PC: Kristina Tripkovic on unsplash.com.
I met my teacher Laura Allnutt at Pensacola Christian College about nine years ago, but I didn’t take any classes from her until my senior year, where I was a part of the Copyediting class. She kept me sane while I juggled preparing my senior portfolio, editing pieces from fellow students, and managing the advertising duties for the class. Laura also taught Latin, the cool class I wanted to take but wasn’t allowed to. (Sniff, sniff.) In this piece, she shares some helpful thoughts on managing depression during this crazy Covid time. If you know someone who may be depressed or if you’re struggling yourself, I hope you’ll read this and then pass it along.
***
It’s no secret that in the U.S., you’re more likely to suffer depression during this pandemic than you are the disease itself. But it’s also no secret that in the U.S., you’re just more likely to suffer depression.
Depression results from many culprits, but it’s aggravated by isolation. The irony of the coronavirus pandemic is that we’re constantly told “we’re all in this together” as we’re simultaneously forced to be apart. That separation is a temporary necessity, and I don’t believe it’s the main force driving the current rise in depression.
Isolation often isn’t the state of aloneness or even loneliness. More frequently, it’s the state of being unseen, disregarded, and misunderstood.
My debut novel is finally seeing its anticipated publication after six tedious years in the making, yet my publisher can’t guarantee print times because the pandemic has slowed everything down. The moment I’ve waited for my entire life (since I could hold a pen and scribble wordless loops in a notebook) feels like a firework that lost energy halfway up the sky, leaving only a ghost of smoke lit by the fires around it. I lamented my circumstance to a friend, who replied, “Yeah, well, it’s not a great time for anyone.”
It’s true. That’s the mantra we hear everywhere, and it’s one I’ve told myself many times, even in past years. Someone always has it worse than you do. Yet the words stung, leaving me to feel empty and unseen, my feelings disregarded. My inner conflict is strong because both of us are right: My circumstance has made me sad, but everyone is sad right now. The result is a lie that leads to our prevalent depression: my problems don’t matter.
Hard times abound, and they always will. It’s never okay to dismiss one person’s sorrows because someone else has “worse” sorrow. All feelings are valid, and all people deserve the humanity of individualized compassion and empathy.
It takes work to resist our natural inclination toward judgment. Our human minds are always evaluating good-bad-better-worse and justifying our conclusions. The ability to judge is not bad; it’s human (though I’m convinced my dog judges me on the regular . . .). It’s bad when we judge issues outside of our jurisdiction, specifically who has the right to feel a certain way and when they can do so.
“Rejoice with those who rejoice,” says Romans 12:15, “and weep with those who weep.” Such actions are an embodiment of loving our neighbor as ourselves.
If we are all in this together, then we need to be sitting in all degrees of each other’s darkness and light—together, weeping and rejoicing with them in that moment because it’s theirs and it means something to them. We can be the fountains of joy and peace and comfort and love that our depressed friends are thirsting for, without negating the ongoing suffering of others. We can be all things for all people everywhere.
***
Laura Allnutt holds an MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University. You can read her publications in Lost River Literary Magazine, Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Power of Yes, and Long Island Literary Journal. She also runs the blog ThinkingWithMyMindFull.wordpress.com. Her novel, Below Them the Horizon, will be available through Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and indie bookstores everywhere this fall.
the gypsy life 