When We Don't Feel Well

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I really like the phrase, "I don't feel well," and the wide umbrella it offers to virtually every complaint. Maybe some of you don't feel well today because you have $27 in your checking account. Some may not feel well because you're up two dress sizes, and you're now wearing stretchy yoga pants seven days a week. Maybe your children are struggling, your husband is stressed, and you don't want to get up in the morning. 

For the past few years that's been one of my hardest things, getting up in the morning. Often I would lie in bed, trying to gently ease into the day, like when you have morning sickness. Sometimes it helped to read, call one of my sisters, or turn on the t.v. for a few minutes. Other days it helped to force myself up, with the promise that I could go lie down again once I got a few things done. 

A few years ago I read the book, The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, which is about survivors of the Great American Dust Bowl which incidentally happened during the Great Depression. I like to think about 2017 as my Worst Hard Time. What made that year different is that nothing happened to me so much as something happened inside of me. I was a windmill that had been spinning at full capacity, and suddenly my propellers ground to a halt. Depression and anxiety like I had never experienced began to roar, drowning out every other sound. At first I was really sick, living in my bathrobe for months and rarely leaving my house unless I absolutely had to. After that it settled into a more general malaise that I characterized as "not feeling well." Over time there were aspects of my life that I gradually resumed, but other things, like intense exercise and large social groups, have felt hard for a long time. 

Recently someone accused one of my friends of having a perfect life. I laughed when she told me this, because although my friend is relentlessly positive and tries to fill her life with happy things, I know some of the private hurts she's had to deal with over the past few years. I know that there have been plenty of times when she didn't feel well. 

This is true for all of us. It's not that anyone feels great all of the time, we just cope differently. Some post their daily complaints on Facebook by breakfast, whereas others are more prone to extreme privacy and to suffer in silence. It's taken me almost four years to feel well enough to talk (and write) about my life since 2017. During the past few years I've spent a lot of time feeling embarrassed by my Worst Hard Time. I didn't look the same, have the same amount of energy, or open my life to other people in the same way. I also didn't know that I would eventually feel better and that the embarrassment would fade away.

What remains in it's absence is my insistence that there is no shame in not feeling well, whatever the malady. For many people, 2020 has become their Worst Hard Time. I'll write more in future posts about my experience in trying to feel better, but for today I want to encourage you by saying this is a season. It's okay that you don't feel well, that you don't look the same, or have the same amount of energy, or open your life to other people in the same way. Just get through today, and then tomorrow. It might feel like this for a while, but eventually you'll make your way through the trees to the ridge line, and then the summit. And it's all downhill from there.