Joy? Is That You?

Everyone used to tell me that I could be happy again. It felt like they could never understand what I was going through so wouldn’t really know. It felt like they were too delusional and if they felt even a minute level of what I did each day, they wouldn’t say so. The counselor, the psychiatrist, the doctors, friends, and family would all say the same thing. Me, I kept denying them over and over again. Yet, it creeped up on me and took me by surprise. Like a roaring wind that grows slowly, and then maddeningly. I felt it in my chest and it was a stranger to me. “What is this feeling?” startled, I asked myself. It took me a while to realize that I was happy. “Happiness! Could it be?” In that moment, I could breathe so effortlessly I wondered how. The weight that was so familiar to my shoulders seemed to have not been there. I felt almost light, like one does when you step into a pool and all of a sudden you’re lightweight. My second thought was that I never wanted this moment to pass. “This too shall pass.” “This too shall pass.” “This too shall pass.” So many times I’d heard myself repeat that back to myself in desperate attempts to muster strength; through the panic attacks, the deep depression, the hopelessness. I never believed those words but I thought it best to lie to myself in the moment. Now though, I hoped with all my existence that it didn’t. Like a lover embraces his beloved after a long separation, I held onto the feeling with the strength of my mind.

It lasted for but a moment and I found myself slipping into the very hole that I had found myself on top off, as I so often did in the past. That was okay though. I had what I needed. “This too shall pass.” “This too shall pass.” “This too shall pass.” Now more belief behind the rant. I can find happiness again and now that I tell myself that, I actually believe it. More so, there are some things that exist because of one another. Just like light and darkness, so do joy and despair exist together. I tell myself now if I can feel such profound sadness, then imagine how beautiful an equal happiness would be. Imagine the darkest of dark there exists to counter the blinding of light. I hope I’m right when I draw that as an analogy to encourage myself.

Hope! Even that had become a foreign friend to me. I’d stopped hoping of good things. Where there exists no hope, lies no dreams. Oh! What a luxury hope is. It’s the foundation of joy, you know. I think, and dare I say, I might be beginning to hope again. “Stranger things have happened,” I tell a surprised me with something close to gale. Fingers crossed, knock on wood, throw salt over my head, jinx it not! I like the warmth of the feeling. I know I could find my way back to happiness again. Like a sailor adrift in the lonely waters of the great ocean finally sighting land, I can find it. There are still ways to go till his feet touch sand, but he can finally see the end of being lost. There are struggles still to come to get there but at least it’s tangible now. “This too can pass.” “This too shall pass.” “This too is passing.” What a beautiful crescendo of hope.

The greatest thing I now take with me is strength. If I can make it to the end of such trials, every other challenge that I could face seems small. To have overcome despair, I don’t find it hard to overcome fear or rage or hate. I am also no longer so afraid of being myself. Once I was so afraid of not being accepted in my entirety. That fear seems kind of pointless now. I’ll take being myself, happy, over being a version accepted by many but sad. The world and it’s crude judgment scares me no more.