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Protecting Your Joy In past newsletters, I’ve talked about finding joy. Today I want to talk about protecting it. I’m still on Twitter/X because it connects me to people, and I was reflecting this week on a time when I had shared a joyful post there about running along a flower-lined trail. Several people at the time responded with irritation because they have allergies. Um... OK? Am I expected to boycott the flowers in solidarity? Negative social media comments used to bother me more… they felt like someone popping my balloon out of spite. However, with compassion, I’ve come to understand that they come from a place of suffering. In many cases, it’s a longing for attention and validation. As Maria Popova describes so well, “The touching human longing for sympathy, that impulse to have our suffering recognized and validated, has grown distorted by a troubling compulsion for broadcast-suffering…[T]he unlucky events of life have become the currency of attention and identification.” In other cases, the behavior stems from some combination of jealousy, envy, fear, and resentment. These are natural human reactions, of course, and our current cultural climate tends to reward their expression. The crabs-in-the-bucket analogy is spot on (if not very vegan-friendly 😛). However, staying stuck in these feelings is detrimental to our own well-being. Karen Armstrong writes in Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, “We should…take careful note of how unhappy these primitive emotions make us. When you are engrossed in thoughts of anger, hatred, envy, resentment, or disgust, notice the way your horizons shrink and your creativity diminishes.” So, I want to share a few suggestions for protecting your joy from resentment, whether it’s yours or other people’s. Joy can be contagious, and you often increase your own joy by spreading it to others. However, as discussed above, it can also trigger resentment. So, here’s my first tip: if you’re particularly sensitive, or your joy feels fragile, consider sharing your joy only with supportive people you know and trust. If you feel your joy is more resilient, feel free to share it more widely. It may help, though, to mentally and emotionally prepare yourself for the possibility that someone will try to pull you back into the crab bucket. This is particularly an issue on social media, where it’s almost certain that someone reading your joyful post is having a terrible day. (This is also why I reject calls to “read the room” on social media. The “room” is the world, which doesn’t have a singular mood, and will always include joy and pain.) You can decide ahead of time that you will feel compassion for any crabs trying to pull you down, while taking emotional precautions to elude their grasp. You may choose to express gratitude for those who helped you find this particular joy, which can keep you grounded and humble, but that is a personal choice. You may also find that your own joy fills you with energy and leads you to help others, spreading the joy even further, but please know that this is not a requirement. It is always a choice. Finally, if you are the resentful one, don’t beat yourself up! It’s a natural human emotion that can provide us with useful information. Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way explains how to create a “Jealousy Map” that helps us transform our feelings of jealousy into insights about our true desires in life and even make plans to pursue them. You can also work to develop a beautiful feeling of Mudita, or sympathetic joy, which allows you to be happy for others. If you’re looking for a job and you see a post about someone else’s new role, you could choose resentment, or you could pause and decide to cultivate joy for that person, trusting that your opportunity is on the way as well. It may also help to remember that the joy someone’s sharing may be the first positive feeling they’ve had in a long time. Do you really want to be the one to sabotage that? The important point is not to turn resentment into a lifestyle. As Tabitha Brown, a popular plant-based chef, puts it, “Have a good day, but if you can’t, don’t you dare go messing up nobody else’s.”
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