Your Courageous Life

don't dull your flame

A late Friday blog post coming, because I had too many thoughts about this topic to keep save them for next week, where the intensity and energy might not be the same.

Here’s the thing: don’t dull your flame.

I finished Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project last night. The latter chapters explore why it is that people resist being happy–why people will go to such lengths to even condemn or shut down the happiness of others. There are so many threads of this conversation that are all tying together for me, lately:  exploring the concept of non-support; tying together with my own feelings of surprise that when I started to feel better and brighter, after what felt like years of work climbing some kind of metaphorical arduous hill, to find that there is then a backlash against being happy, that I now run the risk of being called “fake,” of reading blog posts and tweets that mock people for wanting to step into a practice of reframing their lives more positively. This all tying together with the idea that others get to choose the experience they want to have of their lives, of others, of me, and I get to do the same, and when I step into that space, I’m willing to let someone choose their unhappiness if that is what they need to feel more authentic. And then this lovely blog post by Kelly Rae Roberts that I resonated with and understood and appreciated, because she so tenderly explores how she felt and yet I sense that she has some compassion for what it might feel like to watch someone have the success that she has had and want it for themselves.

I encourage you not to dull your flame. I would love to tell you that if you just “be yourself,” others will come around. I would love to tell you that the choices will always be easy.

They’re not, and that’s okay. Easy is usually less interesting.

But along the way, I encourage you not to dull your flame, not to make it about family or the current economy or the way that someone else might be threatened. I encourage you to burn bright, to live your life in a completely 100% fully alive kind of way, with the courage to trust that you could help shine some light for someone else.

Truly, just by being yourself, you may be someone else’s gift. Maybe they need to see you in all of your brilliant, lit up and glowing glory, rocking out your life, and maybe it needs to trigger the shit out of them, and maybe they then need that shift from resenting you to the process of looking at why they devalue themselves, put their projects on hold, prioritize their lives differently.

That’s their shit. I’d call it something else, something more lady-like, but I’ve been there–yup, I have!–resenting the success of someone else, and it feels like shit so that’s what I’m going to call it.

Good things do not happen because we are simply lucky, though I acknowledge the magical component. And even though I acknowledge the forces of sexism, racism, and classism that are so pervasive in our world, I refuse to take the powerless position that they cannot ever be overcome. (The day we take that position, our society is really in trouble–yet another shift I am making in my life is moving away from soapboxing about society’s problems and being a capital-V “Victim” in moaning that the corporate machine will never let justice prevail).

I don’t know how all of my dreams are going to come true in any specific way, and yet I won’t give up on being a dreamer, a big life liver, a possibilitarian, a courageous believer.

I won’t dull my flame.

Please don’t dull yours.