Optimistic people can be annoying. They sing too early in the day. They come back with a chirpy response when everyone else feels fired up to complain. They are smiling. Always smiling.
I am one of them.
I can’t help it, though. I understand how perpetual joy can come across. It looks superficial and only loosely based in reality. This may not be true of all of the Pollyannas you know, but for me, my delight is not superficial, it’s deep. And it couldn’t be more real.
The truth of the matter is that it is dark outside. Really dark. I have experienced days when I could hardly get out of bed, either because of terrible physical pain or because of emotional pain and depression. If I acted like I really felt, I’d look a lot more like the Grinch than some sweetheart from Whoville. Instead, I choose to act like I want to feel, and it changes me. I’ve learned that even in the pitch of night, there is something to enjoy and some reason to laugh. This is good, so good, for me because laughter is the best medicine, as we all know. Laughter lessens the heaviness of a life with lupus. It softens the blow of physical disability for me. It helps and heals you, too, and you know it.
Laughter is worth pursuing. Worth seeking purposefully.
Once I was in close contact with someone who didn’t like me too much. This person is highly practical, and when I walked in the room, all my joy must have seemed like too much fluff in too small a space.
At first I let it bother me, especially when other people shared the same viewpoint. I tried never to join their complaining, even when I agreed that there was room and reason for it. Complaints wouldn’t have changed anything about the issue, though. So I looked for the few ways to be glad or thankful or genuinely happy about some part of it. It is always possible to be positive.
“That is not what we do here,” they said with their eyes.
“It’s what I do,” I said with mine.
Things did not get easier.
Every time we met together I felt like my favorite Christmas house. It is covered from curb to shutter with light-up stuffy-stuff-stuff. There is a roof-high Santa. There is an inflated hot air balloon. There is a wishing well. A pink elephant. Wrapped presents. White flamingos. There is jolly music coming from a speaker in the driveway, and even the roof blinks green.
But the reason this is my favorite house is not because of what they have. It is because of what their neighbors don’t have. You can always find a crazy house or two in a neighborhood that’s all aglow. But this crazy house is on a street where no other house has so much as a wreath on the door. This neighborhood is holi-dead, extending up and down the street. You can sense the peer pressure to shut it up. Turn it off. Take it down. The darkness shouts their disapproval.
“That is not what we do here,” say the frowning houses.
“It’s what I do,” says the crazy house.
It can be hard to be the only light in an otherwise dark place.
But does year after lonely year deter the crazy house? No way. It blazes on. And we see it all the better for the darkness.
Be the crazy house.
