What is in a name? Sometimes, everything.
For weeks now I’ve been wandering around trying to put my finger on an emotion I can’t name. Maybe it’s been months; hard to tell as winter gives way to spring in what can, at times, feel like one long Groundhog’s Day of a plague.
The emotion is a confusing combination of dull and hyper alert, of numbness and, at the same time, nervy electricity just under my skin. I think I’ve experienced versions of it before — specifically when I step to the edge of a great height and look down. I’m not afraid of heights per se, but it’s a dizzying, disembodying feeling.
As far as I can tell, it’s not attached to any specific event or emotional trigger. At least not one that I am aware of beyond the nebulous moment freeze-frame we are collectively living.
I might be happily walking along or, as I am right now, sitting on a country porch overlooking a majestic river with no stressor in sight, experiencing what by most measures should be a blessed moment, when this feeling will roll through me like an avalanche tumbling down a mountainside. Agitation and urgency mixed with melancholy and paralysis.
I’ve been scratching my head with a nagging question: What the heck is this?
And then yesterday, Voila! The exact right word sifted up from Pocket, Firefox’s data mining curator, which, in its magical trolling way, sensed my need for emotional articulation. An article written by a research fellow at the Australian Catholic University affirmed that there is indeed a name for my conflicted state.
That word is acedia.
I don’t know why, but shrinking my meandering, off-kilter mood down to a single word is oddly comforting — and possibly even liberating. But more on that in a moment.
It turns out lots and lots and lots of people are experiencing acedia — despite the light that has started to twinkle at the end of the pandemic tunnel. Even as vaccinations roll out across the planet, recovery checks roll into bank accounts across America, and Phase 3 reopening rolls through the economy, many of us continue to feel discomforted, lost, and, almost in defiance of our expanding circles of movement, trapped.
Acedia is the emotion that goes along with the sense that we should feel better, buoyant even, but we don’t.
It comes from the Greek akidía, and was originally coined to describe an inner inert state. The Romans changed the spelling to “acedia” and expanded its meaning to describe a feeling of lethargy “without care.” Christians found this state of moral apathy so soul crushing they tucked it in with the Seven Deadly Sins. And when the English translated those seven spiritual scourges, they turned acedia into a very slow animal: the sloth. Sloth, meaning laziness. As if a sloth, which has an extremely low metabolic rate accounting for its lack of speed, is nothing more than anthropomorphized laziness disguised in fur hanging from a cecropia tree.
There is some element of each of these etymological morphings in the acedia I’ve been wrestling. Listlessness? Check. Lackadaisy? Check. Meh-ness? Uh-huh.
But the description that hit my unnamed emotional nail on the head was this one, offered up by the 5th century monk and theologian John Cassian to describe a common “spiritual demon” among his fellow Desert Fathers.
A monk felled by acedia back in 300 or 400 AD, wrote Cassian, felt:
“horrified at where he is, disgusted with his room … (acedia) does not allow him to stay still in his cell or to devote any effort to reading . . .”
Cassian goes on to write that ascetics under the spell of acedia experienced:
“such bodily listlessness and yawning hunger as though he were worn by a long journey or a prolonged fast … He looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness.”
Um. Yeah. That’s it. Exactly.
I pick up a book one second and put it down the next. I pop up, forget why, and plop back down. I sigh audibly for no reason. I forget words. There are days when I watch the sun move across the sky outside my window, as if I’m watching a movie; I want to get out in that sun, but I’m stuck to my chair, a passive observer, unable to budge.
“This sounds eerily familiar,” Dr. Jonathan Zecher, the Australian Catholic University researcher I mentioned, writes of the acedia of those ancient isolated monks. Zecher is studying early Christian asceticism and it was his article dissecting the word acedia on The Conversation that gave my emotion-searching mind respite from it’s wandering.
He explains how the word acedia and its original concept have been all but expunged from our lexicon through the centuries and makes a great argument for adding it back to our vernacular to specifically describe this mid-to-late-pandemic “thing” that many of us are feeling. This melancholy that isn’t quite melancholy, but isn’t not melancholy either.
“Reviving the language of acedia is important to our experience,” writes Zecher. “First, it distinguishes the complex of emotions brought on by enforced isolation, constant uncertainty and the barrage of bad news from clinical terms like ‘depression’ or ‘anxiety.’ . . Saying, ‘I’m feeling acedia’ could legitimise feelings of listlessness and anxiety as valid emotions in our current context without inducing guilt that others have things worse.
“Second,and more importantly,” Zecher adds, “the feelings associated with physical isolation are exacerbated by emotional isolation – that terrible sense that this thing I feel is mine alone. When an experience can be named, it can be communicated and even shared.”
There it is. The “why” of my need to name the strange emotion that lurks in the corners of my apartment and didn’t go POOF! when I got the vaccine like I thought it would. Having a word to hang this feeling on allows me to share it, to understand that my experience is not unique but communal, and thus to feel less alone. I’m not sure why it helps me to know I am not alone, but it does, and I am grateful.
It also helps me to know I am not insane, at least in terms of this feeling.
That slight-but-real fear was thankfully put to rest this past week when my friend Mary played me an episode of the splendid podcast On Being with Krista Tippet. The episode was titled "What's Happening in Our Nervous Systems?"
In an interview with clinical psychologist Christine Runyan, On Being clearly outlines the impact that the pandemic (and in particular, long-term isolation) continues to have on our nervous systems. Runyan talks at length about the body’s great primal protective system against physical threat, the “fight or flight” response. We’ve been swimming in fight or flight’s cortisol bath for a year, she reminds us, and that has to have consequenes. No wonder we forget our keys, feel dizzy, think about eating the entire pie, and want to scream for no apparent reason.
Speaking to the feeling of acedia, she points to the body’s third Superprotector — the freeze response — which manifests in paralysis and stuckness.
“We talk about fight or flight, but there’s also a state of freeze, which can look very much like you’re describing — this state of apathy, of detachment, of even disembodied or dissociative, and numbing, a lot of numbing,” Runyan says. “And that is a state of physiological high arousal, actually; there’s still a lot happening underneath the skin, in terms of the arousal, but the body has essentially tucked in. And it’s a protective stance. There’s a lot of protection there. And anybody who is at risk of depression, has previous depression, it can be a scary place to be. . .”
Acedia is real. It’s back from the desert. Cassian described it. Runyan reiterated it. I claim it.
The question is how do I get rid of it?
If I were to treat my acedia like depressions I’ve had from time to time, the answer would be a recognizable list: exercise, eat right, meditate, talk to a professional. I do all those things regularly. I imagine meds could help.
But maybe the best approach is the hardest — the non-approach. Rather than try get rid of this feeling, which isn’t working, perhaps I need to sit with it. While I’m sitting, I might want to give my nervous system a nod of respect for its amazing protections and then give it credit for knowing when and how to let go of this freeze.
Maybe I need to give my mind, spirit, and my body what I most don’t want to give: time.
This pandemic has taken a lot of that already. In my willfulness and desire for control, I don’t want to give it any more. But we’ve come this far. I’ve been on long walks where the end felt like it would never come, but did. With time (and a lot of cussing).
I like that Runyan avoids the quick fix as she wraps up her conversation with Tippet.
“We are pretty conditioned to turn away from discomfort and suffering in our society. We are not very good at allowing for grief, which is always on its own timeline, and it’s unpredictable in its own right,” she says. “And this is a tough one, because it’s not a pinpoint experience. I don’t know what it looks like . . . because we’re still in it, is the other thing. We’re trying to grieve a trauma that is still ongoing. And I don’t have the answer to how to do that, other than one breath at a time — because it’s still here.”
In the meantime, I want to sign the petition adding acedia to the Emotion Wheel, a popular tool a psychologist once gave me to help me name and feel my feelings. I checked out multiple versions of the wheel, and believe me, acedia is not on it.
After all, to cope with an emotion, it really helps to name it.
“Learning to express new or previously unrecognised constellations of feelings, sensations, and thoughts, builds an emotional repertoire, which assists in emotional regulation,” Zecher points out. “Naming and expressing experiences allows us to claim some agency in dealing with them. As we, like Cassian’s desert monks, struggle through our own ‘long, dark teatime of the soul,’ we can name this experience, which is now part of our emotional repertoire.”
I echo the Desert Fathers. Amen and amen.
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