If it costs you your joy, it’s too expensive. Unknown.
I come from a generation of people raised by those who were brought up in the aftermath of wars, scarcity, and struggle where part of their norm. They were rebuilding (or maybe just building after years of struggle). They didn’t have much, and also suffered from the lack of comfort, support, and social education and a chronic lack of feminine influence and equality (obviously). The model was to work hard, suffer, power over others and wake up and do it again. There wasn’t a lot of emphasis on playing or doing things for yourselves; especially in the way we know it today.
Growing up, I lacked guidance on how to create ease and comfort. There are benefits to the old life ‘model’ – we learned how to work hard, the relevance of reliability, of honoring your word and showing up. Embracing challenges was normal and we lacked the consumerism that dominates our culture today. You worked for one thing at a time, my parents didn’t put things on credit, they worked towards things and paid for them in full. The cost of living was substantially lower, and the cost of technology was way higher. There was value to simplicity and lack of distraction.
Yet, I was never taught to understand if something felt good or was healthy for me. It’s only been the last few years that I realized I didn’t have to suffer in order to feel good. You may already know this, but I didn’t and I’m still figuring out what this looks like. For myself this is a radical realization. I thought relationships had to be hard. That exhaustion was normal. That things should feel tough most of the time. I constantly beat myself up to be worthy. I didn’t understand the meaning of simple pleasures and I forgot that life was meant to be enjoyed and not endured. Joy, playfulness, curiosity and my sex drive vanished. I become resentful, bitter, bored, tired and often seeking conflict in order to feel something.
I think one of the struggles of our time is that we think everything should be easy, relationships, dating, money, success, business, education, and we should also have all the free time to live the life we want. We’ve built a pollyanna world filled with entitlement and privilege.
I don’t mean don’t seek enjoyment in your life. I mean make the small things count. A life is built on simple moments. You may be recognized for your work, land the career you’ve always wanted, enter a beautiful relationship or be able to afford the house you’ve always dreamed of – but it’s how you live your life to that moment which makes it special.
Do you relinquish pleasure in order to be liked by others? Do you devote your time and energy to something or someone and you feel consistently depleted by? Recognizing the ways you tax your wellbeing to serve your stress. Watching something you do regularly that creates resentment instead of lightness.
We all must learn what hard work feels like; to experience fatigue and learn the difference between sometimes experiencing it and how not to push into it constantly. We must experience poor relationships to understand what that feels like. To know what it’s like to sacrifice feeling good to be seen as strong and capable. Pushing beyond comfort is what teaches us our boundaries. But if you’ve spent too much time blowing past your comfort zone – like me – in order to fulfill some social role, idea of success or satisfy the part of you that wants to be seen as good, it may be time to back down.
The difficult move might be to learn to get quiet and witness the parts of yourself that are suffering. To occupy awareness and notice how you’ve forgotten to nurture joy.
I’ve been watching myself push through something that doesn’t bring me joy and I can tell you that I’ve experienced chronic neck pain, headaches and fatigue while I figure out how to unravel myself from myself. I’ve had to admit that this has become a chronic way of responding to the world. I think for many of us it has. It requires steady awareness and witnessing the ways we discount our enjoyment to follow the craze of constantly filling our lack of self-worth.
I know that the world is hard right now and being part of a major world event is fatiguing (which is an understatement) and we are experiencing the absence of well-being. You may feel dull and unmotivated. The pandemic has easily sacrificed most of our joy. Yet underneath that is there someplace that joy can be rebuilt by easing up on the stuff that doesn’t fill your cup?
This isn’t an easy process, but it’s a process. It takes self-agency to learn what feels good and to make hard choices so that you prioritize listening to yourself. Find your joy and pay attention to what isn’t serving you. If we don’t we may, especially right now, continue tearing each other apart in order to feel something.
with love, Noelle