Why Do Even Joyful Things Make Me Anxious?

If everything goes according to plan, I will be happy.

If I could control it all.

But then things go even better than planned, and I am still not happy.

Worse… I'm not just unhappy, I am anxious.

Get this.

Last week, I was taking a shower at 8 am when my husband came in and said, “We are going on a 3-day cruise to the Bahamas next week! My work was able to get us on for free!”

A natural reaction would have been for me to say, “OMG! Praise God.”

Instead, my response was, “Well, you don’t even have your passport. I told you to get that a year ago.”

Ugh. Just typing that out makes me disgusted at my negative attitude.

The thing is, I WANTED to be excited. I got out of the shower and started researching if you needed a passport to go to the Bahamas (Guess what? You don’t). Then I felt a tinge of excitement.

That was later followed by… We don’t have a babysitter, I don’t have anything to wear, and what if the internet is wrong?

I was waiting for the carpet to be pulled out from under my feet.

I knew what was happening, but I did not know how to make the anxiety stop.

I was a foreboding joy.

Brene Brown calls foreboding joy, “The feeling of joy immediately followed by worry or dread, a way of coping with our fear of loss and vulnerability by emotionally withdrawing from joy.”

The way my non-PhD brain would phrase it is, when given the choice between anxiety and excitement, you choose anxiety because you are too afraid of being disappointed.

“There are too many people in the world today who decide to live disappointed rather than risk feeling disappointment.” - Brene Brown.

I proceeded to spend the rest of the week in an overwhelming flurry of anxiety, so afraid that my joy would be stolen from me that I stole all of the joy from myself.

The best way I can describe to you how I felt was like I was getting ready to jump off a cliff.

It could be the best time of my life, or I could die.

I could jump off the cliff and go on this cruise with my husband, have the best time, or I could jump off and get excited, only to have it all blow up in my face… which, quite honestly, has happened before.

In my body’s feat to protect me from past hurts, it chose to self-sabotage instead.

Bad attitudes and constant arguments riddled the rest of the week. In the back of my head, I knew, though, that I was causing it all.

My husband would say, “Just stop worrying.”

Silly boy… doesn’t realize that anxiety has been my captor since I was 12 years old.

Thankfully, the Lord spoke to me through Brene Brown's book Atlas of the Heart.

She recounted a story of a man who lost his wife. The man said, “My whole life, I never got too excited about anything. That way if things didn't work out, I wasn't devastated, and if they did, it was a pleasant surprise." And when this man was in his 60s, his wife of 40 years was killed in a car accident. He then said, "The second I realized she was gone, I knew I should have leaned harder into those moments of joy. Because not doing so did not protect me from what I feel now."

Continuing to try on different tragic scenarios does not make going through them any easier, it just robs us of the joy in the current moment.

Life is not going TOO good.

Good things happening to you are NOT a warning signal that everything is going to fall apart.

You are NOT programmed for self-sabotage.

Have you ever considered that you are worth a life that is surprisingly better than you could have imagined?

How can you stop staring at the edge of the cliff?

How can you stop clenching your whole body, waiting to get hit by a full frontal assault?

How can you expect the best today?

Just me talking to me…

Natalie Nicole Li