My son has declared that he is having “a Nerf gun moment.” He is not new to Nerf guns, but his enthusiasm these days is at an all time high. He just earned money to order a new one, and he counted down the hours until it arrived on our doorstep. He made new targets to shoot at, and prepared a new hide out from which to ambush my husband when they have Nerf gun wars.
He was so, so excited.
I love his enthusiasm, but this weekend I found myself having a really strong reaction to it. I kept wanting to warn him not to get his hopes up too high. Shipping is pretty slow these days, what if it is delayed? What if it isn’t as great as he thinks it’s going to be? What if it’s chintzy and breaks quickly? I found myself wanting to tell him not to get his hopes up too high.
This is not my typical response to excitement. I love anticipation and I tend to think of myself as an optimist. Having things to look forward to is one of my favorite parts of life. My reaction to this felt odd and out of character.
And it’s not just the Nerf gun. I’ve been having a weird reaction to all excitement, anticipation, and even joy. There’s a small, but present, part of me that feels like I need to tamp it down, to insert some “realism” into whatever we are feeling joyful about.
Life feels so turned upside down in this pandemic world, even for those of us who are healthy and relatively secure. We don’t know what the next few months will look like, but we know that the last few months have looked dramatically different than we expected. We’ve already faced a lot of disappointments; missed vacations, missed birthday celebrations, cancelled soccer seasons, and lost time with friends and family. There’s been so much disappointment that it seems like we should brace ourselves for more.
Brene Brown calls this feeling foreboding joy. It’s like pre-grieving, anticipating a loss before it even happens. It’s steeling ourselves up against good times in the hopes that it will protect us from future pain. At some level we think that if we anticipate the disappointment or the loss, it won’t hurt as badly.
The reality is, that’s not how it works. We still have to face loss and disappointment when they come. Anticipating what may happen doesn’t diminish the pain, it merely brings unnecessary grief to the time before the loss. We cannot see the future, and we cannot possibly anticipate what disappointments and delights lie ahead. I don’t know that shipping will be delayed, or that the Nerf gun will be a dud. I don’t know if my son will have months of happy play with a new favorite toy. I just don’t know. But I do know that foreboding joy doesn’t protect me from disappointment, it just steal my joy.
When we anticipate the worst and try to emotionally prepare ourselves, we rob ourselves of the joy of the moment and the fun of anticipation. We miss out on the good and don’t effectively shield ourselves from the hard and painful.
Even if we know this cognitively, it can be hard to shift our emotional experiences. The first step is to identify what the emotion is, to call out the urge to diminish our own enthusiasm or the excitement of others. It can be very helpful to identify the feeling as foreboding joy and to verbalize the experience to someone else.
Acknowledge the foreboding joy and give yourself permission to carry hope, to anticipate, to get excited. Give yourself permission to feel joyful. Identify things you are grateful for in the exact moment that you are in. Breathe deeply and scan your body for feelings of excitement and happiness. When you find them, hold up a magnifying glass to the feeling. Relish in the emotion the way you would savor a delicious bite of food or the feeling of sinking your feet into warm sand.
I am not saying that we should live in denial or make plans that are reckless or unrealistic. I am saying that we can allow ourselves to experience joy and enthusiasm within this bizarre pandemic reality, and that we can actively seek it out and even relish it.
The Nerf gun came on Tuesday night, earlier than expected. My son has already had hours of fun and enjoyment, and he told me yesterday that it was even better than he hoped for. There’s lots that’s hard and scary in the world, but there is still so much good, so much that exceeds even our best expectations.