Ode to Joy

The other day one of my friends shared with me that she and her husband are expecting their second child. My natural inclination was to singsong a heartfelt ‘”congratulations!” and other equally enthusiastic words of support. Though appreciative, my friend quickly tempered my in-the-moment joy with an acknowledgement that (and I paraphrase) “we are excited, too – of course! But, I don’t want to get too excited because I’m only 6 weeks along and I just don’t want to get my hopes up and then have something go wrong”. Respecting her need to be cautiously optimistic, I brought my enthusiasm down a few notches and tried to walk the line between expressing joy for her, but not too much – as if there’s a point at which having hope crosses over into being superstitious. This got me thinking about the tendency we all have of putting limits on how much joy we allow ourselves. Brenè Brown calls this phenomenon “foreboding joy” and this is how she explains it:“When something good happens, our immediate thought is that we’d better not let ourselves truly feel it, because if we really love something we could lose it. So we shut down our ability to completely enjoy so that we can also shut down our capacity for feeling loss.”Anesthetizing yourself from feeling joy is as productive as pouring salt in a wound: it only hurts and complicates the healing process. If you are someone who waits for the other shoe to drop on joy, you’re mistaking the deprivation of unbridled happiness for a coping skill; the two are not the same. If you want to work hard at making your life better, practice placing parameters around the things that are truly subtracting from your life – negative people, fear, self-sabotage, and so forth. But, joy…let it fly!