On Monday, I lost my place in the middle of a sentence. Just right there in the middle of a conversation and…zip! No idea where I was going. It wasn’t the first time.

On Tuesday, I was driving to the church, and was halfway there before I realized that I had forgotten my church keys, so I turned around and drove back to get them. On the way to the church the second time, I realized that I had forgotten a mask, so I turned around again.

On Wednesday, I was reading a book for a study group and had to re-read the same page three times. I find that it has taken me much longer to read things, and when I do, I retain much less information.

On Thursday, I thought it was Friday. I got ready to do some of my Friday things, before someone had to tell me that it was time for the Thursday things instead…since it was Thursday.

On Friday (the actual Friday), I realized that for the third week in a row, my to-do list was woefully unaccomplished. My list of phone calls to make, projects to finish, and emails to return seemed as full as when I wrote it down in the first place.

At the end of the week, I asked how it was that even now, as we are starting to move back into something that feels like normal, I still can’t get my act together. I am still as captured by inefficiency as I was when the pandemic began, or in the middle of it. Shouldn’t I have figured this stuff out by now? What’s wrong with me?

It turns out that it’s actually what’s wrong with all of us.

Krista Tippett, in her popular radio show and podcast On Being, has talked about this question recently. She interviewed Christine Runyan, a clinical psychologist about the ways that our brains and our bodies are reacting to global pandemic. In short, our nervous systems are breaking. The human nervous system is designed to kick into reaction mode, often called “Fight/Flight” mode, when presented with a dangerous stimulus. Runyan suggests that this is good and healthy and exactly what keeps us alive as a species. But, the Fight/Flight level of nervous system arousal is not something we are supposed to do for 14 months in a row! But we have. Even if it doesn’t seem like we have been in panic level reactivity that long, our brains think that we have. Runyan suggests that even when we do things to numb ourselves to that emotional chaos—turn to alcohol or drugs or Netflix—our brains are still in high arousal. We are still in active “flight” response. The neurotransmitters and hormones in our brains and bodies are still firing on all cylinders, even as we binge our favorite TV show with a glass of wine.

Runyan suggests that our response to this is often to ask the question that I asked myself last week: “What’s wrong with me?” Like I am the only one dealing with this, and am somehow the only one in the world who cannot get my act together? But Runyan says that this response of the brain is normal and predictable to a “species-level trauma” like what we are experiencing. When this happens to our brains, predictable behavior includes memory problems, short fuses, fractured productivity, and sudden drops into despair. Like my week last week. And most of our weeks…every single week.  And this “what’s wrong with me” feeling is exacerbated by the fact that we are getting vaccinated and are supposed to be normalizing our behavior.  Life is supposed to be getting back to normal, and when we don’t feel normal, it feels like it’s our fault. We beat ourselves up, and blame ourselves, and tell ourselves we’ll do better next week! Or sometimes, to make ourselves feel better, we find someone to blame. Our brain’s natural response of “what’s wrong with me?” turns into “what’s wrong with all of those people?” We find ourselves even more galvanized and isolated and afraid and angry.

“All right preacher, so how in the world does that have anything to do with the book of Galatians?” More than you might realize. Last week, we read in the book of Acts how the church leaders