I am emerging from what our family has now named "funk." It comes and goes every few months, and stays for about 3-4 days. It’s a familiar guest, though a hard one to live with. Naming it funk helps me to let my family know when she’s back for a visit, and so they can give me the space needed, and the comfort wanted, in order to sustain her.
Funk isn't depression though it feels like it. Intense every time, and every time an eternity—at least to the ego’s eye. First arrives irritability—a meanness in my voice, an edge to my tone. Then comes extreme fatigue. Followed by profound sadness. Then all the stories of "not enough" come rushing in to give meaning to the pain. But what if the pain has nothing to do with my enoughness and everything to do with my aliveness.
As my husband left for work, he said, "Welcome back." And I said, "the funk is part of me too—it's the price I pay for feeling Life so deeply." These words fell from my lips as if a gift from the angels, holy revelation that awakened me to a new relationship with funk. It's a broken, hurting world out there, and our bodies hold that enormous pain, but our mind buries it … for it's often too much or too busy to bear it. But sometime and somewhere, the pain will need to emerge ... because pain demands to be felt.
Is it possible for me to reframe these funks not as an affront to my worthiness but as an opportunity to witness? As a moment to stop the spinning world, and sit and grieve. To weep and ache for the mass shootings, caged children, pets passed, marriages broken, crises of faith ... for the litany of pain in our world that needs to be heard, known and loved. What if I didn't make these moments [entirely] about me, but about me being a vessel for funk to heal? It's not masochism, it's midwifery. Because pain too needs to give birth, needs to emerge from the dark, watery womb, because it too is Life.