The Vulnerability of Joy

On Monday this week, I was having a pretty good day. It wasn’t that anything spectacular had happened, but it was just one of those: three green lights in a row, positive thoughts making the mind a cozier place, possibilities about the future blooming like the daisies under my window.

In the evening I was supposed to meet my dad for dinner. He asked me to go to his office 15 minutes earlier because he had something “urgent” to show me. I thought he needed some copy-editing help at work. I met him outside, his face as blank as a tax form waiting to be filled in, and he told me to follow him. He took me downstairs to the underground parking and put something in my hand. “That’s for you,” he said. It took forever for my visual cortex to identify what was placed into my palm as the keys for my new car.

I jumped from joy and screamed and laughed. I don’t think I had been that excited for a present ever since I got my first Tamagotchi in second grade. The last few months since getting my driving license in January, I had been driving a ford fiesta that was older than me, with broken brakes and a back as creased as an unironed shirt. So, yes, my good day had just turned bloody great. But it is what happened afterwards that inspired me to write this.

I began to feel afraid. I began to feel as if I don’t deserve this new car. As if now I need to hustle harder in order to “earn it”. I felt guilty for it. I became convinced that a succession of such good fortune, could only mean one thing: calamity on its way. My head started coming with various scenarios of potential disaster. Tomorrow was already filled with longer to-do lists, unrealistic expectations and it wasn’t long before it felt so much safer to just return the car. It took me a while, but I recognized what was happening as something which Brene Brown calls “the vulnerability of joy” and others “phobia of happiness”. In her book Daring Greatly, Brene explains how foreboding joy or “rehearsing tragedy” is an armour which we develop to protect us from vulnerability and disappointment.

“If, like me, you’ve ever stood over your children and thought to yourself I love you so much I can barely breathe, and then in that exact moment have been flooded with images of something terrible happening to your child, know that you’re not crazy nor are you alone,” Brene writes.

It is counterintuitive that joy might make us feel scared, but it does. When we are on a high, we fear the low, especially if we harbour feelings of unworthiness and feel as though we don’t deserve the high. We are afraid that the feeling of joy won’t last, that the transition to disaster will be too difficult, that we are simply not enough. For some people “It feels more vulnerable to dip in and out of disappointment than just to set up camp there. You sacrifice joy, but you suffer less pain.” Besides, as Brene says, in this war-ravaged world with starving children in Africa, who are we to be joyful? To receive new cars?

But it’s not worth running away from joy because of fear. Instead, we can practice the antidote to foreboding joy. Gratitude. Practicing gratitude for the cars in our backyard, for the plants in our living rooms, for our relationships and friendships, and for the spontaneous moments of beauty. And in this way acknowledging our privilege and staying humble. Leaning into joy is also about realising that by shrinking ourselves, depriving ourselves of happiness we aren’t really helping others to feel more of it. Quite the opposite. The more we learn to receive, to lean into our power, to accept the blessings of this abundant universe the more those around us feel empowered to do the same.

So, yes, I am blessed and I am grateful. I don’t know what tomorrow might bring and it feels uncomfortable and a little scary, but right here, right now, in this moment, I say yes to joy. I hope you do too.

With Love,
N.