What do you do when you don’t feel like yourself? When there’s nothing but a fuzzy white noise in place of your soul? You knock the side, adjust the antennae, press all the buttons, but only static remains. Your thoughts are jumbled, your motivation is in stasis, your joy is nowhere to be found, and you are just floating through life. How do you fix it?

I’m not here to give an answer, I’m here asking a question, because I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet.

Because I don’t know what caused the static in the first place. I don’t know where the channel lost reception, when it decided to erase the story underneath. But… its there, right under the surface. I can hear the faint murmur of voices, the memory of color, of laughter, but the image isn’t clear.

Can you fix something if you don’t know the root of the problem?

Sorry for the doom and gloom. I haven’t written a post in a few years for a few reasons:

1. Life got busy. I went from unemployed working odd and end part time jobs to two full time positions back to back, one of which lasted for five years.
2. Tbh I was struggling after the pandemic and didn’t know how to encourage others when I felt such deep disappointment.
3. Writers block hit me HARD and I couldn’t put a single word on paper for years. Barely even journaled.

The Dark Night of the Soul

A book I read recently by Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, mentions a phrase coined by St. John of the Cross, a 16th century monk, called “The Dark Night of the Soul”. It’s this concept that everyone will have a dark period of time in their life, where everything feels like its going wrong, and its just an uphill battle. He says that these times can last months or even years; but there’s a deep and good purpose to them. Because in the midst of our struggle, in the midst of our despair and loneliness and disappointment, God is working. He is pruning and weeding out the things in our life that need to be shed in order for us to live to our fullest version of ourselves. This too shall pass, and we will come back into the light.

Does it make it easier? Not necessarily, but it is nice to know that I am not the only one who has experienced this, and that I will, someday, find myself at the other end of the tunnel. In the meantime, let me just say…

It Sucks! It’s hard. I have been this way for YEARS. Scraping through each day, with my energy waning, with my soul feeling crushed over and over. I wake up and wonder if I just stayed in bed all day if anyone would notice. Because I feel like even when I am around people I am constantly messing up, disappointing them, and failing at things that used to be easy. Haven’t I learned my lesson yet, God? Haven’t I proven I can persevere? Let’s end this, k?

Are you listening? Is that music I hear beyond the Great White Noise? Is there joy at the end of this dark tunnel?

I guess I’ll just have to wait and find out.