In Pursuit of Joy: Part 1

This was originally going to be a single post about Figure Skating, but as I started to write it I realised that I needed to explain why skating is so much more to me than a hobby. It is a refinding of a part of myself I didn't know needed to be nurtured and cared for. That sounds very pretentious and pompous talk about taking up a sport but bear with me, I hope you'll understand a bit better by the end of these two posts.

I've spoken a lot recently about discovery of my emotional range. When I was reconnecting with myself I found it much easier to feel negative emotions. Anger was probably the first really powerful emotion that I connected with, it was fairly overwhelming at the time and triggered a whole thought process around my core beliefs and values that I'm sure will be the subject of a later blog post!

I also found connecting with sadness easy and it was really a relief to be able to express my fears and anxieties and sadness around things and cry at things beyond Kevin the Carrot in the Christmas Aldi ad.

But earlier this year I was left wondering, why do I find it so hard to truly and unashamedly find joy?

To give you some perspective on where I was. The first question I asked in therapy was. 'Is it not selfish to seek your own happiness beyond what you need to function? Your energy could be spent on helping others and so to use it on yourself seems wrong'

I'm grateful Ellis didn't laugh in my face but where did that question come from? Why did I have such a warped sense of myself in relation to the world?

I think there's two main reasons.

Firstly, in my experience growing up to have joy was a risk. I grew up in a culture that always tried to tear people down; everyone needed to be as miserable as each other. 'It's not a sin to laugh, it's only a sin to take pleasure in it' was one of the sayings that got bandied about a lot. So if you were happy and you shared that it made you a target of ridicule. Being happy just wasn't worth the aggro or pain that would follow it. I quickly learned to moderate my emotions.

Which leads me on to reason two. In therapy we've discussed something called 'Transactional Analysis'. It's a psychotherapeutic theory that, in short, states that you can look at all relationships between people and the roles they take on in a dynamic. Each person either adopts the role of parent, adult or child and looking at the role we're playing can help us to understand why we respond in the way we do.

From a young age I learned what was expected of me and what was the 'correct' way to behave in order to gain approval or safety. Don't be happy or you'll be teased. Don't voice an opinion or do your own thing because that's not allowed.

As an adult, this translated to my reverting to a role called the 'adaptive child' whenever I was presented with a situation that placed my needs alongside someone else's. That means I would always seek to do something because it was expected, or make someone else happy, or avoid conflict - both real and imaginary.

My therapist taught me that people who developed a strong adaptive child tend to grow into very nurturing adults who are drawn to care for others and lead with an empathetic response. They seek to care for others both in work and in their personal lives because they're looking to care for their inner child that didn't get the care it needed as a child.

What's this got to do with joy you ask? Don't worry I'm getting there! The opposite of the adaptive child is the free child. The child that does things because they want to, because it makes them happy and don't worry so much about the consequences and whether things have a purpose beyond just being fun.

Imagine painting as a kid and not doing it because you needed to learn how to draw but doing it because you like the way the colours look on the page, the feel of the paint on your hands, the sensation of sharing time with your loved ones even if the end result is a total mess because the only purpose was to have fun. That's the free child in action.

I realised that I for most of my life I've done things because it's the right thing to do or it was good for me. I ran because 'it'd be good for weight loss', I helped out in church groups not because I enjoyed it but because it was expected. I said yes to projects or meetings or lunches that I didn't really have an interest in because it made someone else happy and in my mind their needs were more important than my own. Self-sacrificing service was the purpose of life, not to care for your own needs.

I had absolutely zero free child response. I could not remember that last time I did something purely because I wanted to and I'd love it without thinking about if it made other people happy or whether it served another purpose.

I talked a lot with Beth and discovered that this was something she really struggled with too, I won't talk again about religion here but I suspect that had something to do with it for both of us!

We were reluctant to try new things for fear of disappointment especially if we didn't know if we'd like it because doing things for ourselves became so rare that to use an opportunity on something that ended up a disappointment was too high risk. We were never silly because what would others think? We agreed that in order to find joy and let our inner free children discover themselves something needed to change.

So we started the 'Say Yes' campaign with each other. Do things because we can even if don't know if we'll like it because you never know we might end up enjoying ourselves. I got my 'colours done', we went to see Rachel Parris, I had a trans shower. We went to see musicals we didn't know the soundtrack to beforehand, we did Go Ape, I got my ears pierced, we went on a little miniature train without any children with us. We dressed as witches and went to Haworth for Halloween!

These all may seem like small things but they are all things we'd have said no to before because we weren't absolutely sure we'd enjoy them and how could we justify the expenditure if it didn't have a purpose?

The pursuit of joy is not a passive thing that will happen to you, you have to actively seek it.

I still didn't have a hobby that had quite clicked though - that allowed me to pursue it with gay abandon, to geek out intellectually and test myself physically all things I liked to do. That takes me to February this year and the end of part 1.

It may seem like a very long winded way to say, 'you should all do nice things' but I can't tell you how much work I've had to do to see my own pursuit of joy as a key part of life not just something that is selfish.

When was the last time you did something because of the sheer pleasure it brought you without guilt or fear about what you 'should' be doing instead? I'd love to hear what you all get up to to find your joy!