find acceptance. And I'll share a little story. When I was at LSU, there was a guy, you know, and you could just really tell that he struggled with acceptance. He was always looking for attention. And I remember one day he he told everyone at our table that we were eating at NSU union, that he was going to become a youth pastor. And the guy was like, he smokes, he cusses, he drinks. He was doing everything could fit in. I mean, never heard him talk about God, and then something clicked in my mind. I was like, I know he wants to be a youth pastor, because he thinks if he becomes a youth pastor, have everyone looking at him, and he'll finally be the cool guy. And he was going into ministry and being driven by desire to be liked, and I didn't realize that I was actually doing the same thing at that time, and wasn't even aware of it. And so I wanted to ask you about that imma read a quote from the book, but

Amy Roberie  11:04  
I think it's one of those both in situations where I do believe that people, I think the majority of people in ministry, pastors and leaders alike, are pursuing that because they're being obedient to the call that God's placed on their life. And they're pursuing that call and they feel a genuine love for God and a genuine love for people and both. And there's also those wounds that have not been dealt with in their life, and they don't realize that what starts out as answering a call in obedience and passion and love for God and people turns into then using that ministry to then heal those wounds, to gain acceptance, to gain love, back to them, to feel like they are, something that that they never felt before. And

Josh Roberie  11:52  
I think there's been other chuck to grow, and other people have talked about this, the the draw of it, and it's it's something that we need to be aware of, and it's something that that I wasn't aware of for a long time. It was part of my story. And I think Mark maynell, who wrote the book when darkness is my closest friend, he said something about that and that, he summed it up better than I could. So I'll just read what he says. He says this brings real danger to anyone in pastoral work, if my shame, with shame and guilt, and you know past hurts is what causes depression. If my shame has caused such profound instability, it's perhaps inevitable that we attempt to heal the wounds by cultivating the love and acceptance of the people we serve, if only to prevent future assaults. Another person talks about this is John Eldridge, and basically what we do is we put on a performance. Other people have called it adaptive behavior. That's right, where you over achieve to protect yourself, and that's specifically what I was doing was I was overachieving to find acceptance and to protect myself from rejection. And so everyone around like, Man, look, Josh is more gung ho than everyone else, more driven I was. It was adaptive behavior I was doing. I didn't go into I didn't take my shame and guilt and wounds and internalize it and say and try to avoid people. I said, No, I want to be in the spotlight. I don't want to be rejected, so I'm going to over achieve so that I never get rejected again. And you've known me since we were teenagers. What do you think when I say that, looking

Amy Roberie  13:20  
back, what it totally makes sense to me. And again, I would say it's a both and because I also recognize from early on, I think I was 16 when I first met you, you were 16 as well. And there was a pureness about your heart for the Lord, and your drive to pursue Him and to know Him and to make sure that other people knew him, and that was a pure purity that you had in you at the same time there was some deep wounding that you probably weren't even aware of, or you might have been aware of on on a very surface level, but that that stemmed from your early childhood, and that would kind of continue on in your childhood and early adulthood, and coming from family trauma, and I think, I think as you experience those things again, you know, everything that we can can do that can start out as pure, there's always that opportunity where the enemy, the enemy is real, He will come in and he will use those things if We don't continue to pursue healing and pursue healing in them, he can use those things to derail us. And that's really what I see when I when I think about that, is that the enemy tried to use that to derail you, to be focused on performance, focused on being driven to achieve certain goals, to even maybe even become slightly legalistic. You know, in your achievement of those things, of achievement of maybe perfection, almost. And

Josh Roberie  14:43  
I think, you know, it's, it's very messy. And like you said, it's, for me, there was this genuine, pure call to God. I mean, there's a sensitive, sensitivity I've had to God since a young child that I know just comes from hell. But it was, it was the grace of God. But there was it where it got messy. Was there would be a point where it's okay. You've done your your Bible study, you know, you've read your Bible for the for the day. Why is there 100 more things that you think that you need to do?

Amy Roberie  15:11  
You always have you put a pressure on yourself, right? That that you haven't accomplished enough, or there's more to be done, or I haven't achieved enough. And again, that's going back to speaking to that, that you know that that wounding that, and that's what concerns

Josh Roberie  15:25  
me about a lot of people in ministry, when people brag about not resting, when people always have to be on the road, and it's like unnecessarily traveling, it's it concerns me because I don't judge them, because I know that everyone's got their own journey. But I just reflect on me knowing that, okay, why can't you rest? You know? Because I know why I've had problems resting before, and it's not connected to the call of God and all that. It's connected a bunch of bad stuff. And to this day, I have trouble resting and do a lot better with it, because you helped me, and I'm aware of it, but I think we need to, you know, Sabbath and put God back in his place. Okay, so let's read a little bit more of this quote here. But not only is this flog because such this is again from when darkness is my closest friend, because such acceptance can only be limited. It is also highly damaging. Our service of others can only become a cover for our own self service, and an extremist generates what the psychologist calls codependency. I've seen it over and over and over again in ministry, experienced it myself, created it myself, and I see it even in healthy churches, that leaders create a codependency with the people that they follow. And I see it in families, you know, I've seen it in my family and and what happens is when codependency, when you're a leader is, well, I'll just read what, what Mark said. He says, I need others to be pastorally needy so I can meet those needs. Consequently, I have no real incentive to see them heal, but inadvertently sustain their dependency on them. And so what happens is, is we don't we don't want people to grow beyond us, because we want them to need us, and that's where sometimes it's hard to let people go. And it's, it's actually very damaging. So okay, we we've hit that one pretty good. So let's move on. Then. Of course, my own experience in ministry has been influenced by depression. I have. I've battled depression for various degrees, for for as long as I can remember, not that I was aware of it, right, all those tops, but now, looking back, right, can see, and looking back, I can see. And, you know, for example, I remember, you know, I draw. So I have, I do painting and art another hobby, yeah, one of my I really have a collection, and, and, but I've drawn since I was in elementary school, and I've kept every drawing I've ever done, basically. And I have art journals. And I remember going through an art journal when I was in high school and showing I had done a self portrait you. This is something you drew, sketched, sketched in an art journal, and I showed it to you and it and that this is I found. I went through this in 2020, we're all stuck at home, and I was starting to get into art again, and and it was a self portrait, but was crazy about it. And it's kind of shocking to say out loud was that I had drawn a hole in the middle of my chest, and you could see right through my chest. And it's like something was telling me, hey, something's not right.

Amy Roberie  18:18  
How old do you think you were when? When you drew that 17

Josh Roberie  18:21  
or 16 years old,

Amy Roberie  18:22  
this is someone who was, again, I knew you that was passionate about the Lord, reading your Bible every day, praying every day, leading students like myself and many other students to follow Christ. And yeah, and that's part of the problem. That hole was there, though that's

Josh Roberie  18:39  
part of the problem was, goes undiagnosed, and was undiagnosed in our church for a long time, is because, you know, my dad, I remember my dad telling me that if people just got the Holy Ghost, they wouldn't be depressed. You know, they need the joy of the Lord. And that was part of our theology, was this, but it's so much more complicated. You need the spiritual side. And that's part of what I've learned, is learn to manage the spiritual side of things, as well as several other things. There's emotional things that were going on.

Amy Roberie  19:09  
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Josh Roberie  19:25  
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Amy Roberie  19:51  
So Josh, when did you first realize that depression was impacting your life? Well,

Josh Roberie  19:56  
honestly, it wasn't because I saw I was. Press, I had no thoughts of being depressed whatsoever, you know, through high school and even college. But basically my father, it was through my dad. So my dad grew up in an alcoholic, abusive home. My grandfather physically abused him and my grandmother to the point that one day, my dad pulled a gun on his dad and said, if you hit mom again, I'm going to kill you. And so he had to leave. He was smart. He was brilliant, you know, so smart. But he had to drop out of high school and begin working in the fast food. And he left his home because it wasn't safe and and eventually he joined the military, got his GED, but he always watched him, you know, basically struggled through life as someone who was capable of so much more, but because of a decision he made at 1617, and I just would always think about how his life would be different if he was able to continue high school, go to college. He really had no choice. Had no choice. He was in a choice was made for him. Yes, exactly, and and so I didn't realize how much I was impacting him his whole life until he he had three marriages. His third marriage, he loved his wife, but they they had some financial struggles, and basically she threatened to leave him, and when she told him that he overdosed on 90 prescription migraine headache pills and would have died if he didn't call 911 and save his own life. So he saved his own

Amy Roberie  21:23  
life. After doing that, he immediately regretted that he

Josh Roberie  21:27  
took it. And so it really, it's not called, it's called, it's basically called a moment of indiscretion. It's not called an attempted suicide, because he immediately tried to save his life. So and I it's, it was very creepy. But one day he played for me the 911 recording. And so I know I listened to him and how they instructed him and what to do in that moment, and he passed out. You could hear him on the 911 recording hit the floor, and they saved his life. But they he was handy. He was disabled from that day forward, and the effects of that, effects of that, right? And so then he was diagnosed as clinically depressed. And was

Amy Roberie  22:06  
that the first time him making that decision to take that medication to end his life, but then quickly saying, No, I don't want to do it? Was that the first time that he realized truly that he was clinically depressed, and the first time he was diagnosed, yes, with a mental health situation, right? Okay, it's interesting and and so you can look back and see it was affecting him. Yes, long before Yeah. So

Josh Roberie  22:29  
he was, he was officially disabled. He can no longer work. He went from like, almost like a military clean house, yes, perfection. Everything was perfect. The finances were perfect. There he him and his wife had only been married, not, I don't even think they were married. Gosh, eight years were but their house is about to be paid for, yeah, like they're just a few $1,000 away from literally everything being completely paid for, money saved retirement, everything to complete disaster, to the house was never once clean again, to there's no financial stability ever again in his life or my life. And she left. When she left, she took, she took every you took things out of the house. I remember I came home from school and my bed was gone. I'm like, because it was her bed school. It was from LSU. LSU, yeah, I was a freshman at LSU, and I'm like, Okay, I don't have a bed to sleep on now, and my dad's in the hospital. I'll talk about that maybe another time more detail, but basically, for the next nine years, my dad would be checked in and out of mental institution, Baton Rouge, called the toss center. The reason why I'm sharing that's important is because that's part of why I could never admit I was depressed

Amy Roberie  23:35  
well, and I think even then because, because I knew you during again, that whole time, it goes back to our teenage years, and even even in our dating and then our early marriage while he was still alive. You know, I never would have thought it's not you're saying you could never admit to yourself that you were depressed. But I never would have thought that early on at all. I think the problem was across my mind, honestly,

Josh Roberie  23:59  
when things would come up and there was, there was lots of signs that we'll talk about, yes,

Amy Roberie  24:04  
looking back now, I see that in that moment. I never once thought that,

Josh Roberie  24:09  
but part of the barrier for me was the was this spiritual or misunderstanding of spirituality that I couldn't be depressed because I had, like my dad said, had the Holy Ghost, yes, right, you know, and it was probably what I would admit some some flaw in my faith. And that was a part of our theology that was very wrong, this perfectionist faith, that if I had faith, everything would be perfect in my life, which is so toxic and dangerous. But the other part of it was, is that I could never admit that I was depressed, because to admit that would be admit to the level that my dad was, that he was in the toss center for Thanksgiving, and on Thanksgiving, I'm driving up to the mental institution in Baton Rouge with my grandmother, yes, and visiting my father and wondering, how did this happen, you know? And so I couldn't admit it, because I would be admitting that, that I was the same as that, and that that was very hard for me. But. You know, eventually, you know, things, things would, things would go on. We would, we would have kids. We would get married. I would tell you, we get married first

Amy Roberie  25:10  
anyone that doesn't know us. We did it in that order. Got married, yeah, children,

Josh Roberie  25:15  
yeah. But basically, I remember I wanted to start writing, and there's lots of different points I could talk about, but for the sake of time, I remember I wanted to start writing down my childhood story. And I really wanted to write about my my father, and I ended up writing about my mom, which was like, so bizarre, sit down and write a book on faith, fatherhood and family, and I end up writing all this about my growing up in my mom's house. And I remember, as I started doing that, my I started twitching, you know. And my eye, my eye was twitching all day long, non stop. And then I remember, I woke up in the morning one day and I looked at my teeth, and it looked like one of my teeth were chipped. I'm like, when did I bump my I don't remember bumping my tooth, you know. And the maybe, like, a week later I started, I had this headache, this migraine lasted for like a week. It started my shoulders went up, my head went down, my shoulders, and it was the most I've had migraines my whole life. But it was so intense I couldn't understand what was going on. And then I was in a meeting one day here at the office, and in the middle of the meeting, like half my half of my tooth broke off. Yeah, I remember that. And I was like, I got up, didn't say anything, just walked out of the room. Our dentist is like, five minutes from the office. We have a great relationship with them, so just drove right over there. I walked in, I was like, my tooth fell off and and they, they immediately put a crown on my tooth, right, right then and there. They fixed it, you know? And I'm like, they're like, what? I'm like, What do you think happened? They said, you're grinding your teeth at night, and I was grinding my teeth so much because of the stress of like, another part of the story was that I started reading autobiographies about people who lived traumatic lives, and you would read them too.

Amy Roberie  26:56  
So this is important. This is when I began, I think the first realize what you were up against that I did not have an understanding of. And we were probably 1011, maybe 12 years into marriage, and had both kids had settled back here in Birmingham, not back, but settled here in Birmingham, been here a few years, and on the outside, everything was, was great and and really, have a have a non stressful job, you know, we are so, so blessed in what we do, where it's ministry, and it's serving pastors, and it's serving leaders and church planners specifically, but it's in the most life giving environment that I could ever describe to you. So, so I'm trying to set it up. It's not, there's not work stress, there's not life stress with our children at the time or anything like that. But, but someone recommended autobiography Glass Castle is what it's called, and you were reading it, and you read it, and then I read it, I read it, and it was one of the situations again, as a Enneagram seven, I read it, and I basically had to read it in 12 hours. I read it in a 12 hour sitting, because I I had to get to the end where I knew this woman would be okay. She was at least okay enough to write an autobiography. And so I needed to know that she, like survived this childhood. And so after reading it, of course, we talked about it, and I was like, you know, telling these moments of gosh, I cannot believe she went through this and and out. And then you said to me, you were like, well, that was like, my childhood, and it's like,

Josh Roberie  28:34  
no big deal. Like, I didn't realize when she was writing the stuff in the book Glass Castle, that this was supposed to be alarming to other people. I'm like, That's exactly how I grew up. I mean, I thought she was like, Yeah, I get it. Josh pointed

Amy Roberie  28:46  
to specific examples that she cites of when she was three years old, four years old, five years old, early elementary, teenage. And like, I remember doing this, you know? I remember this at my grandparents house with my mom, or with my dad, or this, and that is the first they have the photos to prove it. Yeah, no, that is the okay. That is the first time that I understood your childhood fully. She talked, and

Josh Roberie  29:12  
I give one example here, so she talks about cooking and boiling water and hurting herself because she was

Amy Roberie  29:19  
three years old. She was three years old. She had pulled a stool up right wasn't going to get there's photos

Josh Roberie  29:23  
of me and my brother at that age cooking, and once so I have, like, like, it's so crazy, how similar it is. But I remember one day my grandfather would cook, you know, eggs in the morning, and it was so normal for me to be at the stove that nobody stopped me. I pulled up a chair, and he was finished climbing up the chair, and when he turned the burner off, the coils went black. And something in my head thought, I wonder if it's still hot, even though it's black and not red. And I took my hand and I just put it right on the burner, full on, had the coils burned into my hand, but yeah, and so what happened was. Is reading that brought back memories, discussion, writing about it brought back things that I I've never felt like I've tried to hide anything from myself or anybody else, but it just started coming to the surface and then watching my kids go through the same age that I was years

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