COVID Weariness

So here we are nearly a year since my last post about my nightly awakenings.  And what have I done this year?  Well, THE WORK.  The work has consisted of a lot of holding space for myself and others.  Keeping my heart open and grounded, so I can invoke the same posture in others who need their own ability to stay present with emotional pain.  I’ve listened, I’ve lectured, I’ve cried, and finally—I slept.  At last. 

It’s a good thing, because this year mental health workers have begun addressing a new phenomenon, one we don’t yet have a name for.  I’m not quite sure what to call it either, but it is indeed a thing and I’m calling it COVID Weariness, though that doesn’t truly capture the magnitude of it.  Based on personal and professional observations and experiences, here is a list of some of the possible symptoms one experiences when dealing with COVID Weariness:

1.       chronic sadness

2.       anger and irritability

3.      irrational thinking and difficulty with concentration

4.       symptoms similar to trauma reactions (i.e., hypervigilance, paranoia, avoidance of cues that elicit a triggered reaction)

5.       emotionally tender and reactive or alternately numbed and disconnected

6.       loss of pleasure in activities one once enjoyed

7.       loss of motivation, difficulty staying motivated to do daily tasks

8.       confusion and disorientation in day to day tasks and/or in planning ahead (as a result of living long-term with survival mentality)

9.       acting out and/or numbing behaviors (i.e., rage, overeating, drug or alcohol abuse, shopping, excessive use of activities that promote sense of feeling “checked out”)

10.   grief and difficulty naming it as grief

11.   difficulty connecting with other people when opportunities arise/feeling awkward and disjointed in one’s social skills

12.   persistent anxiety and difficulty identifying why

And this is really just a short list but a pretty concise one for what I am seeing in many people.  Every single day clients list these complaints to me and nearly always they express confusion as to why they feel this way.  In our 2020 vacuum, we are suffering and disconnected from one another while doing it.  This has denied us the emotional mirroring we need to contain our own pain.  We have no one validating for us that we have been and are being traumatized by the ongoing daily threat of infection, possible outside violence, and/or death.  We have no one helping us name the fact that we are carrying hypervigilance and grief in our bodies because of the ravages of a pandemic and violent political unrest we’ve witnessed for nearly a year.  We worry.  We are afraid.  We are sad and often hopeless.  We have lost some of our ability to make small talk.  I even noticed the other day that I no longer feel the automatic impulse to extend my hand to a stranger in greeting.  I’ve trained my mind to stop offering touch or to expect it from others.  This takes a toll on one’s psyche, emotional health, and physical health.  As human beings we are not wired neurologically to live under persistent threat with no room or time for resolution and to do it all while living in isolation.  We are a nation, a planet suffering under COVID Weariness. 

COVID Weariness is something you are experiencing as a result of the world you have lived in for the last year, even if you didn’t lose your job, even if you didn’t get sick, even if your friends and family have been taken care of and well, yes, even then.  You have sat in a world that faced death every day.  You changed your daily patterns and your family’s daily patterns.  You removed yourself from daily contact.  You watched suffering or at least knew it was happening and held this in the back of your mind.  All of us have been impacted and we cannot afford to minimize the emotional fallout from this pandemic.  We cannot remain in denial that what we feel is a result of what we’ve experienced.  We need one another’s mirroring eyes and we need community to heal. 

Last night our president addressed the nation and offered some hope of emerging from this pandemic, literally emerging from our homes and gathering, when and where it’s safe, with friends and family.  We need this to recover.  And even more than this, when we emerge it is essential that we acknowledge one another’s suffering.  We must bear witness to what has happened.  We have to name it.  We have to talk about it.  We have to validate for one another that this is unusual, traumatic, life-altering, and grievous.  We have to be compassionate and patient with one another’s emotional recovery.  When we fail to offer these important elements of healing to one another, we set ourselves up for more acting out.  In an effort to act out our pain and have it seen, we’ve indeed observed instances of violence, rage, and sorrow.  Our sorrows have gone unattended until they grew monstrous and primitive.  Our efforts to gain relief through raging have only deepened the grief trenches.  We have been leveled and deconstructed, but this also means we are poised for radical change. 

I write today to provide a mirror for what we are feeling and what I see each day.  It’s not a pretty thing to look at, but here it is, and we can handle it.  We must.  We can do the hard things.  We always have.  I’m grateful today that we seem to be turning a corner, and it is my hope that it is not only bodies that begin congregating again, but hearts.  Open, softened, and present hearts.

The Nightwork

I’ve taken to waking in the middle of the night, anywhere between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.  It started sporadically around September 2019 but became a nightly thing in January 2020.  This is especially significant for me, because I am and have always been a heavy sleeper.  I’ve never had sleep problems and have never functioned well on minimal sleep.  Sleep, in fact, is the one thing I’ve always been good at, anywhere, any time and, at least seven plus hours as needed.  So for me, of all people, to begin waking, wide-awake waking… I couldn’t make sense of it. 

And it continued nightly.  NIGHTLY I tell you, for months.  For the first week or so, I kept thinking it was stress-induced and that it would eventually pass.  I tried all the calming, meditation, relaxation, sleep hygiene strategies I teach my own clients, to no avail.  Finally about a month into the madness, I began to realize that despite only having 3- 5 hours of sleep per night, I was surprisingly alert and creative.  I began to realize that perhaps this was a new normal and something else was happening in me.  I felt more awake on the inside than I’d ever felt before.  This is when I began getting up when the 3 a.m. call came.  I got up and opened myself to whatever it was that wanted my attention.  This is when cool things began to happen.

Even during my resistance phase of the night-wakings, I woke regularly to God’s presence with me and comforting me.  During that time I was asking God for help in going back to sleep and settling my mind.  More nights than not, I didn’t get that particular prayer answered, but God remained compassionate to my resistance and near.  When I started waking and saying Lord, I’m up now.  What do you need me to do? I began feeling the weight of this world.  I saw friends and family in need.  I saw my own desperate and raw 3 a.m. pain (because it is indeed undressed at 3 a.m.).  Each night became sessions with God, sessions for crying, just being held, writing, praying, lying in contemplative silence, whatever impulse came.  Some nights I woke, lit a candle, and prayed.  Some nights I reached to the nightstand for a book and asked God to come back another night, let me sleep.  But more than anything, I can now say with such immense love, I have grown to look forward to nightly meetings with God.

I’ve stopped worrying about how I’m going to feel the next day, because most days I feel just fine.  I’ve developed trust that if God wakes me for work, God will sustain me through the next day.  That took over a month to learn that.  Once I stopped worrying about lack of sleep, I’ve been freed mentally to engage in a new way.  I’ve discovered a quiet palpability to the presence of God.  I’ve discovered what love literally feels like when it fills a room.  There’s an energy so sweet and humbling, overwhelming, satisfying.  There is nothing like it.  I’ve grown to trust what I hear in those hours, what I am told to do.  I don’t always adhere to it once the spell of Nightwork ends, but I’m trying; and finally now I am seeing how these last months of nightly wakings have prepared me for the days ahead.  I am a deeply sensitive person, one who perhaps could be easily overwhelmed by the anxieties of a world facing pandemic, but that is not the case.  At least not today.  I feel the weight of death, loneliness, and panic but I am not crushed by the weight.  Feeling it only gives me a read on how worthy the prayers of deliverance must be.  God lets me feel it so I’ll really understand it, not so it will consume me.  I trust.

So this morning, God allowed me to sleep in until 4 a.m., which I appreciate.  I woke to the holy cloud that fills my room at that hour.  I now smile at the sleeplessness and enter the power of the call.  This morning I felt the need to sage myself and the entire house.  I have felt that more acutely in recent weeks.  Yesterday was an emotionally difficult day and some of the remnants of it still clung to me.  I cut on a bedside lamp and first opened my bedroom window.  Immediately the sounds of morning birds chirped into the room, despite the fact it was still dark out.  The birds already knew what was coming on the horizon.  I opened multiple windows downstairs in the dark, tears already starting to fill my eyes—the weight of many needs coming in on me.  I let them come and continued my task.  I came back to my room and lit the white sage, let the smoke drift above me while listening to the birds.  I prayed through my own pain God, cleanse me for this work.  Remove the negativity of yesterday.  Wipe away any despair or fear that might try to cling. I can do whatever I need to do when you tell me to do it.  I need you.  Come be with me, surround me with your love, protect me in the days ahead.  Protect this home and everyone in it.  I can’t do a single thing without you, nothing, Lord, but I can do anything when you go before me.  The birds continued their conversations outside. The house began to fill with morning twilight and I started through every darkened room with the smoke, honoring it as a representation of God’s Spirit.  In every room I asked for cleansing, strength, and protection.  I carried the smoke upstairs and covered the children’s doors, calling in God’s presence around them.  I brought the sage back to my room downstairs and felt the need to write about this morning.

The work this morning doesn’t look much different than many other mornings.  I checked on a few friends and prayed for many.  I sat in God’s stillness and absorbed every ounce of supernatural love I could hold.  I cried.  I prayed some more.  And now I write.  World, we are in for a bumpy ride with COVID-19.  Many are dying and will die, and those who won’t are quarantined at home fighting their own battles with loneliness, depression, anxiety, and trauma.  In the coming months, many will emerge from their homes traumatized by the losses.  We separate ourselves to survive this deadly virus, and yet the separation from others takes its own toll on our mental and emotional selves.  Yesterday it took its toll on me. 

My spiritual work seems paltry when I consider what is happening around me.  I have a friend in Las Vegas, who I just chatted with this morning.  She was dragging herself home from work after covering the trauma of murder and suicide in her city, on top of the new normal of COVID-19.  Many of us know healthcare workers exposing themselves daily to this deadly virus with no fanfare or needed supplies.  Grocery store workers, health departments, banks, pastors, clinics, therapists, delivery drivers, sanitation workers, cleaning crews, so many facing risk.  Just this morning I read about a nursing home north of Nashville that had to take 19 of their elderly patients to the hospital to be treated for the virus.  There are people embattled, bearing a weight I’ll likely never know, pushing through in mighty ways.  But I write this to say— whatever you are doing, wherever you are doing it, know this— there is a woman across town who wakes nightly for you.  She lights a candle and begins the incantation.  She rises with you, because it’s all she can do and God insists she do it every night.  From this room in Tennessee I connect to the Higher Power for us all and I stand in the gap for you, begging mercy for you, pleading protection, and asking God to hold us all another day.  God, thank you for another day.  I’ll see you tomorrow morning.