"Joy is Not a Trick"

Have you ever had the experience of cycling through a similar problem again and again until, one glorious day, you land on the question that busts the whole recurring nightmare open? It happened to me the other day, as I sat in despair and frustration, wondering what I could do to make a certain person believe me.

I’d told him, or tried to tell him, that I was in pain. He wasn’t hearing me, and my response was predictable, I suppose. I’m a creative person and a communicator, so I was working to craft new images and metaphors, new ways to make myself heard. Surely, I thought, if I find the right words to express myself, he will understand.

In that moment, I was graced with a sense of déjà vu. I remembered other days when I had labored to convey to those closest to me that I was in pain. When I was a child, my parents’ pain took up all the room in the house, but as an adolescent, I sometimes made an attempt to express myself. I tried to find the right words, the ones that were big enough and strong enough to honor the depth of my feeling. When my efforts were deemed “melodramatic,” I stopped trying.

Early in my marriage, whenever I needed more from the relationship and worked myself up to mention it (a monumental task for a person whose core belief is that she is only safe and lovable when she has no needs at all), I was told that I needed too much. More recently, in attempting to be honest about my heartache, I was told that I couldn’t be trusted to know what I really felt, that I’d forgotten what was true, that I’d colored the past with the present.

The tragedy here isn’t so much the limitations of the people in my life; it’s the fact that, when confronted with a different perspective on my feelings and my experiences, I have routinely abandoned and betrayed myself. I have sided with those who dismissed me.

I don’t have to look far to find a reason for such behavior. And while I am weary of discussing religious trauma, I suppose I’ll have to talk about it until I have finished unraveling its effects, until I’ve made a full accounting. You don’t learn to trust yourself in a day, certainly not when you were taught to mistrust yourself for decades, when your developing brain was molded around a narrative of shame and self-rejection. I have written already about the effects of the message “the heart is deceitful above all things,” but until this revelation about self-abandonment, I hadn’t considered the whole of the reality I’d constructed within that paradigm.

To teach a person that truth and certainty exist outside of her, while deception, evil, and danger lurk inside of her, is to set her up for a lifetime of self-abandonment, self-rejection, self-betrayal, and self-abuse. Sometimes I consider the fruit of the faith I inherited, and it looks astonishingly like a recipe for suicidal ideation with a cross stamped over it. According to what I was taught, anything that comes naturally, that feels like an expression of who you most truly are, is suspect. The heart’s deepest longings—even simple, ordinary wants and needs—cannot and must not be indulged. In my mind, those were the markers of the “wide gate” and the “broad way” that leads to destruction. Self-love and self-care, and self-trust above all, were for the careless ones who ambled along the easy path, heading straight to hell, or some terrible end.

The “narrow way,” by contrast, was for the faithful, committed ones. People like me, with the backbone to choose the harder path. Our reward, of course, was eternal blessing. We got to be happy when we died. What I’d never considered was how these ideas might combine to create in me a belief that pain and suffering were signs that I was going the right way.

Does it surprise you? Have you fallen victim to the same subconscious belief? That if things feel good and easy, if they’re working, if you wake up smiling, then something is dangerously amiss? That if you’re struggling, if things are hard, if your life is defined by the will to endure, then you must be headed toward the light?

No wonder I couldn’t prioritize my own peace or wellbeing. No wonder I felt safest when I was running full tilt away from my true self. Turns out I’ve spent most of my life believing that happiness was a trap.

But back to the question that broke the cycle. My sense of déjà vu, my memory of attempting to make others believe my experience, finally led me to this question: “Who has to validate your experience, Helena, in order for it to be valid?” As with all great questions, this one carried the answer on its back. “No one. Except me.” Not one single person has to believe my experience in order for it to be real. But I have to believe it. And what an act of faith, coming from where I come from. What a risk!

Not long after the question arrived, I found myself sitting on a couch in a hair salon. I was waiting while my daughter had her hair cut, and I’d brought a book of poetry to read. (I’m in a difficult place just now, but poetry I can take. Poems are little shot glasses of courage and beauty.) The book I’d brought was Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West. My dear friend had sent me a copy months before. At the time I’d thanked her and set it aside, too busy or overwhelmed to open it right away. In the hair salon, when I cracked the cover, I saw that the book had been signed by the author. “For Helena,” it said, and the words felt like a hug.

I opened the book to the very first poem:

”Instructions for traveling west”

First, you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart. Divorce yourself from routine and control. Instead, find a desert and fall in. Take the trail that promises a view. Get lost. Break your toes. Bruise your knees. Keep going. Watch a purple meadow quiver. Get still. Pet trail dogs. Buy the hat. Run out of gas. Befriend strangers. Knight yourself every morning for your newborn courage. Give grief her own lullaby. Drink whiskey beside a hundred-year-old cactus. Honor everything. Pray to something unnameable. Fall for someone impractical. Reacquaint yourself with desire and all her slender hands. Bear beauty for as long as you are able and if you spot a sunning warbler glowing like a prism, remind yourself—joy is not a trick.

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This essay is for all of us who are secretly ashamed of our desire, who have tried to hurt less, want less, need less. Who have exiled our aching hearts and clasped hands with our accusers. Who were taught that every step along the road to our soul’s delight was waiting to open up and swallow us.

Is it possible, friends, that we were lied to?

What would you do if you really believed that joy is not a trick?