Bring Your Own Joy

(or Does Adulting Suck Or Is It Just Me?)

I’ve been watching a lot of My Little Pony lately. Not by choice, of course. Side note: do not write “I’m in an abusive relationship with my six-year-old that I can’t leave” on an online parenting forum because the cyber bots WILL flag you as a high-risk user and reach out to you immediately with a request to reply to them within 24 hours verifying that you are safe lest they report you to authorities and deactivate your account. 

So, on an episode of My Little Pony, there’s this annoyingly bubbly pony named Pinky Pie who has so much fun at her birthday party that she decides to throw an after-birthday party the very next day and I thought OMG DO PEOPLE THINK I AM LIKE THIS PONY? That I am so attached to things being joyous and fun that I desperately need them to be joyous and fun every minute of every day?

Because they’re right. I do. I am this pony. 

I turned 45 recently so I was deep into emotional cutting (ALERT CYBER BOTS!!!), reflecting on the gigantor gap between the life I thought I’d have and the one I’m living. Obviously, I thought I would be a famous creator of some sort like a wild artist who throws paint with their bare hands on a canvas which turns out beautifully and sells for oodles of money, and picking up a new hobby every few weeks. What are you enjoying these days, Caroline? Surfing, archery, performing the accordion, making mirror glazed cakes? Oh, ALL of it and then some? How lovely! I’d be making spontaneous, sweet love to my stable and dependable husband who looks like Javier Bardem and has the magnetic force of someone with rapid cycle bipolar disorder, along with fierce loyalty and a healthy credit score. We’d be grilling grass-fed burgers or a whole Branzino with locally-sourced accoutrements out on the lawn laughing with our neighbors/best friends as all of our kids—biological, adopted, and a few foreign exchange students—are running around chasing fireflies as the sun sets EVERY SINGLE SOLITARY EVENING.  

So it feels like a mighty fall when we cut to putting the GPS on even when I know where I’m going, just for the emotional support. TURN RIGHT. Awww, thanks buddy! That’s exactly what I was thinking!

My friend Olivia says I'm 90% pure whimsy (the other 10% is unsubstantiated terror but that is another post for another time that will likely be titled, “99 Ways to Die at the Zoo”). Being whimsical sounds awesome but the problem comes when day-to-day life isn’t whimsical. Most of life in our 40s is the same slog every day. At the risk of sounding ungrateful (which I’m not because thank sweet baby Jesus that my family and I are safe and healthy!) midlife is a flat out monotonous grind. 

Now, before you say GUUURL, GET A BOYFRIEND OR A CUDDLY DOG ALREADY!, let me stop you. This is not the problem. This shit is baked into society. We get up before the sun rises and work constantly to buy all the things. Self checkout at Teeter while avoiding eye contact with randoms. Clean the house. Do the laundry. Cut the grass. Drive the kids. Numb ourselves with alcohol or Bridgerton. Talk about how awesome Costco is…constantly. AVOID TOO MANY TARDIES AT ALL COST! Stay so busy checking so many mind-numbing boxes that don’t actually mean anything. 

Where is the joy when you don’t happen to be vacationing at the Grand Bohemian Lodge sipping a blackberry beet ginger mocktail? Can we get some day-to-day whimsy up in here?

I once went on my own little Joy Quest, challenging myself to find bits of joy in the everyday. I discovered tiny personal giggles in things like painting my nails different colors or wearing offensive socks that only I knew about. But I want joy to be bigger and omnipresent, so I start asking questions like “how do we start siestas in America?” or “should I become a professional hula hooper and homeschool my child in a little pod which whittles sailboats and forages for woodland creatures?” 

Y’all, I’m really close to buying an extremely oversized multicolor chandelier that looks straight out of Willy Wonka’s pure imagination and is so absurdly too large for my house that I will need to physically duck underneath it which gives me a fun thrill like not being quite the right size Alice in Wonderland. Help me, I’m whimsical.  

What’s the answer? Do we continuously look for small moments of joy in life and take what we can get with lowered expectations? Do we make our own joy, interior scale be damned? Do we get deep and embrace that suffering is simply a universal and unavoidable part of the human condition? If there is no resistance, and we accept that midlife adulting is hard and kind of sucks, does it open up more space for some light to shine through? 

At least this pity party isn’t a party of one anymore. It’s me and Pinky Pie against the world. And all of you are invited. BYOJ.