What does Christian Science mean to me? So much. First, it stopped my crying.
In my teens and early 20s, I was generally sad and sometimes felt hopeless. I would often cry for no apparent reason, sometimes for two or three days at a time. Depression, which in hindsight it appears I was struggling with, was not yet seen as an illness, and drugs for it were not yet common. “Snap out of it!” was a common refrain from the people around me. But I couldn’t seem to do that.
I’d grown up attending a Christian Science Sunday School. Feeling in my teens like a general misfit in the world around me, and thinking that my association with Christian Science was a big part of that, I stopped attending. Still, life often felt heavy and hard.
