Eliana Chow

This one is a little on the more difficult and heavy side. If you’re dealing with your own emotional burdens and reading about someone else’s may make your battle harder, please feel free to close out the tab and come back another time. But if you have space somewhere to help me bear this, I’d appreciate it 🙂

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I can’t even tell you how much cereal I have eaten in the past two weeks. I’ve drunk coffee every single day since school started again and we all know that’s not a good sign.

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We all knew it was coming, but seeing the official statement that social distancing will continue until April 30 was jarring.

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Yesterday, Jackie Hill Perry posted the words, “As an introvert, I may get energy in silence while the extrovert gets it through conversation, but the truth is we all get some kind of energy and life from community. Before we are a personality type, we’re human beings and it has never been good for any of us to be alone.”

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A few days ago I went on a solitary walk. Originally intended to be a quick stroll before dinner, it turned into a very long hour and a half of listening to birds, sitting by the stream, trying to pray. On my way home a light brown poodle bounded around the tall grass at me and I froze. It sniffed my shoes and my hands before stopping suddenly with one paw in the air, then hurried off to rejoin its owner at the outdoor exercise equipment in the park.

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I’m feeling it. I’m fed up with and overwhelmed by social media but that seems to be one of the few ways I can actually keep up with my friends. Texting is also tiring. I’m ignoring messages, letting them sit for hours, offering minimal words when I do respond. I recognize the problem and yet I have no energy to change anything about it.

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It has thunder stormed here for two days. The world feels like it’s weeping. Now there is a thick layer of fog over the field behind my house and I can’t see the woods beyond that from my window. The fog has gotten denser as night approaches.

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I spent all of Saturday in bed. I only got up to eat meals, call a friend, shower, brush my teeth.

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The playground nearby is closed off with yellow caution tape. You’d think a crime had been committed there, or that it was a crime to play.

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Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

I remember being prayed over during All School Communion early on in my sophomore year. She said Jesus’ name over and over again as she hugged my heaving shoulders and I wept against her neck.

There is power in the name of Jesus.

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The sweet and smoky smell of bonfires.
Gurgling streams.
Pear blossoms.
Forsythia: spring’s burning bush.

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Let’s put a label to it. Depression. It’s rude and it’s insidious and it’s back. This time I don’t know what to do about it and it seems like a wave I’m just going to have to ride out. This is the worst kind of circumstance to be dealing with a mental illness of any kind. But it worries me that these spiritual and mental battle fields might be taken less seriously now. I can already hear it. “Oh, but everybody is feeling that right now.” No, no. This is how I feel even when the world is as it should be, and now that the world is not as it should be it’s a hundred times worse.

But ever since the Fall the world has not been as it should be.

Lord, have mercy on your people.