Happy Today
As I continue my ongoing battle with my ever-shrinking anxiety dragon, I’ve been exploring why it took me so long to face the trauma that made the damn thing grow in the first place. As a naturally logical person, I understood on a fundamental level that I was not directly involved in the events, and what happened to others was in some way worse than what happened to me.
My anxiety dragon, of course, warped this all around and had this to say on the subject, “It wasn’t about you, so why are you acting like you’re so impacted by it? Stop trying to make this about you, you greedy little attention-seeker.”
But the thing is, that was precisely the problem: those events weren’t about me, so no one ever checked in to see how I was feeling about what was happening all around me. Without anyone to comfort me when I was a child, my fire-breathing frenemy grew bigger and took more power in my life until I had daily panic attacks from age 14 to 19. And because this was the 90s, being an anxious person wasn’t a “real” problem. Society said that “real” problems were physical abuse, actual abandonment, starving kids in Ethiopia. Feeling anxious and scared all the time for no reason? Grow up and get the fuck over it. That this played along very nicely with the evil whisperings of my dragon just made me trust what it had to say on the subject even more.
When you’re told something that deeply hurts you “isn’t about you” it negates the very real feelings you’re having and by extension makes you feel invisible. I have a lifelong fear of not being seen or heard. And when I feel invisible and alone or abandoned, that’s exactly when that fucking dragon refuses to go away.
The reason I’ve never owned this trauma, shared it with anyone, or even acknowledged its existence until now is that I felt so ashamed for letting this impact me at all when I know people who faced so much worse and are seemingly so much more functional than me.
I work with a man who was among the thousands of refugees who came to this country from Vietnam after the US fucked up their homeland. He sings. A lot. Vietnamese love songs. He also smiles every day. I’ve worked with him for fifteen years and I’ve never seen him on a day where he doesn’t exude joy and gratitude. This man was in a prison camp. He lost family members. He left his homeland for a strange country where everyone speaks a language he still doesn’t understand well. But every day he sings. Every day he smiles. Every day he asks his co-workers how they are and how their families are.
But me? I’m all fucked up over some shit that went down when I was kid. Not war. Not famine. Just good old-fashioned emotional trauma. Unpacking that shame is part of what I’m working on lately. Pain is not a sliding scale. Pain is pain. And if you don’t deal with it, it festers and grows disproportionally. Maybe the reason why my friend at the office smiles is because he faced his grief and let himself feel that pain so that he could move beyond it or at least turn it down.
And the thing is, I’ve been trying to tell myself this in my writing for years. Not one, not two, but three of my main characters faced some kind of trauma as a child or young adult that they hid from the world. And all three of them dealt with it in different ways:
Q shut down emotionally and avoided romantic relationships until a fucking six-foot-five unicorn appears in her life and refuses to give up on her.
Sanger builds a family from his friendships with Q and Ben and gives and gives and gives until he doesn’t know who he is without them.
Derek cloaks himself in a veil of swagger and confidence and never shows anyone who he really is underneath it all.
And the horrific thing is, this is what I do. All three of these things. That’s me in a nutshell.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
When they say “write what you know”, I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean that.
But somewhere in my creative unconscious, I knew what I was doing in my relationships. I also knew it wasn’t healthy. I gave my characters the help and the love they needed without them having to ask because I don’t know how to ask for help when I need it. I always handle it on my own. Until now. Because I am not a character in a book. There is no all-powerful, omniscient being crafting my destination towards the happy ending they’ve predetermined for me. I have to do that part on my own, but I can still ask for help from the people who love me. And the funny thing is, when I ask for help, I get it because that’s what people who love you do.
In Chasing Those Devil Bones, Stanley Gerard tells Q that there are two ways of dealing with ugly things: let them twist you into something ugly, too, or twist them into something beautiful instead.
And maybe that’s what I’ve been doing with my writing. Trying to twist the ugly things from my life into something beautiful. To share the pain of my trauma without having to say it out loud. But saying it out loud is healing and I am so grateful to have a supportive family who wants to help undo the damage we all still feel and loving friends who are willing to take the time to listen. And that’s another weapon I’ve found very useful in slowly slaying anxiety dragons, that dickhead dragon of mine does not like it when I stop and appreciate the bounty of my life.
Recently, my amazing friend at work and I have started greeting each other with “Happy today!”
It started as a joke. He was wishing me a “Happy Tuesday!” and it came out “Happy Today!” and now that’s how we greet one another.
And I have to say that on mornings when I see his smiling face in the kitchen getting his coffee and he wishes me a “Happy Today!” it completely shifts my mindset and all I can feel is abundance and love.
Happy today. I’m here. I’m recovering. I’m learning. I’m growing. I’m becoming a better version of myself. Happy today. Even when it hurts. Even if I need to cry. Happy today because I am seen and I am heard and honestly, how can you not be happy around a person who smiles all the way through his very being and says, “Happy Today!”