Facing Joy
Most people, myself included, have spent their whole lives playing hide and seek with joy. That current of wildness in Anaisa is the joy itself: the joy of the funeral pyre, of dancing as you are immolated. The joy of destruction, because destruction is a kind of joy, a freedom to act and to be.
It is frightening.
Believe it or not, the actual emotion is more frightening for me than the destruction. I’ve lived through spiritual immolation many times. I’d rather burn a life down than keep it—it’s happiness that I find particularly intimidating. After a lifetime of learning not to want, not to reach out, and not to try because I would never find, the idea of finding is challenging. It can so quickly lead to despair, and for my previous life, I learned some time ago that I got more done if I simply ‘turned off’ the desire for joy, the longing for connection, and the desire to be understood.
If I cut part of myself off, I could function better in the world around me. If I did violence to myself and my spirit, I could limp along well enough to earn a paycheck.
The spirits have had me sitting with that for the last week or so. They’ve had me sitting with the emotions and the reasoning which got me to my previous, numb state of being. They’ve had me sitting with that despair (I will never find), with the self-hatred which came with it (I will never find because there’s something wrong with me.) They’ve had me sitting with the sometimes childish anger that went with it, all the emotions I tried to cut off as a child.
I literally spent yesterday pouting in as much as an adult can and feeling like a grounded tween, which is about when I mutilated myself the most to fit in. I don’t particularly like it when they have me do this, but it’s ruminative. After the first rush of outrage passed (and don’t get it twisted, I can be quite cranky about my ‘status’ as an adult), I started to ask questions about how I was feeling and why.
I find the quickest way through an emotion or a period of reflection is to get busy asking questions, not arguing with the emotion about whether or not I should be feeling it.
The short answer is that I was in a circumstance where being happy was punished, where the desire for connection was punished, but I’m not there any more. I am no longer a child facing survival decisions alone. I am no longer being told on a daily basis that I am defective and could never be loved, nor am I trying to outwit adults more than three times my size who want to harm me and my younger sibling.
As an adult, I no longer have to be haunted by those things. I am not so fragile that reaching and not finding is going to crush me, nor is it true that I can never find. It is better to reach and try to find than it is to sit in my room, brooding, and punish any attempt to reach out to me.
After all, joy has found me. Anaisa has a remarkable talent for finding people in their despair, and how lucky we are that she takes that shit personally.
