Is it OK to not be OK?
Airport bathrooms can be holy.
I learned that this week. I was in that walking daze I get into in transits across the world. By this point in my 40 hour journey I no longer knew what day it was or why I’d even wanted to travel in the first place. And suddenly, in a moment, I was more awake than I’d been in a long time.
In the busy bathrooms near gate 51B I was brushing my teeth at the sink as women in various states of transit daze made their way to and from the cubicles behind me. And all at once our attention was snatched. Someone had just thrown themselves into a cubicle and slammed the door and was making some kind of otherworldly sound. Grasping for comprehension, my mind flipped through possible solutions: sneezing? no vomiting! or sobbing? All three? Whatever it was, it was violent. And deeply human. And it just kept going. While every other human in this crowded airport bathroom was now suddenly still, suddenly paying attention.
When it finally stopped my mind raced. What was this? Was I unsafe? Was help needed? What kind of help even would it be?
An airport employee called to the now silent cubicle, “Hello? What’s going on in there?”
“I’M HAVING A BREAKDOWN, OKAY?!!” spat the voice on the other side of the door, more coherent now but still raw, guttural. “I just need some space to myself in this crowded freakin’ airport, okay? Can’t you just leave me alone?!”
The airport employee shrugged and moved on. People went back to whatever they were doing. As I spat out my toothpaste, the blood in it made me aware how long and how hard I’d been brushing. As I cupped my hand to rinse my mouth, I felt myself shaking. So I said a wordless prayer and as I passed the now quiet cubicle, I paused for a moment to whisper into it, “Take some deep breaths, sweetheart. You’ll get through this. Just take a few deep breaths.” I never call strangers “sweetheart.” But I think I said “sweetheart.” And I think I heard deep breathing. I hoped I heard breathing.
As I returned to my gate I felt my hands still shaking, my heart still pounding. I wondered if every woman in that bathroom left carrying in her body a tiny piece of the pain. I hoped the woman who risked sharing it now felt a little lighter.
As I settled back into my seat at the gate, I noticed on the carpet a lumpy puddle of some kind of yellow substance. Banana pudding? Or maybe vomit? Someone had wheeled a suitcase right through it. And nearby lay an abandoned water bottle. What had happened here? I saw my question mirrored on the faces of two security guards, standing near the puddle and the water bottle, looking with bewildered indignation in the general direction of the women’s bathrooms. I had to wonder if whatever I’d witnessed in the bathrooms had begun here. Something that’s supposed to be contained had slipped its restraints and was now exposed in the middle of this very public place, now looking somewhat ashamed of itself. The security guards looked like they’d been slapped in the face. Somehow all the other bodies in this place managed to keep themselves tightly tucked in, what gave this one woman the audacity to defy the unwritten rules that keep chaos at bay?
Two days later my jet lag has me staring at the bedroom ceiling at 3am. And remembering back to that moment in that airport bathroom.
I think I know now why it left me shaking. I think now that I shook from the strange holiness of it. I shook from the whiplash of waking to reality. In hindsight I feel a reverence now for that moment when I got to witness one human spirit courageous enough to say, “I’m not okay, is that okay?”
“I’m not okay. Is that okay?”
As a pastor, I’m often with people who aren’t okay. As they describe their anguish I sometimes see how desperately they’re treading water at the top of a waterfall as it threatens to sweep them into oblivion. In their exhaustion their survival instinct gives them no choice but to thrash about for dear life day after day after tiring day. Is it perverse that I delight in this opportunity to ask them, “Strange question but have you ever seriously considered stopping?” I have to work hard to restrain my joy for what I know is possible as I take time to give credence to their real anxiety. I assure them that yes, it will be crazy for a while. And then, I promise with a solemn delight that after the drop and the tumbling, they’ll bob up to the surface again, gasping, to find themselves in a new, calmer place. That more liveable place is so close, just on the other side of what will feel like death. The saddest moments for me are the ones when an exhausted paddler decides to just keep up the desperate battle against the current. They leave with disappointment, “I ask her to solve my pain and she tells me to move into it?!”
Jesus’ story of life, death, resurrection is not only a deathbed hope. It’s a daily promise that every honest expression of something dying in us is an invitation into a new place. If not a relief from the thing causing the pain at least we can find relief from the pressure to pretend, a release from the lie that humans shouldn’t suffer and we’re the only ones who do. If nothing else it can be a moment to remember it’s not a problem that we have a problem.
I don’t know about you but I feel my small part of all creation’s groaning. Daily.
And when another human lets herself groan along with creation, together we join a strange kind of chorus.
Longing doesn’t belong inside us.
It’s supposed to leak out and find other longing.
And on the other side of longing, together we find release and sometimes even joy. Even if it’s only the joy of knowing we’re not alone in our longing, that it’s okay to not be okay.
And then we’re a different kind of okay.