Foreboding Joy

When we experience a big disappointment or loss in life, something we were really excited about, sometimes we become afraid to be excited again. I experienced this recently, but it was so subtle it was hard for me to recognize. I merely realized I was mentally “preparing myself” and holding my breath in moments of joy, in case they didn’t work out or something went wrong. Yet the preparations don't really help. When something does go wrong, it still hurts. In Braving the Wilderness, Dr. Brené Brown writes, “Joy is probably the most vulnerable emotion we experience. We’re afraid that if we allow ourselves to feel it, we’ll get blindsided by disaster or disappointment… We try to beat vulnerability to the punch by imagining the worst or by feeling nothing in hopes that the other shoe won’t drop. I call it foreboding joy.”  

I didn’t realize that I was foreboding joy at first, but the day that winter holidays started, I noticed that I was scared to be excited about anything. I was scared to make plans, or to be happy about the time off. I thought about all the horrible things that had happened last December including (but not limited to) being very ill on antibiotics, having multiple family members hospitalized, losses, and a huge set of exams to study for. It was one of the worst months of my whole life. Combine this with the fact that back in September I had been really excited for my plans for the winter holidays, but since life circumstances changed, my plans changed. The end result was that day that the holidays started this year, I was holding my breath scared to feel joy, because I didn’t want to feel the pain of suddenly having it all taken away.

Dr. Brown writes in Daring Greatly about how foreboding joy comes from a culture of scarcity.  Brown writes, “Scarcity is the ‘never enough’ problem… Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.” She quotes Lynne Twist’s book The Soul of Money, “For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is ‘I didn’t get enough sleep.’ The next one is ‘I don’t have enough time.’ Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it… before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we got to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day… this internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.”

Lately Punjabi media has tried to highlight this issue of comparison fueling greed and jealousy. We often think about the comparison being physical objects, but it’s more than that. Someone came up to us once and told us how much their parents were comparing them to us, and how devastating it was to live under the pressure of not being good enough. I had no idea. From then on, the more I paid attention, the more I noticed that when someone did well in the Punjabi community, it broke friendships, it led to jealousy instead of happiness, and it led to resentment. I didn’t grow up like that, because my parents often talked about how everyone’s kids in the Punjabi community are like their own because we are all part of the same community. I think the reason people act that way is because of the feeling of scarcity. Especially since we are a minority community, maybe people feel like someone else’s success is at their expense; that there isn’t enough for everyone and if someone else makes it, they won’t. People doubt their own ability to be able to do it. I think it’s important to recognize because if we want to overcome it as a cultural community, then we need to know where it comes from and recognize that there IS enough. That there is enough joy in the world, enough success, enough love for all of us. It’s the doubt of maya in our minds, with the fuel from the fire of media selling us that we are “not enough” that makes it that much worse.

Getting back to my story, when I recognized it as foreboding joy, I started to use gratitude.  Brown writes, “There is one guarantee: if we’re not practicing gratitude and allowing ourselves to know joy, we are missing out on the two things that will actually sustain us during the inevitable hard times.” I didn’t use the kind of gratitude where you write in a journal each day about what you are grateful for, because that always had ended up with me writing the same things over and over without thinking. I already practiced gratitude in my Ardas. This time, I needed to add something. I practiced the kind of gratitude where, every time I felt vulnerable and I felt like I was holding back my excitement, I said a mental note of appreciation. Often I would say a prayer, Thank you Waheguru for this moment with my family, etc. Brené talks about having appreciation for the small, ordinary moments, and she gives the example: “A man in his early sixties told me, ‘I used to think the best way to go through life was to expect the worst. That way, if it happened, you were prepared, and if it didn’t happen, you were pleasantly surprised. Then, I was in a car accident and my wife was killed. Needless to say, expecting the worst didn’t prepare me at all. And worse, I still grieve those wonderful moments we shared and that I didn’t fully enjoy.” I started to really focus on moments like driving to the Gurdwara, watching a movie with my family, and eating dinner together. The other shoe never dropped. I got to actually enjoy my holidays and experience the joy of being with my family without that extra anxiety. One of the biggest moments of appreciation was recognizing that this year has given me a younger brother. Even though we aren’t related by blood, he’s just as protective and has taught me a lot. I was only able to appreciate and recognize the joyful connection, and trust deeper because I wasn’t holding my breath, worried about losing everything and everyone.

I encourage you to think about what kind of messages you tell yourself and society tells you about being enough. I shared my story so it could get you thinking about how foreboding joy can be subtle, and it’s important to recognize the feeling, then to express appreciation for the gift in the moment that we have. Really it seems like a small thing but it makes a big difference. Not only do we live more fulfilled lives, we have more resilience to deal with the losses, disappointments, and tragedies.

References

Brown, B. (2016). Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Brown, B. (2017). Braving the wilderness: the quest for true belonging and the courage to stand alone. Random House.