Love Thursday
by Jess
I do not consider myself a cheerful person. I love to be cheerful, and I love to laugh. I love when it makes my ribs hurt, and I love when a small unexpected happening makes me smile. I am capable of happiness, joy, warmth, cheer and exuberance. However, continuous, uninitiated cheer is something I struggle at. Reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” I recall the discovering that she had articulated my personality perfectly: “…a tendency towards melancholy.” To this day this remains the single quote that I can repeat from a book from memory: she summed me up in four words.
I met up with an old friend yesterday in Geneva – a friend I had not seen in over five years. I anticipated bubbly, cheerful Katie, and she did not disappoint. She always had that quality, which I find in others as well, which I have always envied. I light up momentarily like the strongest beacon and then collapse into a dimmer, calmer being. What would it take for me to be bright and cheerful all of the time? What would it take for me to feel a consistent source of light, rather than a series of intense blips on a dim radar? I would prefer to be, because it feels good to be cheerful.
It sounds worse than it is, when I ramble like this. I only mean this: I am in conscious wonderment of people who smile while sitting on the beach looking around, or people who smile to themselves while walking through a department store. At my most serene, happiest moment, lying on the beach this summer after my wedding, I was not smiling. My face, when I catch myself in the mirror, is blank. A look that is most often mistaken for snobbery, when in fact, I am simply daydreaming. I daydream a lot. I am asked, “Where are you?” a lot. I am calm as a Swiss Sunday. And, fairly frequently, I will sigh a deep, lung-rattling sigh, for no apparent reason. When Jon asks me what is wrong, my answers are honest:”Nothing,” or “I do not know.” I always shock myself with those sighs, and the sudden registering that my face is hanging again, though I’ve nothing to explain it.
I imagine things deep down inside me shifting. Like leaves disturbed by a quick gust of wind, my inner layers or memories – some of them saturated with pain – rising briefly, and then drifting back down, resettling themselves.
Last week, I woke up depressed one morning. Full blown, fantastic depression. The first day was horrible. The next two days it simmered away slowly like our dinner’s sauce, being slowly reduced to nothing while Jon tends to me in my misery. Three days, and then I am free again.
For some reason, in the days since, I have felt compelled to combat the twinges of sadness that arise in me. I call it “sadness,” but in actuality, I do not know what fuels this weight, only that I find myself at the top of the escalator, about to ring the buzzer to be let in the gym, and I sigh a deep, troubling sigh, and suddenly the afternoon looks bleak. Today I heard that sigh and something gave me the strength to bite down on it. I envisioned a moment in my past when I walked into my gym and I was cheerful and excited about something. I remembered that feeling, clamped down onto it and buzzed it and myself into the gym: I was determined not to let that sigh follow me in. Two minutes later, undressing, I answered my cell phone. My husband calling to say, “I love you. That’s all. I’ll be home early.”
I did smile there in the locker room.
Walking home today I found a small ruby heart on the ground. It is Thursday. The irony to me is, last week I began participating in Shutter Sister’s Love Thursday. I have always been slightly skeptical of the “find a heart in your daily life” thing, because it seemed a bit corny. I’d love to look for love, but really, do I have to find heart shapes? Then, today, there is a small heart on my path. I felt corny picking it up. A smiling, corny girl in a red riding-hood jacket, purchased in a second-hand clothing shop on Haight-Ashbury two hours before I would meet my future husband. I thought to myself, “Well how about that…”
I am still feeling the high coming from a short conversation that I had at a gas station yesterday, with a mentally handicapped man who pumped my gas: The way I felt my present self pull back from him (“people here don’t chat, I’ve grown accustomed to my little shell, what would the point be…”) and then the real me stepped back up to the plate and opened up. He was wily and clever, and he had me laughing within moments. He had a big, goofy smile. I drove away waving to him, winking because we both had seen his next customer’s license plate (Zurich) and I now knew how he felt about those customers.
I wonder if perhaps that conversation is what gave me the strength to choose to be cheerful this afternoon.
I’ve been hoarding this little quote from Balzac for over two weeks, writing it onto one photo and another, then just as quickly erasing it: It never felt right. Now it is perfect.
Comments
The part about opening up with the man pumping your gas reminded me of this story I stumbled upon the other day on the web: http://www.zenmoments.org/the-cab-ride-ill-never-forget/
Amazing how small decisions in seemingly random moments in time can have such impacts on our lives and emotions.
What a lovely find. And I think your story sort of captures the point: it’s not that you should go looking for hearts (which, I agree with you, is a bit hokey), but that when you see a message, or a sign of love, however small or trivial, you should take a moment and notice it. I love that you noticed this one.
May signs of love and secret smiles continue to appear in your life.
K.
I’m exactly like you! Since my early childhood, I tend to be easily “depressed” by things and without reason… I’m also quite melancholic and can’t smile all the time! I guess we are sensible people.
Cheers,
Rosa
I tend toward melancholy, too. Like you, I am always impressed with the perpetually cheerful types and wish I were more upbeat more consistently. But personality is what it is! You captured the mood beautifully. Brava for opening up with the gas attendant. I’m sure he’ll remember you for a long time to come. Regarding Marcy’s comments, ZenMoments is authored by a friend of a friend…who had just pointed out his site to me yesterday. Zen?
First, Jess, send me the links to the things above (Sister…), etc. To all of YOU, but especially my daughter, I know of only 2 kind of people who seem perpetually cheerful. I say seem for a reason. First, people like Esther (or Cecelia) who SEEM perpetually cheerful but who are not in private, people who actually suffer for themselves and the world quite deeply, but whose sheer love for people gives them an unconscious strength to set that aside when you (and others) are around them. They are the “real thing,” the enactment of love. The second type, and I’ve known only a few, but I’ve known them both in highschool and in college and occasionally as a professor (when, rarely, I get this type as a studen), are people who truly “don’t get it,” who have no reflection, who live on the surface, and who have come from incredibly sheltered lives. They lack the compassion or imagination of the first type and, are to my mind, incredibly difficult to bear. If you DON’T have a “tendency toward melancholy” in the face of all human history and in the face of this world now, you’re either insane or very low on the intelligence quotient. On the other hand, overcoming that melancholy (like Esther), through the sheer power of love (or spirit)—–something I did for years in your early life, and even a lot of the time during my own bleakest time, and something I seem to have recovered–is the kind of cheerfulness marked by maturity and by Grace.
Love, Mom p.s. change the border back to purple! I looked forward to SEEING the page. The gray is depressing me, and I have a tendency toward melancholy.
Yea! I was dreading the gray, especially after the AMAZINGLY detailed (brilliant) description of you day at the Embassy. Amazing blog, really amazing.
BUT I was dreading the gray again and felt like looking here would feel like Stalingrad or something.
And, surprise, YOU, something beautiful and bright with a future…….that’s what this says to me.
thanks for changing it back–I was honestly having trouble wanting to click on it with that gray. THIS, I can’t wait to see, and to see what you’re doing.
Mom
I feel like I used to be a happier person before I moved to Switzerland. I think training myself to not smile really affected me deeper than I thought. It’s also hard to be in surroundings where you’re not completely comfortable or accepted. I do think I’m happier in my own country, but still, I enjoy being here and having the adventure at the same time. It doesn’t always make sense!
[...] conversation is what gave me the strength to choose to be cheerful this afternoon. An extract from “Love Thursday” by Jessica Brogan-Maier: an American freelance writer living in Switzerland. First published on [...]