The Joy of Being Fully Human
The Joy of Being Fully Human
Filming a book trailer and finding out its not all hairspray and happiness
I’m feeling the full weight of being human today.
Which is odd because yesterday I was levitating.
Walking up to this door, I hesitated. Was I ready for this? Ready to meet the other women sharing the page with me? Ready to hear their stories live, from a body, not a screen? Ready to synopsize my own in front of a camera? Ready to be “part of” instead of “one of?”
I walked through the door and hugs greeted me. An instant invitation to a power party - women who have been through something, so now they know something, and are ready to teach that something - as my publisher always says. As I stepped in to the Green Room, warmed by the lights from the make up mirrors, I could feel the energy. Women energy. Mother energy. Warrior energy.
We were there to film the trailer for our upcoming anthology.* Our individual stories of motherhood finally coming together to play out on the screen, to find a collective voice, to show up and show out as testaments and testimonies to what we’ve been through and how we’ve come through.
I’d forgotten the details of these stories - human trafficking, grave illness, repeated pregnancy loss, childhood cancer, parentified children, sexual assault, single parenting. These women, we women, have definitely been through something. But being there with them, all I could feel is the power of their personhood, their today-ness. The dresses, the silver boots, the new jewelry, the hair and make up, the practice paragraphs, the meditation, the interview. They…we…were there to tell our stories; more importantly, we were there because we were asked to tell our story. And as mothering is often so much about being asked to elevate another’s story over your own, that was one joyful gift of an invitation.
I didn’t wake up in that energy today. I woke up at home, unexplainably exhausted, more committed to my blanket than my bike, and feeling the seeds of anger and sadness already competing for space in my soul.
Why? Yesterday was so beautiful, so special. Why do I feel so tired today? So exhausted by literally everything?
Because yesterday was our triumph. Our mountaintop.
And today I’m mourning the rest of the story. The somethings that brought us all through the desert. I’m remembering the details of the stories I’ve read, and the ones I’ve just briefly heard summarized, and the layers uncovered in our off-the-cuff conversations yesterday. The “holy shit” moments where my eyes had to break from the screen or my ears rang with rude reality or my heart dipped in to my belly.
It is overwhelming how much suffering this collective group of women has endured. I’m stuck in that suffering today. Their suffering. My suffering.
It just all feels so hard, so unfair, so cruel.
And I’m reminded that this, too, is the joy of telling stories. They are narratives that explore the full range of our humanity, a Dewey decimal system that includes digits for suffering, pain, and fear in equal part to joy, resurrection, redemption. A story is more than just its ending, and it is wholly human to break for its beginnings.
I reached out to my best friend this morning with the same opening line unceremoniously sent behind “Morning” as her wake up text. Her response was to do what she does, which is to make the world feel better, to try to make me feel better. When I sarcastically wrote back that it was not her job to make me feel better, she responded with the following:
Oh, I know my job.
But maybe I can’t let my mopey hang all the time. I want to lay down and just give up a lot right now. But I can’t or I won’t. It’s just not in me.
Maybe it’s residual trauma drama, maybe it’s that I don’t actually know how to let go, but I feel like an empty soul carrying my own weight, and yet…I still got out of bed anyway.
Fuck me.
An empty soul carrying my own weight.
I can’t get that image out of my head now. It echoes so many of the stories in this anthology, so many of the stories my friends tell, at least the beginnings, and some of the middles. And the getting out of bed anyway…yeah, that’s how we all got to the endings. Another morning, another day, another “doing it anyway”.
This morning, I was worried about myself, concerned that I had missed the full impact of yesterday’s mountaintop. That in the laughing and hugging and Insta-gramming amidst the haze of hair spray, I had sipped in something superficial, not substantial. Something that wasn’t as magnanimous or magnificent or magical as my fellow authors.
But that’s not it. Yesterday was joy, plain and simple. I got that.
Today is not the let down of a less-than-what-it-should-have-been experience. No, today is the empathetic reaction to so much time spent in the desert by so many women whom I now love and care about and respect. It is my very human heart’s reaction to bearing witness to an empty soul carrying its own weight. It is how I hold space for both destinations - the mountaintop AND the desert.
I’ve never been one for toxic positivity (my closest people are chuckling right now as that is the understatement of the century). I’ve also never been one to wallow long in my own pain. Historically, I’ve tried to split the middle, aiming for something just right of “sarcastic realist” and just left of “blindly happy.” Walking this line worked…for the most part…except when it didn’t. When life unleashed the full power of its awful on my doorstep, my range grew precipitously, first far more right reaching “desperate and angry” and then rebounding back to “grateful and a little bit weepy”. I don’t bother with trying to strike middle ground anymore. It feels stilted now, more like dialing in a robotic reaction than living in to a fully human experience.
What I learned in my desert is that our suffering is our humanity as much as our success. And telling both, feeling both, meeting both…well, that is the joy of being fully human.