“It’s everything I’ve always wanted, and now I finally have it—but I’m afraid.”
With so many years—generations, even—between us, it’s hard to believe that the very thing I’ve been grappling with recently is exactly what my grandmother just said to me through the phone.
Things in my life were going well. Like, really well…almost too well. But as every piece of my life felt like it was falling into place, how did I feel? Terrified. I was utterly terrified of being so blissfully happy.
Was I really so scared of being happy, though?
No.
I was afraid of losing it.
I thought of the times I lost people, relationships, things that seemed “too good to be true.” I thought of the times I felt blindsided or empty when they were taken from me. I thought of how much it hurts to know what it’s like to feel pure joy, excitement, and love, only to lose it in the end.
So this time, my brain wanted to protect me. It came up with all the ways everything could blow up in my face. My brain told me to keep my guard up and close myself off from being too happy. All to prevent that pain from ever reaching me again.
By predicting any future pain I might feel, my brain might think it’s protecting me. Yet, in reality, all it’s doing is forcing me to live with pain that hasn’t even happened outside of my own mind.
And yet something far more destructive is happening when my brain does this, too. It’s preventing me from fully savoring all of the beautiful, joyful, loving moments that make life worth living.
I like to think of my life sort of like a heartbeat. Picture the highs and lows of a line on a heartbeat monitor. It shoots up high, only to drop down low, only to go back up. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down.
This visual helps me understand that as long as we feel joy, love and excitement, we will also feel sadness, heartbreak, and disappointment. The truth is that the more you open yourself up to good, the more you also risk a similar magnitude of pain. It’s simply the balance of life.
But the more we listen to the part of our brain trying to prevent the lows, the more we prevent the highs, too. And if you do that enough?
You’ll get a flat line.
I don’t want to live a flat-lined life. The type of life where nothing ever truly penetrates some armor I’ve built around my heart; where everything feels just a little more dull. No—I want to experience every bit of joy, love and excitement the universe has to offer me, even if that means I feel the lows more deeply, too.
Instead of focusing on the pain that I will inevitably face, I have to actively choose to focus on the highs of life.
After all—if pain is inevitable, doesn’t that mean joy is too?
So what choice do we have when our brains are telling us to run away and hide so that we never have to feel true pain? For this answer I’ll turn to another quote from my grandmother:
“Run with the good, and deal with the bad.”
In other words, we will stretch that joy, love, and excitement as far as it will reach. We will feel it deeply. We will revel in it. We will remember it.
And it’s because of these highs that we will also have the strength to get through any sadness, heartbreak, and disappointment that might follow. When it reaches us, we will deal with it. We will survive it. We will grow from it.
And when things start to look up–when that joy, love and excitement inevitably find us again–you bet we’re gonna run with it.
Written by Jessica Bard.