Do you remember the panicky moments as early as sixth grade when someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up? The way you tried so hard to fit in in middle school despite all of the overbearing emotions and dramas unfolding hourly in the hallways. The way you grit your teeth and did your best from crying on the hardest biology test, the one that would surely send your GPA into an unsalvageable abyss even though you studied until three in the morning.

Chores, school, homework, tests, sports, grades, emotions, work, projects, money, meetings, relationships. Life builds as slowly as the snow falls until one morning you wake up to an impossible suffocating weight on your chest, surrounded by a deep blue cold. There are days you want to whine and fight with the world, eyebrows furrowing and throat swelling shut until there’s only enough energy to bury your face in a pillow and cry yourself to sleep at two in the afternoon. You could be thirteen and you could be thirty, the heaviest days will come as surely as the seasons change.

On those days, functioning is enough. On the week following those days, functioning is enough. Going through the motions is the first step towards finding meaning within them again. I know how to wake up one day and realize that the temper tantrum you threw yesterday was not worth the fuss, and I know how easy it is to be angry at yourself for making a big deal out of nothing. Forgive yourself because in the moment, it wasn’t nothing. Today isn’t meaningless, and your current feelings or lack thereof are very important to the narrative of your life. Take your time in the lengths of lethargy that will envelop you. Functioning is enough.

I have learned in the many seasons of life that no season lasts forever. Time will fold over and your feelings of disengagement will slide into the past with the passage of night, pulling into place new opportunities and mindsets that will bring you hope again. Until then be sure, that for now functioning is enough.