Navigating COVID-Am I OK?

When do I know I’m not ok?  

This year has been hard, perhaps that’s an understatement. With each new crisis I find myself digging my way out from under what feels like 10 weighted blankets. I’m functioning, but very slowly and certainly hindered. Sometimes I struggle to connect my thoughts together. Sometimes despair feels very near. Sometimes responding to yet another text string of well-meaning friends trying to maintain connection through Covid feels completely overwhelming. And I begin to wonder… Am I ok? I begin to look around at my friends around me and they’re all describing their own version of the same thing. I hop on social media and there’s no doubt that my experience is at least some variety of normal. After all, there are whole series of memes that seem to be describing what I’m feeling. But then I google the symptoms for depression and I could probably check off most of them. And have they lasted for more than 2 weeks? Well yes, because 2020 is longer than 2 weeks. How do I know when I’ve moved from a normal reaction to a lot of hard things to something that needs more attention? When do I know I should seek help?

Have you found yourself in this place this year? Do any of these thoughts sound familiar?

My hope in this series of posts is to give you some practical ideas to help you with those questions. My goal here isn’t to turn you into self-diagnosticians or to equip you to do this for those around you, but rather to give you some tools as the body of Christ to enter these things together.

So first, before we get into any of the practical things, let’s start with what not to do. Don’t ignore them. Let’s start with an analogy:

I’m not a car person. My father once had to tell me that when I neglected to put oil in my car it was like me choosing not to drink water. Apparently you can’t just wait for the light to turn on and just add oil then. My typical response to my check engine light is to wait and see if it will magically go off, sometimes it actually does. And when the gas light goes on I often start calculating in my head how many miles I’ve driven and how many I might have left before I really need to get gas. I’ve only ran out once! Adulthood has meant cultivating a better relationship with the lights on my dashboard. Learning to utilize them as they were intended to function, listening to them and heeding their warnings in order to care for my car well and steward the resources the Lord has given me. Our emotions, all those feelings or lack of feelings that ought to be there, might be kind of like the indicator lights on our heart’s dashboard.

Consider how we see this in Scripture. The Psalms are full of crying out to the Lord, speaking your heart to him. But the first step in being able to speak the psalmist does is know what is in his heart to speak. Psalm 42 gives us a glimpse at his process about wondering about a tumultuous, downcast heart. “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why are you in turmoil within me?” To have the language to come to the Lord the psalmist first had to register that there was sadness, confusion, discouragement. So our goal, like me with my car, is to learn how to identify them, listen to them, and come to the Lord to be cared for by him and shaped to be like him.

But sometimes there are some barriers that we need to get through to before we can get to the process of listening to them. So that’s where the rest of today’s article is going to focus.

Barrier #1 – Do you moralize emotions? By that I mean, are there some emotions that feel inherently sinful to you while others feel like the more righteous emotions? Let me give you an example. Say during the pandemic you’ve overwhelmed and began to feel guilt because you ought to be joyful, hopeful, content, etc. If this is the system you’re in you’re going to be motivated to get rid of the overwhelmed feelings like you would other sin, to put it aside and set your eyes on things above. But being overwhelmed, and many others we’re tempted to deem inherently sinful, have righteous expressions to them and it’s our job to figure out what those are. One of my favorite little verses that demonstrates this principle is from Hosea. In Hosea 7:14 the sin of the people isn’t that they are crying, it’s not that they’re upset, but that they are crying in their beds and not to the Lord.

Barrier #2 – Are you even aware of them? Some of us have grown so accustomed to pushing aside things that make us uncomfortable that it takes awhile to even register that we’re feeling them. If this is you it’s going to require that you slow down a bit and consider your own heart. Maybe even follow the path of Psalm 139 and pray that the Lord, who knows every crevasse of your heart, would search you and show you.

Barrier #3 – Numbness. This one is similar to #2 but is more specifically related to a situation where you’ve been hit with crisis after crisis. When difficult things keep rolling in it can be exhausting to continue to feel them fully. Maybe at the beginning of the pandemic you did a good job crying out to the Lord with the confusion or fear but as the year has rolled on it has become exceedingly more difficult to sustain that level of emotion with each new crisis, so you just begin to feel numb. The problem with numbness as a coping strategy is that it’s not unilateral. When numbness enters the picture it begins to numb the hard and also the good. If this is where you find yourself, consider opening the conversation with the Lord simply but confessing your numbness and asking for the strength to continue feeling. 

In my next post we’ll start to talk about how to identify some of those emotions.