Is Joy Allowed?

Content Note:   Gentle discussion of trauma recovery, guilt, and emotional healing.

Am I allowed? Is it okay? I am supposed to be sick shouldn’t I be too sick to find joy?

They tell me to seek joy to heal. But they very rarely talk about the guilt and shame which comes with doing anything other than the work as part of your healing journey.

Here I am seeking my glimmers by taking myself by myself to my favorite Bento spot. I love the feeling this brings of being the grown-up independent woman I wanted to be as a child. The women I saw on the TV, taking themselves to bars with a good book and funding their own lives.

It starts as I leave home and begin walking to my spot. The joy of wondering if I will make it there. Or if I will explore my freedom by being pulled, spontaneous, to another place and a new adventure. The thrill of the new rather than the comfort of the familiar.

All things are mine to grasp. I must please no one but myself. I compromise with no one.

I revel in other people, alone, in crowds, or in groups. What they wear, how they talk. The magic of wondering where they are going so happy and carefree.

The breeze and light rain is freshness on my skin. And I ponder this piece. On what may follow my conceptual statement. Will it be the joy I’ve been prompted to write about or will it turn to a darker place, enveloped in my trauma, as the rest of myself has been?

And now here I am. Arrived. The tension and joy of proudly announcing that I am one, alone, just me. Reminiscing my radical self-acceptance which accompanies this journey to healing.

I am just me. Alone but enough. And allowed most importantly allowed.

I am allowed to be myself allowed to feel and allowed to heal through joy.

Still writing when my food arrives, I forced myself to stop and taste the joy. Examine the visual pleasure and anticipate the gustatory pleasure with mouthwatering impatience.

A glimmer. A joy.

And now to dive in. Swimming in it. Bathing in it until I’m soaked in the joy. I hope it lasts. I hope that tomorrow brings another glimmer.

I wonder, will this glimmer sustain me as this food will sustain me? Through the difficult night.

Am I full? Sated? Is that enough? Am I done? Questions we ask as we eat to avoid overfilling and starting to feel the bad beyond the good.

I have experienced the joy now. Am I sated? Is it enough? Am I healed?

Questions those with trauma or mental health suffering ask every time they take in joy. Are required to ask by our corporate, social media, productivity driven world which only wants you to add the joy up to the point where it is enough to offset and enable more productivity.

And so we are forced not only to feel joy, but to examine it. To allow it to simply be. As we do would like to be allowed to simply be.

But joy, like power, is not a zero sum game. There is no fixed amount of joy which yields XX amount of productivity or wellness. Which is what they want. You are short 17 units of wellness, and so you must go out and seek healing and joy to the measure of 17 units and then come back to participate in the system once more.

Failing to account for the fact that each day these units reset, each day you may gain 14 units but lose nine.

Another day gaining only five but losing 20, because you smelled something which made you think of them, or read something which put you back into the place of rage against the unfairness of all they did to you.

For today though this joy is enough.

I have gained some units. I will gain more as I walk home. At my own pace. And driven by no-one. Nothing but my own desire.

Perhaps I will find more glimmers in the children frolicking in the fountain. Or perhaps I will go straight back and seek joy in the comfort of a good book, a warm duvet, a familiar cast of characters in a film or TV.

The point though is that I am allowed.