"You're Healing to be Able to Handle Joy"

....You're not healing to be able to handle trauma

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Word Nerds who give even just $5 a month help make that possible.

I truly need your support, use your support, cherish your support, and won’t let it go to waste.

Want to change up the pace? You can read some of a fiction novel I shared here as thanks.

Want to read some novellas? Here are some on Kindle (though I can send to anyone who needs the help). There are even more than you see listed here, so reach out if you’re in a reading mood!

Want to read on?

Shutting up now…

But one last thank you for the road: THANK YOU!

“Something a therapist once said: "You're not healing to be able to handle trauma, pain, anxiety, depression.

You're used to those. You're healing to be able to handle joy and to accept happiness back into your life."

I sat down to write some words about a recent weekend, as if a means to justify a posting end.

I needed words to match the happy memories I wanted to scrapbook forever… but the truth of the matter is that I didn’t have any.

Let me explain that better:

I was so free and phone free here [other than taking photos] that I didn’t have any insightful-pretending syllables to possibly compare to the comparable syllabus of what it meant to actually FEEL alive.

For once, I didn’t have to justify the happy-looking images with complicit validations of how: “I look so happy when I smile on my metaphoric stage by day… but I’m actually secretly crawling up the somewhat-metaphorical stairs by night”.

Since life IS suffering (“Highness”), and so says most level headed theorists, honest masochist ballerinas, and cynical cinema parents [who secretly want their children to become lawyers and doctors and not pursue the arts and their high school “love” who encourages them to make horrific decisions in the name of whimsy when really it just leaves everyone with astronomical legal fees, possibly pregnant and not accepted into Julliard]= I always feel the need to remind other People Of Pain that just because we look okay in an image, doesn’t mean anyone should hate themselves for being a Person of Pain.

Or is it just practicality? Maybe one IS the other.

I tried to slap some bars down in ink regarding these images, and all I kept thinking about was how healing this moment in time was.

And that sounds selfish (it is). Because this moment in time has nothing to do with me. But… I’m the dumb-dumb trying to balance a self imposed, online Op-Ed with the illusion of this being a personal scrapbook when, really, I should get an actually personal account for that.

You know what’s healing? Having my friend run up to me on her wedding day and ask me to help with a scratchy part of her dress.

If that made sense to you in one sentence…

You get it.

▪️▪️▪️▪️▪️▪️

There is pain behind every frame.

Every frame you see online and hung on someone’s wall had a moment of that day’s pain etched invisibly upon it.

Someone was fighting that day. Or hungry. Or couldn’t pay their bill. Or was doubting their self worth. It was doubting their life.

But some days not only feel almost utterly free of these normal trappings.

Happiness and love does not look like a friendship where we have seen each other every single day for hours and hours [we are long distance and mostly text about being sorry we haven’t text each other].

It doesn’t look like a daughter who goes to her first prom, and our family isn’t forever scarred by shrapnel from the worst couple of years of our lives. [Refer back to Part One’s quote about healing?]

It doesn’t even mean memories without pain… because EVERY SINGLE ONE of mine for the last few years has had too much.

Pain is always present.

But… Love isn’t large and loud and gestural. Everyone lied when they told us that growing up.

I’ve started to wonder if love in action is soft and paper thin like a moth’s wing; lamb’s ear leaves we walk right by without noticing.

What if it’s so finite in fruition that it never makes the final frame? Cutting room floor exits. Love without the boombox.

Pinning bobby pins in someone’s sweaty hair feels like love.

Pulling up someone’s strapless bra from down inside their dress feels like love.

Making the next morning’s pot of coffee feels like love.

Most of those are about feeling needed, yes… so, maybe that IS selfish.

But I’d like to think the most alive and happy we can ever feel is when we are with the ones we love, doing anything … literally any thing… where we can help. Even if we are just lying to ourselves thinking that we are.

"You're not healing to be able to handle trauma, pain, anxiety, depression. You're used to those.

You're healing to be able to handle joy and to accept happiness back into your life."