“I’d never felt so alone in my life.” – Tedashii
In this one-of-a-kind Healing Out Loud video, Tedashii opens up about the season in his life where he experienced multiple losses of family members, including his one-year-old son, Chase. This experience led him to cope with the pain in unhealthy ways.
View this video with Tedashii and other Healing Out Loud videos in this YouTube Playlist.
I felt like God had abandoned us, not just distant. I felt like he quit on us. – Tedashii
The first loss that I experienced was my stepmom who passed away from breast cancer. A year later, my sister passed away. And so here I am, stepmom who… My biological mom, I love her, she’s in my life, we have a great relationship, but I was super close to my stepmom and felt like, “Man, this woman embraced me as her own child.” And to lose her was hard.
But then to backdoor that with the loss of my little sister, it was like, “Man, she’s young. I don’t understand, God. How does this happen?” And so I’m watching my dad grieve the loss of his daughter, his child. And I think to myself, “Man, how do you do that? Man, I am so sorry. We just did a one year anniversary thing for mom who had just passed. Now, your daughter, Josephine, we’re at her funeral.”
So weird and just surreal. And I’m at a loss on what he’s going through. So I’m just trying to be encouraging and supportive.
Less than a year later, my wife and I lose our one-year-old son, Chase, and I’m going through what he’s going through. And I’m recalling the moments at Josephine’s funeral, and I’m recalling the moments of watching my dad grieve and fight to stand strong and appear strong for people.
So I told myself, “Man, I’ve been walking with the Lord since I was 18. I believe in Jesus. I believe we grieve with hope, so I’m going to be okay. And I’m looking at my dad, he’s still going. We’re going to be fine.”
And that lasted all of six months.
When you can’t fight with your own strength
And all of the strength that I, in and of myself could muster, faded, depleted, and went away, and I was left with just emptiness and silence.
And I’d never felt so alone in my life.
I didn’t know how to reconcile loss on that scale because it’s permanent. Lose your shoes, replace them. Break your glasses, get new ones. Wreck your car, maybe get another one. Even if there’s a loss in life that you can’t replace, like my stepmom or my sister, you still think, “Oh, but they’re older. At least they lived.”
But I couldn’t reconcile my one year old, not being here. Chase not living the life that I dreamt for him or that he deserved to live in my opinion, only to lose that all. And I just felt like there’s no way to reconcile that in my mind, in my heart.
Click here to hear about Lecrae’s healing journey after battling clinical depression.
Coping through the pain
I was often depressed and angry all the time. I felt at one point like anxiety was all I could feel. Panic attacks daily. I felt unsafe leaving my house so I didn’t. I coped primarily through comfort and gratification in the company of places and people that were not the norm for me because they weren’t going to judge me, or look down on me.
They weren’t going to intensify the shame that I already felt. So if I wasn’t drinking every day, I was trying recreational drugs. If I wasn’t trying recreational drugs, I was watching TV and ordering fried catfish every day. Something to just make myself feel better than what I was.
And eventually, something to make me escape who I was. Two really good friends of mine sat me down and they said, “Hey, we are concerned about you.” And they started to communicate back to me what they’ve seen of me. And I didn’t see it. I had a blind spot to it.
So I had to wrestle with whether or not I thought these people that I, in the past, really believe love me. I had to wrestle with whether or not I thought they were just lying or manipulating me. And they said, “You need to take time away, and you need to go to therapy too.”
What healing looks like for Tedashii
The healing doesn’t look like no longer dealing with it. It looks like obtaining the tools, which is what therapy is to me. It’s providing me with tools to put in my tool belt so when something comes up, I can go, “Oh, I know what this feels like. Here we go.”
I can recall a scripture, or I can spend time meditating, or I can stop for a moment and call a friend and go, “Hey, I’m, I’m stressed out. I don’t know what to do.”
So those things are now at my disposal when before they weren’t. It has been Almost 10 years. It’ll be 10 years this coming March.
There are days I wake up thinking he’s there, or there are moments where I still think I hear him crying, or there are moments where certain smells bring about a triggering of remembrance, or certain dates of the month, or times of the year.
And you don’t necessarily stay in the same depth of pain, I would say. I think eventually you begin to process and move forward by doing the work. But the pain is still there in certain ways. And it comes in waves.
I’m not meant to stay in a cycle of pain. I am going to go through suffering, but there are other things that exist on this earth, joy and peace, and this unimaginable love in the abundant living that God gives us. And that needs to be experienced because I feel like it is God’s gift to us before we see Him in glory. That we get to taste a little bit of heaven now by the abundant life that he’s providing through his son if we trust Him as Savior.
Find more information about The Chase Foundation, in memory of Tedashii’s son.
Ready to find healing?
If you wrestle with anxiety, past paid, grief, addiction, broken relationships… you are not alone. The struggle is real… but so is help and healing.
