The beginning of the year
is a strange contradiction. It’s a time we tell ourselves is different even as
it feels exactly the same as days before. It’s a time where we look back on our
accomplishments and resolutions, often finding that we accomplished little of
what we resolved to and much of what we didn’t. For many of us, it’s a time
when our own journey always seems to pale in comparison to everyone else’s. You
may say that all depends on how one defines success. I’ve found that many
people, myself included, define success in terms of happiness. I don’t mean
immediate happiness. Most adults have made peace with the fact that one must
sacrifice the immediate happiness of doing whatever you’d like for the sake of
securing long term contentment somewhere down the line. The obvious question
that follows is: does that contentment ever come?
I think this is the wrong
question to ask. The real question is: Do we let ourselves see it and feel it
when it shows up? Let me explain. I realized recently that I used to imagine
happiness and sadness as meteors that crashed into the ocean, leaving giant
craters and overwhelming me with tidal waves of one emotion or another. I
always hoped that I’d be able to predict the next one, that I’d build stronger
walls and be more observant and avoid getting swept up next time. If I’m
particularly happy, I never let myself fully enjoy it because I know the wave will
pass eventually. When I’m sad, I often ridicule myself for not building
stronger walls, for not moving out of the way in time since I should have seen
it coming. What I’ve begun to realize though, is that my emotions are tides
rather than meteors. The high tide of happiness was never going to drown me,
and no sandcastle wall could stand against the tide of sadness forever.
This isn’t what American
culture tells us. The pursuit of happiness is engraved in our minds seemingly
from birth. Never mind that we often sacrifice life and liberty for it. If we
just keep running toward the horizon, we’ll catch up to our happier self in the
distance. If we just keep running fast enough, our sadness can’t keep up. It’ll
get tired and collapse even though that’s often exactly what’s waiting for us
when we end up collapsing ourselves. We put our emotions in boxes to do our
jobs, to be the people others need us to be, all to avoid letting our humanity
catch up with us.
For most of my life, I
thought of my low emotional moments, my low tides, as a crisis. American
Christianity reinforced this idea by telling me over and over again that people
are responsible for their emotions. If they’re happy, it’s because they chose
to focus on the right things and have a positive attitude. If they’re unhappy,
it’s because they deliberately choose to ignore positive things and focus on
the negative. This is what I was explicitly told by countless adults growing up.
What this led to during
my low tide moments was a scramble to find anything that usually made me happy
in an effort to pretend everything was normal until happiness showed up again.
I was a kid on the beach carrying water from kiddie pools and dumping it on my
feet while telling myself and anyone around me that I loved swimming in the
ocean even as the water disappeared underneath my feet. Fake it til you make it
was the my creed and anything else was giving up. I was so busy making
sure no one was uncomfortable around me that I never gave myself permission to
be uncomfortable. Discomfort was a defect that needed to be changed
rather than listened to.
My high moments were
never any better. I was afraid to fully enjoy any positive moments for two
reasons. One, I was constantly aware of the fact that whatever happiness I
experienced was temporary, and I was afraid that the more I enjoyed it, the
more I’d feel its absence when it inevitably left. Two, I was raised in a
tradition that attributed everything positive to God and everything negative to
humanity. Enjoying something too much ran the risk of either arrogance or a
lack of gratitude, and both were seen as deadly in the long run. This is the
kind of mindset I grew up with, subtly reinforced by well-meaning people who
were just doing the best they could to make sense of themselves and the world
around them.
I grew into adulthood,
and in my 20s I finally hit rock bottom. I finally decided to try getting
counseling at my school as a last resort before I did something drastic. Coming
in and admitting that I needed help, admitting that I couldn’t hold my emotions
alone anymore, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The process of
untangling my feelings and making space for them instead of shutting them out
never stopped being uncomfortable. But slowly and surely, through a combination
of medicine and therapy, I started to recognize myself again.
I started to sit with
that version of myself on that beach. I didn’t try to fix myself. I didn’t go
scrambling for water anymore. I sat with my fear and loneliness, the bruised
and battered parts of me that I always ignored in favor of focusing on other
people, and I let myself feel. I let myself feel anger over things that
happened to me instead of constantly telling everyone I was fine. I let myself
feel the grief of losing so much of myself in favor of being who others wanted
me to be. I let myself mourn the relationships that would inevitably fall apart
when I finally showed others that I was not the straight, happy, pleasant
Christian they expected me to be. I was, and continue to be, a queer disabled
man frustrated by and dissatisfied with a form of Christianity and a society
that seek to minimize and contain emotion and hardship rather than confront it
head on and be forced to change as a result.
That too, was an
incredibly painful realization. A lot of my friendships and important
relationships didn’t survive. The ones that did though, were changed radically.
They were no longer flimsy things dependent upon our adherence to the status
quo. They were two way lifelines, and we laid everything out for each other.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of my fire and intensity burning
up everyone around me anymore. I had always done my best to encourage others’
passions and ideas, but now I was beginning to see my own ideas and voice as
valuable too.
Things are still far from perfect. There are
still occasional meteors, and I find myself dazed and confused more often than
I ever expected. The world is scary and it’s impossible to not be overwhelmed
by that sometimes. Now though, even on the bad days, I can sit with myself,
knowing that the tide will come back. It always does. I know now that my low
points do not make me less valuable than my high points. Both make me who I am,
and I wouldn’t trade who I am for anything, and neither should you.
