Shameful Joy
Candy pumpkins, musicals, and hiding in the closet.
I “eeny-meeny-miny-moed” my choice of Italian red wine from the desperation case on the floor in my kitchen, a generous gift from an out of town friend to help me survive the coming weeks.
Snagging a stemless glass on my way out of the kitchen, I cut off all the lights on our main floor and padded upstairs to our bedroom.
It was a Friday night. My daughter was fast asleep. My husband was in the hospital. And all I wanted to do was drink wine in bed and watch Hamilton on Disney+.
It felt shameful.
Not so much the luxuriating in bed with wine part…let’s be honest, not the first time, definitely won’t be the last. It was the knowledge that I was about to snuggle in to our Tempur-Pedic king-sized bed, dogs curled around me, wine in hand, while my husband lay strapped to a hospital bed terrified as his post-Dilaudid brain hallucinated baby alligators and Inception-style time traveling.
It was COVID times, so they wouldn’t physically allow me to stay with him. I had called before the wine grabbing and confirmed he was in his room seemingly asleep. There wasn’t anything else I could do.
And yet, I felt ashamed. Mostly because I desperately wanted to be two glasses in to not throwing away my shot instead of at the hospital with him.
I’m not a candy person.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a dysfunctional relationship with sugar, but when it comes in candy form, I can typically turn it down, no problem.
But there are three occasions and corresponding candy for which I have zero self control:
Halloween - Little candy pumpkins
Easter - Brach’s OG jellybeans. The big ones that get stuck in your teeth.
When my life goes to shit - Reese’s Pieces
For #’s 1 and 2, I’ve learned the delicate balance of keeping this maniacal addiction in check. I am only allowed to purchase one bag of each per season. Let’s not talk about how much starting Halloween in July and Easter in February is fucking my external control plan. Soon, I’m going to have to enact “cannot purchase until” dates. 🙄
There’s no real rules with Reese’s Pieces. When my life has gotten to the point where I willingly purchase a bag, I am well past caring. Usually, I’m also just too depressed or overwhelmed to go buy another bag, so the problem solves itself.
I typically eat these things in solitude. Think, like, in the closet while changing my clothes kinda solitude. I’ve even eaten them in the bathroom. Basically, they get consumed when and where I’m highly unlikely to get caught. By my child OR my husband. Who hides mouthfuls of jellybeans at 43?!?
This girl. 👋
It’s shameful.
When my mother was diagnosed with inoperable uterine cancer and I went home with my 2-year old and two dogs to care for her, an Amazon package arrived at her house with my name on it. It was a fairly big box, and while my addled brain could easily have ordered something I didn’t remember, not something that big. I grabbed a pair of scissors and cut through the top tape, distracted as I tried to crane my neck around the kitchen doorway to keep an eye on my daughter. When I finally got the box open, I started laughing.
Inside were four, 1-lb bags of Reese’s Pieces. FOUR POUNDS of life going to shit. And two blankets, because, well yeah, what else do you send a woman who has terminal cancer?
For an entire month, I ended every day with a handful of Reese’s Pieces. Sometimes three or four handfuls. A bag stayed on the table with my computer and the growing pile of bills at all times. I snacked on them while I wrote updates on my mother’s CaringBridge page. I pounded them when the tears started to threaten. I sucked on them when exhaustion hit but I had two more hours of work to do.
The irony is that it was the skinniest I’ve ever been in my adult life, probably because besides coffee, Reese’s Pieces were my primary sustenance.
And even though my life was clearly falling apart around me, I ate the Reese’s in the dark, at night, by myself.
I get why I’m physically addicted to candy pumpkins and jelly beans. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Data suggests that HFCS causes metabolic dysregulation and abnormal dopamine release even in the absence of weight gain. Basically, those little pumpkins are a happy hit.
Given that I’m usually experiencing this brief bout of happiness in my closet, all signs point to a more serious problem. So, if all it boiled down to was perpetuating the dopamine hit, I’d be extremely worried about my eventual slide in to more adventurous means of keeping that going. Once the pumpkins are gone and the plastic eggs put away, though, I go back to loathing HFCS like the good gut health girl I’m supposed to be.
After my mother passed away, there were still 2.5 bags of Reese’s Pieces left. I threw the open one away and donated the other two. That was probably shameful in and of itself.
The point is…I don’t think dopamine is the issue here.
There’s a juxtaposition between shame and joy, an uncomfortable chafing between actions that leave us feeling fleetingly happy and fundamentally flawed all at the same time. When we hide joy, not out of a desire to keep a secret joy for ourselves, but out of shame that we should not be experiencing it in the first place, we convince ourselves that joy should be the reward only for behavior that is responsible, appropriate, controlled.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but joy just don’t work that way.
My love of Halloween pumpkins started because my mother would take me to the drug store, the local one that doesn’t exist anymore, to buy Halloween candy. We would get several bags of candy corn (for the Trick-or-Treat bags) and a single bag of pumpkins (for me). To this day, the drug store is the only place I can find bags of just candy pumpkins. That shameful joy is as much about nostalgia as it is about sugar, a reminder of a mother who made Trick-or-Treat bags for the neighborhood despite her meager finances and who shook her head at my refusal to eat candy corn but bought me my own bag of pumpkins anyway.
Reese’s Pieces became my go to for life’s disasters when my roommate in graduate school brought home a bag to tempt me out of my stupor. I had just found out that my boyfriend of four years, the one I was moving to another city for after graduation, had cheated on me. Repeatedly. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t shower. I couldn’t really talk all that well. But I destroyed that bag of Reese’s. Those little peanut butter buttons are my benchmark.
It’s my acknowledgement that we’ve reached rock bottom. And my reminder that I know how to climb.
In seventh grade, I discovered musicals. The soundtrack to Les Miserables played incessantly on my boombox. I’m not sure when I realized the play was about the French Revolution. What I heard was the agony of Eponine, my favorite character, heartbroken by her unrequited love for Marius. A little dramatic for teenage love, maybe, but let’s just say I got her. Since then, musicals remain my language for emotional anguish. I wanted to watch Hamilton that night in my bed because I was being overtaxed, and I needed a Revolution to right the ship.
In my experience, the origin story of shameful joy is far more complex than dopamine. We’re hiding in closets and sneaking around bedrooms less because of society’s shame and more to avoid having to explain. I’d rather be chastised for wolfing down a completely man-made sugar bomb than tear up telling the story of my Mom buying pumpkins at the drug store. I’ll take the label of selfish wife because I am too emotionally exhausted to put words to why I need Lin Manuel Miranda to sing me free of my fear.
Shame is an acceptable price to pay for the joy.
That’s not to say that sometimes we don’t just want what we want, story or not, but it is to say that if you find yourself sitting amongst your shoes with a Little Debbie in your mouth, you may just want to ask yourself why.
I don’t have a lot to say about shame. I feel like Brené Brown’s got that one covered. But I’ve got some perspective now on joy.
Ya’ll, we are going to need pumpkins. And Reece’s Pieces. And Hamilton. And whatever other complicated joy you carry that you and only you understand. Your penance for that joy shouldn’t be shame. But if you need to eat it in a closet or cry in your car or watch it with the lights off, please do. Just go after the joy, my loves. Shame be damned!
I always love listening to your audio Jess! I think eating in the closet is more about self soothing and chasing away scary feelings than about joy. I can totally connect with your go-to candy of choice in times of high stress. I always have a jar of sour ball sucking candies in my apartment. The sugar is the dopamine hit, and the sucking is one of our earliest self soothing skills (think pacifiers and nipples).
There's also something calming (mind numbing) about the repetitive hand-to-mouth motion, like eating popcorn at the movies. Combined with the pleasure signals sent to our brains that we are eating (which means we will live) it's all happening in the ancient, reptilian part of our brain. Some people numb out with drugs, some with shopping, others with eating, to various levels of excess.
It took me years to figure out that shame is part of the cycle, and if I wanted to find other ways of coping with my anxiety, I'd have to let go of the shame of my self soothing behavior. Ultimately, cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt) helped me sit with a lot of the discomfort I had in my teens and 20s. Lately, I just lay down on the floor in my bathroom to feel grounded and safe when the anxiety hits. The more I allow myself to feel my feeling, the faster they pass. XO 🥰