the courage to be happy.
Summer marks the beginning of wedding season, and with the loosening of restrictions, I found myself a couple of weeks ago, attending a wedding in person for the very first time in what felt like a very long time. I have always joked quietly with friends that weddings have always made me uncomfortable, and perhaps this one was no different. For as much joy as is always to be had in celebrating the things worth celebrating, there is a great courage that is required to acknowledge the spaces of regression and stagnation. It didn’t truly hit me till a week after the fact, in after seeing a near and dear friend choose happy, to be reminded quietly that I am still wholeheartedly afraid of traversing the same path.
Perhaps it has been the nature of the things that I have acquired the skill to hold space for, or a growing list of shoe drops, that make me seemingly apprehensive of a happily ever after. Not to say that it doesn’t exist, but that it has never occurred to me once, that I would ever experience the idea of “happy” without an equal weight in struggle. That happiness is not naturally apparent, but is grown like gratitude is with patience, courage, and determination. As much as I would wish to admit to myself that I have grown beyond the broken spaces that once defined my joy in grief, it is hard to admit and acknowledge that the things which I had wished and hoped for in time to disappear with age, have not only very much the same, but remained as an omnipresent shadow, that within the heart of it all, I still struggle to open myself to the experiences where I choose to willingly let joy in.
The courage to be happy, has never truly been easy, and in time perhaps I have grown to make excuses for happy, alternatives to happy; contentment, peace, gratitude - a mirror to happy. While I am ever so grateful that realization is half the struggle and acknowledgement through acceptance is part of the growth that comes in the form of healing, what we choose to do with the understanding of our revelations is what distinguishes the spaces we choose to allow ourselves to be a part of. The distinction of spaces that will forever remain either a question to our experiences, or an action we choose to make happen. That the courage to be happy does not end with the realization that we are afraid to allow the experiences (or lack of) define our understanding of what it truly means to engage and wholeheartedly experience joy, but the understanding that it is a natural and cautious response of a heart learning to walk and run again.
Even though it may no longer be tied to the things that anchored it, our broken hearts still remember its strings. Maybe this is where vulnerability keeps us, hungry and by nature inquisitive, at the things we have always seen as promises we see for others, but in reality, a truth that we have grown weary and overtly cautious to truly wish and define for our own individual selves as wanting happy.