Just Feeling Some Joy

I’m waking up. 

I never had a problem with the term “woke,” but that’s not exactly what I mean here. 

This feeling doesn’t have anything to do with current events or politics, though granted, I feel a lot more motivated to speak about and take action lately, due to the extreme nature of recent events. 

No, I feel like I’m being the person I’ve long wanted to be. Or maybe I’m embracing the person I am. 

When I was growing up, my focus was on the future, on who I would become. I think I liked myself ok as a teenager. I don’t remember disliking myself, anyway. I was just focused on progress. The next steps were more important. Maybe I’m remembering that wrong, but that’s how it feels looking back. 

In college, there was more time to think about the future as a reality: it was imminent. So I felt pretty close to fully cooked and maybe paid a little more attention to who I was almost.

After college, I hit a few confusing years where I didn’t know what I wanted to do career-wise, didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew I wanted to work, and I knew I wanted to marry my husband. I kind of bounced around and did a whole lot of different things. I was overly critical of myself during this time, and I spent more time being retroactively critical after I stumbled out of it, into something like an adult frame of mind. 

I had about 20 minutes of adulthood under my belt before I got pregnant and then plunged into motherhood. One huge gulp of air before my head was pulled underwater. I flailed there for years, not knowing who I was anymore, not knowing if I ever did. After both of my boys were alive and whole, I continued to float, no longer drowning but not really doing anything else either. When the little one was diagnosed with leukemia at age two and a half, something new started to happen. I gradually cared less about others’ opinions. 

It was a slow transition, to be sure. It started with needing to prioritize my son, my kids, my family. I didn’t have mental space to care if people were mad at me or if they thought I wasn’t doing things perfectly. It was a small shift that snowballed into a major mental transition. Therapy helped. 

The point of this is not to tell you that I’m great. I mean, I’m pretty good, but what I'm driving at is that thoughtful confidence is really powerful. I feel so much freer to like what I like, investigate why I don’t like certain things, and change my mind if necessary. I’m not stuck. I can love Bad Bunny even though I don’t speak Spanish, and I’m just not going to worry about the people who chose to view that halftime show, a display of joy and fun and a multifaceted America, through a negative lens. I can’t fix that problem. We can’t let racist backlashes and closed-mindedness stop the rest of us from appreciating something beautiful. 

I said I’m waking up.

A few years ago, I was not led by joy. I was led by fear. This is the life we get - man, how cliche can I be? But this feels real right now. When I was younger, fear of stepping wrong made me think I was just on this earth to score heaven points. I remember saying in a bible study setting that happiness isn’t the point of being on earth. I was maybe 19 or 20. Practically a baby. The message I was getting at the time was that humans - especially women - are bad, and we just have to be as good as we can so we can have a perfect life after this one. How much time did I waste believing that garbage? 

It could be age. Or greater awareness. I think a lot of us are waking up now, recognizing that what we’ve been told and the way we’ve been socialized has served a particular purpose, one that benefits men much more than women. One that keeps half of us second-guessing ourselves. One only needs to look, for example, at how medical research dollars have historically been divided (like here, or here, or here) to see that equality between the sexes, let alone the genders, has never been the goal of those men at the top.

But as for me, and my own little life, I thought there was a plan. I thought there was a path. There just isn’t. We have to do our best for ourselves, and when I first realized this, it felt overwhelming to the point of suffocation. Too chaotic. Too much freedom. All of us are just out here wandering separate paths, colliding and intertwining and separating and winding and spiraling. (This analogy may have been inspired by Olympic Ice Dancing.) If we’re lucky, we find a steadying force, a calming influence, and we find our own rhythm and pattern. We skate our own path.

My new-found awake-ness is allowing unnecessary things to bounce off because I can focus on priorities. I’m hoping it’s a lasting change. I heard a bird singing this February morning in the suburbs of Chicago, its trill ringing through the cold air above a thin layer of snow that still mostly covers the ground. This is a hopeful time of year. There seem to be more open displays of joy as a form of resistance, and geez, does that feel good to witness and experience. It makes me want to stand, stretch up and wide, to make myself expansive.

And now that I'm awake, stretched and ready, it's time to get to work.