Abundant Joy

A few days ago, a dear friend sent an email to me telling me not to fear joy. She couldn’t have possibly known, and yet somehow she did, that for days I had been planning a blog post about how scared I am to be happy.

It sounds strange, I know. I’ve been working on a happiness project, I’ve been trying to make 2013 the best year ever, I am doing my yoga teacher training in pursuit of joy and peace, I took another year leave from the PhD to figure out what I really want, I launched my own home business to give myself more happy time with my children – everything that I have been doing in the last six months has been in pursuit of happiness. And yet I’m terrified of it.

In a way, I feel this fear is justified. Soon after I had my daughter, my husband and I were sitting together one blissful morning as my infant slept on my chest and my son played on the floor, and I said to him: “Isn’t it crazy? We have everything that most people want. A boy and a girl, a house, a car, very little debt, jobs we like – it’s amazing.” I felt like it was almost unfair, how we had so much.

Eight months later, I was diagnosed with leukemia.

Do I feel like I jinxed myself? Just a little bit. I will never forget making that comment. I play it over and over again in my head like a bad dream. I had everything I ever wanted, and then my life exploded overnight. So I am very afraid to be in that place again. I am afraid to allow happiness in, because I feel that it will just be ripped away. I am afraid to shoot for the stars because I might not be around long enough to get there.

Do I want to be happy? Absolutely. And in fact I am quite happy at the moment. That’s what scares me. I am happy and making plans and loving life, and everything could come crumbling down at any second. Every time I have pain in my back (like right now), every time I have a sore throat, every time something feels not quite right, I feel a lump of panic congealing in my throat. In fact, after I post this, I am on my way to the hospital to get bloodwork done because of increasing low back pain I’ve been having. It could be nothing. Or it could really be something.

And so I worry.

Other survivors tell me that this fades with time. I can only hope. I feel like every time I turn around, someone else I know, or someone else’s child or mother or brother, is being diagnosed with cancer. And every time I hear that news it’s a punch in the gut. When will we stop poisoning ourselves? When will we fix everything that is broken?

In that same email, my very wise friend sent me this verse: "Give us gladness in proportion to our former misery! Replace the evil years with good" Psalm 90:15 (NLT). I hope she is right. I hope that someday I do get my pony, and that the immeasurable joy that is coming my way will far outweigh the heavy sorrows of last year.

Another very dear and wise friend said to me that I might need to reframe my idea of success. We are conditioned to believe that we go to school, get an education in a field we like, and then (ideally) get a job in that field and we’re set. But that’s only one path to success. Just because my career plan exploded doesn’t mean that another one, a better one, won’t rise up to take its place. And I need to embrace that. I need to believe that I will have insane amounts of joy and success, whatever “success” may mean to me on any given day (and believe me, it changes). I need to believe that the ever-increasing light will far overpower the darkness that was 2012.

Because when you just keep waiting for the fall, you miss all the good things that are happening in your life right now. And I do have so many wonderful, amazing things going on.

I took my kids to the waterslides on Monday, and as we ran around I thought about my trip to the waterslides at this time last year. At that time, I was not allowed to swim because of the catheter in my chest, and because I was so weak all I could do was sit in a chair and watch. This year, not only could I go into the water, but I had the energy to do the entire outing by myself.

And that, my friends, is today’s version of success.