Try Praying

Jana Petersen

Jana Petersen studied Social and Cultural Anthropology and Religious Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and completed her training at the Evangelische Journalistenschule Berlin. Her work has been published by S. Fischer, Deutschlandfunk, taz, Zeit Online, Monopol Magazin, and Feministische Studien, as well as on the platform waahr.de for literary journalism. In 2026, her text “Die wunde Stelle mitten unter euch” was published in the anthology “Ich! Neue ungehaltene Reden ungehaltener Frauen” by S. Fischer Verlag. Petersen has received multiple awards for her work: she was granted the Recognition Award of the Herbert-Pichler-Inklusions-Medienpreis 2025; was named one of the “Journalists of the Year 2025” for her writing on ME/CFS and Long COVID; and in 2025, at the invitation of the Stiftung Brückner-Kühner and S. Fischer Theater- und Medien Verlag, delivered a speech on ME/CFS and human dignity at Rathaus Kassel. In 2022, she was elected to PEN Berlin. Petersen lives with severe chronic illness and disability in Berlin and has two children.

Try Praying 

There are no curative therapies for ME/CFS, and many medications used off-label are difficult to obtain. I have been trying for a year to convince my GP to prescribe a medication that I would have to pay for myself, and for which it is unclear whether it would help or even cause harm. When I sat crying in his treatment room during the first year of my illness, he said: Try praying. A Kreuzberger whom I could imagine throwing stones in the eighties. Praying, really? Now, a few years after this encounter, closer to despair, further from hope, I turn his words over in my mind. Should I try it after all? I have no practice; we didn’t pray at home. I could try magic, I think, as I leaf through Robert Macfarlane’s The Lost Spells. I wonder if attempts at magic can have side effects like attempts at therapy. I consider how I could conjure and invoke my sick body, which words would be the right ones, which words are powerful.

Magic, and perhaps prayer too, reminds me of experiences I have in better phases of my illness, in sessions with psychoactive substances like ayahuasca, a tea from the Amazon, or psilocybin, the active ingredient in certain mushrooms. These states are by definition difficult or impossible to describe; they exceed reason and causality and lead into a reality that appears more real than real, as scholars of religion call it. They are spaces of universal connection; boundaries dissolve, identities and thought patterns disintegrate, a pulsating field emerges.

Does the illness want to tell me something? Am I trying to tell myself something with this illness? Is my body speaking to me? I wonder if an illness is also a being, like a crow or a cactus or my child. If an illness is a language, as my friend T says, who grew up in the Amazon and who speaks of illnesses as espíritus with such matter-of-factness that I become dizzy. I leaf through a book about the Lacandon, a group in the Amazon. They do not use the healing power of plants by picking, boiling, steeping, anointing, snorting, or swallowing the plants—they ask the plants verbally or mentally for help, and the plants send their healing power into the supplicant in a way I do not understand. Perhaps, I think, this works with my cactus too, with my geranium, the pilea, the snake plant, the monstera, with the pothos and spider plants that live in my apartment. Perhaps, I think, I can also ask the crows that fly past my window in the morning and evening. Perhaps I could ask the stones that lie on my windowsills, shelves, and tables.

Formulas form in my head: Cactus, carnelian, crow; Ask, pray, sow.

I close my eyes, nibble on a dried mushroom or take a sip of the dark brown syrup stored in my refrigerator or swallow a cactus capsule. I devour the journey herbs, travel into the reality of myths. Did the jaguar god take part of my soul? How can I appease him? I dance the plants, enter infinity, hang on the cosmic umbilical cord. Am I my own midwife? I pray, ask, conjure, plead, bless; bathe in the sound of galactic foreign languages, sing with the crows and stones, scream with the branches and leaves, bow to the pale purple glow in my head. I grill, dismember, torment myself. I gather the pieces of my body, chopped, splintered, shattered. I sweep myself up with the dust on the concrete. I comb the self-hatred from my head. I am my own research object.