The other day, as summer settled into full swing, my teenaged child asked me to help them create a pair of wings to wear while rollerskating. They have been searching their whole life for a way to fly. After hours of homemade construction, they strapped the wings to their back and roller-skated through the neighborhood.
How was it? I asked when they returned.
Amazing, they said. Everything I’d hoped for, although I forgot there were so many kids my age who live on the street.
And how do you feel about that? I asked.
It was worth it, they said, beaming.
Not that long ago, I could not cry. It lasted for a full year. I would feel sadness welling up inside of me, and I would heave open my mouth and undulate my body, and after a moment, my body would stop, refusing to perform, and I would wipe the single tear or two from my face, and carry on.
As a child I regularly cried in front of teachers, and then as an adult, bosses, when faced with hard conversations and stress. I had been a person who sobbed herself to sleep some nights, and woke up the next morning with the puffy eyes of an infant.
Not crying felt liberating and mature, but I also felt broken.
Eventually I started seeing a new therapist to stop being a robot, but I was also afraid because when you stop being a robot, you have to let the feelings in, and feelings seemed dangerous.
People understand this when they hear it.
My therapy-going friends reassured me and said, You’ve gone through a loss, you’re now afraid of pain. To control the pain you cut off your feelings. That makes sense.
My therapist said, It’s not good to hold in your pain and anger.
My less gentle friends insisted, It rots you from the inside.
But the specter of feeling pain was actually a lot less of a deterrent than the potential to feel joy.
I learned to cry again, actually, before I learned to feel true happiness.
On the face of it, the fear of joy makes sense for its close relationship to pain. By not feeling joy, you keep your vulnerability for loss low.
But pain still comes.
Feeling joy was terrifying not because I was afraid of pain crushing me, but because I was ashamed and embarrassed by my positive feelings.
Think of my teenager, skating down the street, wind in their face, flapping mesh wings, feeling free. True joy. In this moment, they were in the world exactly themselves, inwardly focused on the beaming happiness, and expressing it, unabashedly to the world. As in, for all to see.
Joy is embarrassment.
It’s irrelevant whether I think my child should feel embarrassed for the wings, but it was a likely consequence of unabashedly exposing themselves to the world.
Still, my child said to all who watched, Yes, I love this, this makes me happy. This is who I am. I am person who at fourteen loves roller skating through the neighborhood with wings on. The rest of you be damned.
In that moment my child was present in their body, refusing to be defined by what others defined as correct or proper or normal. They were focused solely on the moment and their desire.
To grab onto joy feels gluttonous and irresponsible. It is not productive. It is not serious.
Joy is giving over your body to the pulsing sensation of electricity in your blood.
When I began to date again, I was careful not to let the ache of desire enter my body. I thought about the people I dated a lot, but I didn’t actually feel my interest for them in my skin. Only once in a while did I let my guard down and when people asked about the women I was dating. I would become shy, recognizing that I wanted to smile at their very names. I refused to break into a smile. I did not want my body to betray my adoration, I did not want to shamefully expose being interested in someone who may or may not last. I did not want to admit to my weakness.
How naive, I thought, do you have to be to fall in love again after a you’ve crashed and burned your whole life? How weak do you have to be to forget your failures, the lessons you learned about being skeptical and how people are bound to fail each other in the name of the childhood myth called love?
My mom always said the reason she married my dad was he was the first person who loved her for who she was. I never understood that feeling until now. It felt safe. It felt like safety to observe another person, gazing at you all starry eyed and know that half the joy you felt came from them enjoying you so hard, knowing that there is not one part of them wishing you’d change.
And then one day I realized that protecting myself from the childish sweep of joy was not going to protect me or make me seem mature, it was going to leave me regretful at the end of my life.
When you truly connect with the joy and let yourself be vulnerable to it, everything lightens. I was no longer allowing myself to feel shame about my joy and other people’s judgment of it.
In refusing to cap my own joy, I became unwilling to cap my children’s joy too. Instead of cautioning them about the possible social repercussions of being themselves, I helped them tie the wings on extra tight.
It’s an admittedly strange time to be talking about joy while the world seems to be coming to a reckoning, but this is a reckoning too.
Joy is not easy. To dig into joy takes work, it takes bravery. It is a risk.
In this world feeling joy is an act of resistance.
Resist. Feel joy. The grief will come either way.
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