Species of joy
“Your patronus is unusual,” the Pottermore assessment told me (Pottermore is the authority on all things Harry Potter). “We’ll need you to answer a couple more questions.”
For those unfamiliar with Harry Potter trivia, a patronus is an animal spirit that manifests during a spell that wards off dementors, the soul-sucking creatures that feed on despair. You conjure an animal spirit by recalling your happiest memory, using it to repel the darkness. The Pottermore assessment deemed my case “unusual” after I replied to this question: “In this memory, are you alone or with others?”
Well, this question certainly doesn’t seem very neutral, Pottermore. You just said I was unusual. I tried to back-pedal. Was I sure this was my happiest memory? I thought of those late summer nights in Tucson, feet in my aunt and uncle’s backyard pool and my gaze upward in awe at the extravagant celestial parade above me, cradled in stillness as my imagination chased through light years of possibilities for how my life might unfold.
And I tried to think of a memory that would eclipse it. But the other contenders shared a quality that set me apart, quite literally, in nearly every instance. In all those memories, I was alone.
Solitude and loneliness are rarely correlated in my life. Indeed, it’s more common for them to have an inverse relationship.
But I can’t claim that there’s never loneliness. Sometimes I feel sad or self-conscious when I can’t experience joy in sync with others. Or grief, for that matter. There’s lip service to the fact that there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to grieve, but there’s still a set of expectations. Shared emotions are a connective tissue of social bonding, and I’m still struggling with the fact that I can’t force them no matter how I try to fix whatever I think is misaligned. I learned in improv that you can’t control your internal emotional temperature on a given day; accepting the lesson is an ongoing effort.
I think of this around the holidays. I enjoy the Christmas season, but I’m mostly ambivalent on Christmas day. And for whatever reason, almost like strange clockwork, I was usually in a crummy mood on tree-decorating day at the Randall household when I was growing up. My sister, meanwhile, never had any trouble finding her holiday cheer — and today, her seasonal decor could put Martha Stuart to shame. “I never feel what I’m supposed to feel when I’m supposed to feel it,” I would always say to my parents.
It’s also strange and isolating to find joy in things most people dislike. It makes for tricky small talk when someone observes, “Ugh, this rainy weather is awful, isn’t it?” No. It’s my favorite. Enough of my colleagues know now. They affectionately refer to me as the office vampire.
I once read an article where the author described his relationship with summer in Seattle like a weekend visit from a long-distance partner. The pressure to use the precious little time wisely took the natural, organic joy out of it. That specific example is lost on me, of course, preferring Seattle’s cloudy default weather. But I have to wonder if that’s what’s going on with me: that the pressure to feel joy shuts it down.
Because I do experience joy: immense, and some might say incommensurate, joy. I recently had each of my brunch guests, one by one, listen to the story about the 50% discount I negotiated on my beautiful new ceramic serving dish (“… from $52 to $25 just because it had a broken spoon. Do you think I cared about the spoon? I didn’t even know it came with a spoon!!”).
A couple of weekends ago, I settled in at Starbucks with a caramel macchiato and watched an episode of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, and I thought, “It doesn’t get any better than this.” Different setting, same principle as those starry Tucson nights. The joy of awe and imagination. (And coffee. Always coffee.)
I’ll take this exchange. If my joy is MIA when I think it should better harmonize with those around me, I’m still grateful that joy itself is nonetheless a frequent companion. And if I can’t always be joyous concurrently with others (e.g., waking up ambivalent on Christmas morning while my sister is clearly euphoric), it is a blessing when others find it in themselves to match my enthusiasm about an unexpected discount at the cash register. I mustn’t be so hard on my unique and “unusual” brand of joy. It may be imperfect, but it serves me well.
My patronus, the owl, sure puts my preference for solitude, chronically late bedtimes, and introspection into perspective. After all, if you were to find any animal studying cultural anthropology on a weekend — for fun — you can bet it’d be an owl. It’s nice to think that there are as many species of joy as there are animals in the world, and that they all belong. Like all the constellations in the Tucson night sky.