The cancer is gone. My surgery was a success, and I am almost entirely recovered. I am playing soccer again — albeit on a limited basis — and I can do so without pissing myself. I call that a win.
So why don’t I feel happy?
Since finding a therapist that I liked, last fall, I have been going to sessions every week, save a couple of weeks right after my surgery, and it has been helping. There have been some weeks where I felt what I can only assume many people call normal, but save a few brief hours here or there, I can’t say that I’ve been truly happy. I’ve felt steady, and unaffected — confident even — but never happy.
Last week I was bragging to my therapist about how “even” I felt the week before, about how I seemed to be looking at the world with a different perspective that allowed difficulty to roll off of me. I wasn’t getting bogged down in things I couldn’t control, and I was far more assertive than I had been in a long time.
But then, suddenly, a day later, all that disappeared and I started sliding backwards. There was no cause, that I could discern, aside from being a bit overly tired, and the more I attempted to find something upon which I could at least blame for the set back, the less certain I became. I began to feel a great weight upon me, as if something was sitting on my lungs, and everything became heavy and labored. After a week of this, I began to doubt all the progress I had made in the preceding months. Deflated and discouraged, I was sinking back into a very familiar hole, and the thought crossed my mind that I would, in fact, never experience joy in my life.
That thought, alone, was crushing. What if I can never get out of this?
I lacked the strength or courage to tell anyone what was happening, and that certainly made it worse. It’s a hard place to be. I am not one to ask for help, especially when I don’t know what might help me, or even how to express what I’m experiencing. So, I remained silent until my next session.
Even then, it took most of the session before I admitted the idea that I might never feel joy. I acknowledged that I knew the thought wasn’t accurate, even while it felt as if it was. And then it occurred to me that I am unable to walk across that threshold to joy. I don’t know why. I don’t know what is holding me back. I just know that doorway is closed to me. I am a dweller on the threshold.
At the time I admitted this, it didn’t dawn on me how my semantics had changed. In the past, when talking about the barriers between me and happiness, I always spoke about it in terms of a wall, or of being in a pit, something far more permanent and foreboding to overcome. But a threshold? A threshold is meant to be crossed. It requires only a certain amount of energy, a certain resolve, and the other side can be achieved.
Here, in a moment where I could see nothing good, there is such promise.
A year ago, I wrote a short play called Into The Sun. A local company had put out a call for short plays on the theme of tolerance. I hadn’t intended to write anything, but a vision came to me a few days later, and I realized that it was a play. I thought I was writing one thing, but when I was done, it was something else. It seems I was already working on this, long before I knew it consciously. The central character is walking along the bank of a river, into the rising sun, and she is stumbling over the river rocks, but she is determined to keep going. She is blinded by the sun, and her feet are sliding out from under her, but she keeps stepping forward.
I may be a dweller here, but I think I might just step over that threshold sooner than I think.