I Can Feel It Coming

I can feel it coming, like the way you can sense it in the air when summer is rolling in with the humidity.

I can feel it coming, like the way the smoke from a fire can catch on the wind and float for miles until it reaches your senses and you think to yourself distractedly – “ah, smoke...”

I can feel it coming, like the way a grain of sand has no power against the steady crashing of the waves on the shore…up and out…up and out.

I can feel it coming, like the way the sun sets every night, no matter how beautiful the pinks and gold and reds would be just to stay that way forever..it sets anyways.

I can feel it coming, like the way you know tomorrow will be here even if you don’t want it to…

Inevitable. Bigger than me. Bigger than all of us.

It bears down on us like the car-crusher in a junkyard crushing old rusty cars together to the music of grinding metal. Only for us, it holds us just in its grip, immovable, without totally crushing us. We can’t move, we can barely breathe. But it won’t have mercy and just take us out….no, it keeps us just right there. We wait for the relief of the final push, but it doesn’t come. It just holds us, and we lay there powerless under the weight of 10,000 bricks.

It presses down on one person and I can feel it spread.

I can feel it spread, like the way the bees fly from one flower to the next.

I can feel it spread, like the way oil and water don’t mix, can’t mix.

I can feel it spread, like the way fog rolls over a field.

I can feel it spread, like the way the first snow falls in big fat flakes and covers everything.

I can feel it spread, like the way dominos will keep knocking each other over endlessly once the first one goes down.

When someone around me has a great grief, it reaches over and crawls inside of me to stay for a little while. It wreaks havoc inside, it goes deep down and pulls all of my old griefs to the surface and I re-live all of them. It is like when you are in love, and the sky is bluer, the grass is greener, the flowers are sweeter. When you are under grief, it seems to lurk around every corner, dulling the senses, it seems to be upon person after person after person that you come into contact with, it seems as though the devil himself is on attack against your particular field of people and relationships. It is like walking through the thick air of a greenhouse, but instead of green life all around you, everything is dead and the heat is suffocating.

I can feel it winding its way through me, like vines growing up the side of a brick house.

I can feel it winding its way through me, like hands tightening around my neck.

I can feel it winding its way through me, and it leaves me with a disoriented kind of depression.

It will have its way and I will be exhausted until it is through. I would like to squeeze out some wise words of hope and cheer while it is here, but instead I just freeze. I freeze and I wait. I hold on, but even the holding on isn’t really anything because I just float and wait for it to be over. No drastic moves, no quick actions, avoid making any big decisions, don’t talk too much, don’t talk too little, don’t let yourself feel anything too far in any direction, just fly under the radar and wait. Make like a robot and operate out of memory, depend on your programming to get you through until you can handle it again.

It’s quiet and no one really knows. Someone close might suspect I am not right, but I will say very little. It’s not that I don’t want anyone to know and it’s not that I’m hiding. There is no answer, because to notice is to make me crawl out of my skin, and not to notice is to make me crawl out of my skin too. I’m just so, so tired, and to even talk about it seems stupid and more exhausting. Even now, writing about it seems pointless. It will pass soon, no need to hold it under a magnifying glass.

Even in the grief/depression funk, I have the hope though, the hope that it will pass because it always does. I don’t have much else, but to trust the pattern of my history, and more importantly to trust the God who is carrying me along. He is okay with the fact that I am dead weight right now, that I must be carried and can only barely, weakly, consent. He has taken into account my inability to hold an entire thought in my head long enough to pray in a respectable way. He has taken all of this into account and yet I know Him enough to know He will still see me through. I’m glad for that, it helps me rest in Him this time when I really need to the most.

So tonight I am resting. It is okay that:

Emails are left unanswered

Phone calls are left unreturned

Tasks are uncompleted

Things have been forgotten

Pizza has been eaten instead of salad and exercise has been skipped

God is handling all things that need to be handled, and He is okay doing it without me tonight.

Come back and look for the follow-up to this post with the next one I will write, which will be titled “I can feel it lifting”, and will celebrate the passing of the grief/depression funk.

 If you are also in the funk, you might appreciate my sister's writings on depression and grief.