The Joy Is In The Work

“The joy is in the work.”

— Ann Reinking

I enjoy hard word. I enjoy working at things that many people find daunting, painful, or even “impossible”. Which is sort of my point, here. A lot of things that people think are impossible are really just a matter of preparing oneself for an uphill battle.

Getting through the suicidally intense grief after the loss of a child. Or the fallout of a sexual assault, or the trauma of a severely abusive childhood. The heartbreak of an emotionally devastating breakup or divorce. Happiness after those sorts of traumatic experiences is an impossibility, many people will tell you — which is actually what they tell themselves — they just include you so they don’t feel so alone in their misery, because they’ve simply given up. And can you blame them? 

Well, actually, yes, you can — if they insist that you buy into their misery too.

When people have given up on happiness after a long, grueling battle with life and its seemingly endless stream of shit, it’s only natural to want to make everyone else around them convinced of the futility of finding happiness in this world; and if, god forbid, you should dare to find your own happiness after experiencing such things in your life, they’ll try to make you feel as if you’re somehow flawed, or perhaps even less human, less emotionally connected to your grief for doing so. Perhaps you don’t grieve as deeply as they do.  Feel as deeply as they do. Perhaps, you don’t REALLY care. And therefore, perhaps, something must be wrong with you. In my case, as an example, they’ll tell you (or rather, everyone else BUT you) you didn’t love your child enough, otherwise, how could you be happy again (even if it took many years, and stints in the psych ward, and one suicide attempt to get there) after losing them?

How could you possibly heal from years of horrific childhood abuse? The sort of abuse that’s so severe, people disbelieve you when you describe it to them? You must be lying, or perhaps you exaggerate. Maybe something is wrong with you.

And on and on it goes.

But what they’re really telling you is this: they can’t, or won’t, take the responsibility for their own happiness into their own hands — so they certainly don’t want to hear about YOU doing it.

The truth is, it’s easier to wallow in one’s own dysfunction, one’s own misery than it is to do the incredibly difficult work of healing, and allowing oneself to get past the pain and guilt. Healing, happiness, and health takes courage. It takes serious, hard work. Work that takes years. And, somewhere along the way, I realized that I found a lot of joy in that work.

Better, I found a lot of joy, period. I found what I’m made of. I found that I could heal from all the shit that was done to me when I was helpless and had no agency as a child. I found I could heal from things that were done to me — and the things I had done to myself.

Eventually, I found myself — at the very center of all that rage, sadness, fear, and despair. And then, I found so much more.

A long, long time ago, I was a bruised, sad little girl huddled in a closet, high on a shelf with a stuffed rabbit, a diary, and a candle. I promised myself that someday, I was going to write my story out in the open, with no fear of being beaten for telling the truth; I wanted understanding. I was going to love someone without being afraid of being hurt in return; I wanted acceptance. I was going to be loved for who I was, and I was never going to be afraid again. And, I wanted those scrawls and scratches in my diary to someday make a difference to somebody. Maybe even a lot of somebodies. I wanted to have a voice — the kind of voice I never had then, as that skinny, bruised child.

That didn’t happen for a long, long time. The path was dark and full of strange, frightening detours. I got lost more than once. I nearly didn’t find my way back. But, I never once lost sight of it. At times, it showed up more clearly at my feet than others — sometimes it seemed to barely be a path at all, but rather just a bare suggestion leading off in a direction away from what I thought I wanted at the time…but my gut told me to follow that bare scrap of a path, and so I did. My gut never led me astray. It was the times when I strayed from the path that I ended up bloodied and beaten, barely conscious by the side of the road, depending on the kindness of people like the Paterfamilias to set me back on the not-so-straight, but most definitely narrow road back to myself.

And there is always a path.

My path was there, back when I was that little girl. I felt it then, and I knew what I wanted, simple as it was. I wanted true understanding, acceptance, and love. I wanted to be heard.

These might seem like fairly simple things, but I assure you they are not. To be truly understood and accepted for who one is takes a kind of honesty that many people aren’t comfortable with. A vulnerability. So does the kind of love that I have forever been rather half-heartedly looking for. It requires one to open oneself to loss, for one thing. I’m not afraid of loss. I’ve experienced more of it than anyone I know, personally. Not that it’s a contest, or that I’m saying it makes me inured to it; only that my failure, again and again, to find lasting romantic relationships doesn’t stem from any kind of fear.

Rather, I think it’s simply damage.

I always tell my friends, a motley bunch of damaged but incredibly wonderful bunch of people if there ever was one, that NOBODY is ever too damaged to find healthy, good, wholesome love. And, I’ve been proven right, time and again. Some of them have gone on to happy marriages (note, I said “happy”, not “perfect”). Happy, and, for the most part, healthy and functioning. So, I know it can be done. But, in my case, it seems I am just…missing that ability to read people correctly. My recent excursion (brief as it was) a couple months ago or whenever it was into a long-distance, online “romance” — I put it in quotations, because thankfully, it didn’t ever truly launch — being a perfect, typical example. I simply seem to attract variations on the same theme, over and over again; the theme being my mother. I know, I know — most girls date versions of their fathers, but it was my mother who was most damaging to me, as she was the one who raised me.

I took a long hiatus, about 8 years, after my last abusive relationship, with the exception of a brief poly relationship that was lovely, while it lasted, until the inevitable and predicable problems arose; I had thought that, after such a long period of reassessment, unflinching self-examination, and solitude, that I’d had the thing licked. That I wouldn’t make that mistake again. But all I really did was stop the thing before it really got started — which, I suppose you could call progress, but the thing is, I STILL picked the same damn person, again. I mean, not LITERALLY, but just another version of my narcissistic mother (diagnosed, btw; when I was in high school, by the therapist she sent us to because she wanted them to say I was fucked up — instead, the therapist took me aside and told me she was concerned for my safety and suggested I become emancipate as soon as possible, because she was convinced my mother was a narcissist, and a sociopath).

And granted, it was so easy to leave this person behind, granted I gave it an honest shot for the two weeks he was here in town; although, I should have left him at his AirBNB the very first night; the consensus of several of my trusted friends, and my own hindsight all pan out on that one. The man himself was irrelevant, just another variation on a theme. So, again, progress, sure. It didn’t take me 4 years and a two week stay in the hospital, this go around.

But the issue here is, I am clearly attracted to a Type. And it is not a healthy type. And I would LIKE to have at least one good, long term, healthy relationship before I die.

Now, I’ve HAD exceptions to the rule. There was The Samurai, in Hawai’i. We’re still close friends, and he was the opposite of abusive. We simply had to part ways because of circumstance, and if anything, I was shitty to HIM. Then there was the only boy I was ever actually in love with, who died when we were very young. Maybe that is what screwed me up. Who knows. Because he was a saint, and I chose my son’s father — another diagnosed sociopath — over him. At the age of fucking 17.

So, there’s a pattern here, folks. And I don’t know how to break it. And I’m no longer a young girl. I’m not at death’s door, certainly, and I’m still young enough and attractive enough that I get approached by men and women alike, on the rare occasions I do get out. But, let’s face it — at my age, is it likely I even CAN turn things around? I don’t know.

God knows I really want to. And it’s not that I have some sudden yearning to settle down and get married and do the whole conventional thing. That’s never really been me. I’m not the housewife type. At this age, even if I wanted more kids, which I don’t, that’s out of the question. If it wasn’t for my health, I’d say bring on the kids — just don’t make ME have them. I love kids. Seems incongruous, but I do. And they love me, so there’s that. I spent many years working with them — mostly disabled kids. But I digress.

My POINT IS — perhaps my problem is that I am so unconventional, and that is what attracts the nastier types of people. But I myself am not a nasty, bad person. I have values. Real ones, ones that are important. Ones that this last charlatan tried to exploit by pretending to share. But just because I’m unconventional doesn’t mean I’m immoral.

Whatever that means. To me, it’s not based on any kind of Christian morality. It’s based on respect; for myself, my body, my life, my own values, and the lives of the people who are important to me. It means going above and beyond for the people in your chosen family, even if it’s inconvenient…or even possibly scary. But I so often attract people who are the exact opposite of myself, which is weird, and I still haven’t figured out how to change that. I’m not going to settle for idiots who flatter, who want me because they think my unconventionality means I’m an easy lay (spoiler alert — I’m not); I’m not going to settle for ANYTHING, anymore. And I have, indeed, gotten better at recognizing the signs.

I just need to learn how to attract the decent ones, now — and be attracted to them, in return. Perhaps that’s the real key. Being raised by a woman who had no moral center, who wasn’t capable of love, but instead unspeakable cruelties — physically, emotionally, psychologically — has indeed warped me, and I have accepted that. But what I still need to learn, and accept, is that it also warped my perceptions. And those are a Hell of a lot harder to overcome.

But I have faith in myself, above all else — I’ve lived through so much, overcome so much. I’ve nearly been destroyed by grief, by men who wanted to literally destroy me, a mother who wanted to destroy me — and I’m still here, I still have joy in this fucked up world, I still have faith in the beauty and inherent goodness of people.

And as long as I have that, perhaps there’s still hope that there are relationships for me that will give me back a little of that faith, a little kindness and reflect the love I’ve found for myself and others, that I worked so fucking hard for, back to me.

One thing I do know, is that I’ll find joy in the work on the way there, whether I ever actually get there or not; because finding one’s faith in oneself, and in other people, again and again, despite all odds, is not an easy task — but it’s definitely worth it.