Complex Joy

During this pandemic I've been even more self reflective than usual. I’ve had a lot of time to think and I’ve been trying to use it to understand myself and my faith better. As an established overachiever, I literally haven’t had this much free time on my hands since the summer between 6th and 7th grade. I figured that not making the most of this time would be disrespectful to the grace and privilege that has allowed my greatest trouble to be too much free time. I spent a lot of my life not knowing who I was because I was so busy trying to be what I thought other people wanted me to be. However, that’s a story for another blog post. The point is, I’m on a mission to understand myself so I can get to that purpose that God has for me. This post is about a partial reflection on my journey to walking in joy during this quarantine. I am someone who has suffered from anxiety and depression in my not too distant past, so I am very intimately aware of what the absence of joy feels like. I now know that joy, real joy that exists is the midst of pain and sadness is possible but it takes soul work (caring for your mental and emotional health according to Dr. Anita Phillips.) The time of retreat required me to shed the perception that joy is simply extended happiness. The joy of the lord is my strength but, to walk in that power I had to understand the complexities of joy. The process required a proper understanding of my identity in Christ. I needed courage to accept the fact that because God is good, what may not be good to me can still be good for me. I could go on but let’s start from the beginning. 

Back in March I had to go into 14 days of isolation because I’d been directly  exposed to someone who had the coronavirus (it was actually the first confirmed student case at UT). I was still in school but as one of those people who was always involved in an unnecessary amount of activity, being trapped in my apartment by myself for 2 weeks was strange. It wasn’t too challenging at first because I am an introvert but quarantine was different. The stillness was palpable. I didn’t even have school work to properly distract me because my self-quarantine was during the extended spring break time. I could feel the solitude, like a tangible, living thing. It was a shapeshifter, becoming whatever I allowed it to be. At times solitude was the monstrous thoughts that came up out of the unknown and seemed to overwhelm me. They surfaced, the small traumas, (lowercase t) that had always been stuffed back into the lockbox of my mind as a survival tactic in a world that never stops long enough for you to really process your pain. They rode up on the back of this monstrous solitude as soon as I wasn’t looking. The world had finally stopped and I was still in that pause with no Beyonce melody to carry me on past the pain that was coming up out of my soul. However, at other times, the solitude shape-shifted into a peace that I’d been forced to uncover when in my past loneliness had nearly consumed me. It was the peace of someone who was secure enough in their relationships to appreciate time alone. The peace was that of those who have discovered that loneliness is not synonymous with alone and one woman’s sad isolation can be another woman’s jubilant seclusion. It was the peace of a woman who had chosen to make her own presence the preferable company so she’d have more autonomy over her joy.

On the 6th day of quarantine, solitude took the shape of happiness. On that day I decided to go looking for joy and I found her. She had always been there but she surfaced in the nature-filled view of a beautiful day. And just like God looked out over the green, growing, graceful things which he created and commanded to multiply on the 6th day, I looked out over his creation and saw that it was good. My journal entry from that day read:

“I’m not sure if I haven’t fully processed everything yet or if I’m really just okay. I feel safe, like everything is going to be fine and this too shall pass. What I’m going through right now sucks but the world is suffering in unison and God is still good so I’m honestly at peace. I’m currently sitting on the roof of my house in Austin looking at my backyard where the trees are alive with Spring at the end of my cul de sac. I have a cup of citrus ice tea in hand and Smile by Keni Lali is playing on my speakers. Despite everything, I have so very much to be thankful for, and so I have joy. Since I know the joy of the lord is my strength, I feel so powerful. I literally haven’t left my house in a week but I very thoroughly enjoy my own company. At first I was feeling dreary due to a lack of vitamin D. But, now I feel the heat of the sun shining down on my brown skin. The large trees in front of me cast everything below in speckled shadows. There’s a slight breeze that ruffles through the leaves reminiscent of hope and anticipation. Every so often, the sunlight reaches down from the sky and glints off of my pen, then reflects off the slick sweat on the bridge of my nose and a rainbow of fractured light emerges and disappears in the same instant.  This seems as good a time as any to remind myself that I am beautiful and loved; that my worth is unquantifiable and the majesty of the world around me resides within me because the same God made us both”.

On the 7th day, unlike God, I did not rest as my monstrous mind morphed into prison of painful thoughts. An all too familiar sadness came over me as I looked at my feelings and they stared back at me. I realized that the solitude which I thought I had chosen yesterday became the loneliness that chose me today. My reality was that in some ways I’d chosen to emotionally distance myself from others and even God long before social distancing was enforced. I didn’t have a contingency plan for what I would do when all of a sudden I was no longer enough for myself. What had once been a dream of me, myself, and I, became a nightmare because the one person I had on my side had turned against me. I was at war with myself so I was left as the only casualty. With the fatal blow, I wrote the following:

“I am scared to hope for companionship. I am afraid to want more than just a good God, afraid to admit that God simply isn’t enough for me.  I have this deep aching desire to be known, to be heard and understood, to be unlonely. I want someone to see me, someone whose presence I don’t have to struggle for, someone who is just there, as steady as the certainty of waking up to myself in the morning. I want a love that never sacrifices consistency for the sake of passion, a love that I don't have to settle for. I want someone who draws me in, in order to draw me out of my facade and into the reality of my being. Someone that allows me to find comfort in being me. I want a love that sets the edges of my life ablaze like the golden lining of a Texas sunset. I want a love that hears me and acknowledges me and responds to me, a love that doesn’t make me feel silly or unsure or insecure. I want a love that resembles the way I love myself, the way God loves me. I want a love that demonstrates the way a beautiful woman who loves a man deserves to be loved. I want this love to be like a soft blanket straight out of the dryer. That waning warmth of the evening sun against cheeks and orange light pressed up against eyelids type love. It would be a love that does not attempt to be God but that compliments God. It's a love that is a gift from God and therefore comes with no sorrow. I want to be unlonely, so the tears I shed can dissipate and I’d have a person with whom I could exchange joys and anxieties, someone who makes it okay for me to just be. I don’t want to want this and I’ve been pretending I don’t but, here alone I have to face myself, my fears. I want to be unlonely but I’m afraid I’ll never be.”

So you see the solitude was a shapeshifter and I couldn’t keep up with reality. Was my truth, joy or pain? Blissful isolation or miserable loneliness? Both felt real to me in the moment but how could those realities coexist? How could I experience both in such quick succession? I hadn’t felt loneliness like that in a long time but was that because I had willed myself out of isolation. Building my faith helped me gain the knowledge that I wasn’t ever alone. But, even though I’d gone to therapy freshman year of college, I was excellent at using God as a mask so I never got to the root of that loneliness that never quite went away even when I was surrounded by friends. Maybe solitude doesn’t bring about the parts of ourselves we’ve never known, perhaps it simply uncovers what was there all along. What do you do when the things you thought you’d dealt with suddenly surface to interrupt your peace? How do you choose joy? What does it look like to do more than wipe your tears and go about your business saying “whoo I was really in my feelings right then how random. Anyways let's get back to regularly scheduled programming!”

There are a lot of things we can use to avoid unpacking our feelings, and for Christian girls who love God but hate pain, Jesus can be one of those things. Let me speak for myself. I find that I’m often on one of two extremes. Either I’m letting my feelings lead me or I’m deciding to focus so much on Christ that I can completely avoid getting to the root of those feelings at all. Yes Christ can change my heart and desires but, my reality is my reality. What I’ve been through, how I’ve been taught to think, the decisions I’ve made and those that were stolen from me didn’t go away when I came to Christ. So, when the results of my reality come bubbling up because I was triggered by a comment, or had too much time on my hand, or too much to drink, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with me. I don’t have to choose between giving those feelings control and running to Jesus so I can pretend they don’t exist. More of Christ might help me deal with pain and have better days but God never promised us a carefree Christianity. If we don't get to the root of our feelings and deal with the ways that our experiences have shaped our perception of God, ourselves, and the world, then we’ll continue to live lives saved but not free. At least not as free as we could be. Dr. Anita Phillips says it like this “your emotional wellness will not change how God shows up for you, but it might change how you show up for God. 

God wants us to do the digging and see the real disease so we can hand it over to him. In the meantime he is graceful enough to address some symptoms but let the illness remain so we don’t mistake ourselves for healthy people and allow what ales us to kill us. God is ultimately good  and when we discover that during a time of brokenness, we start to understand God and ourselves in ways that are transformational. In her recent podcastTherapist and Minister Dr. Anita Phillips said:

“At times pain has to reach a certain level before people are willing to do the work. And that’s fair...sometimes you have to make space to do the healing work. Emotional healing work is not like a thanksgiving plate, you don’t just keep piling stuff on top of your life. Sometimes we have to wait for a period of our lives that is a little quieter or calmer in order to do that work. One of the benefits of the pandemic (although it is not worth the lives that have been lost)  is that people are not able to be as busy. Being forced to be still is bringing some old pain to the surface for a lot of people...all of that stuff [the seeds of trauma, and pain, broken relationships, and heartache] has been in the ground just waiting. Now that people are being forced to sit, they are experiencing the sprouting of pain that they’ve been in all along.

I guess the point is that quarantine has forced me to come to terms with the fact that my joyfulness and my sad loneliness can coexist in the same body, they do not negate each other. My joy comes from my salvation and my sadness comes from my experiences. Even when I feel down the joy of the lord is my strength. My joy gives me enough perspective to know that what I am feeling is temporary but joy is eternal. My joy gives me the courage to get to the root of my pain so it can’t control me. What God has convicted me about during this quarantine is that there are certain fundamental problematic ideas about the way I see myself and the world that have to be uprooted before He can properly address my brokenness.

I can't surrender what I can’t see so, if I thought I'd overcome some pain and it’s still surfacing, perhaps the roots of that hurt went deeper than I thought. Because of quarantine, I’m finally in a position to get knee deep into the garden of my mind and pull out those things that have warped the way I see God and myself. Things like putting the expectation on a man or a friend to fill a God sized space in my life. I honestly thought I was good off my belief that I needed other people more than God when I got saved but I had to realize that I'd only chopped down the tree of that belief. I never took time to tackle the roots. At some point in this process of uprooting, I’ll need a therapist to help me pull those things up. At that point we’ll be rocking with Jesus and therapy but, until then, I’m thankful to be in a position where I can see the necessity of doing the work. Some people, Christian or not, don’t see the necessity of doing the work to tend to their emotional health and so they end up spilling problematic behavior everywhere. They end up forfeiting their joy. I can’t judge them because I was one of them until very very recently.

I’m simply thankful for a God who allows me to get real low but never out of sight. A God who loves me in my brokenness and allows it to bubble up just enough for me to realize that I still have work to do. I’m thankful for a God who trusts me enough to let me do the soul work that’s needed to step into the wholeness He has for me. I am grateful that I can see the purpose in my pain. It is a privilege to have enough perspective to realize you are being refined when all you can feel is the pressure. Because of that perspective, I have joy even in the midst of my shape shifting emotions.  It doesn’t always look like a smile, sometimes its the process of being real with myself and facing my demons no matter how ugly it gets. When I turn my gaze from myself, to my good God, I find joy there on both the 6th day and the 7th. I am able to look over my life and say “it is good”.