My Laughing Heart

Joelle Deyo is our Wednesday contributor.

She holds a degree in Fine Arts from Cal Poly, Pomona and is an artist residing in Glendora, California.

Joelle knows the pain of marital infidelity, betrayal and divorce, and she is a survivor of addiction, childhood sexual abuse, and Anorexia.

She brings a wealth of experience to Wings Like Eagles, and is willing to be transparent and real so that our readers who have traveled similar paths will have someone with whom they can relate.

She is an advocate for the recovery process, and is a firm believer that there is hope, and a fulfilling life on the other side of Crisis.

It is Joelle's hope is that her experiences, past and present, will bring perspective and encouragement to those who are in the middle of their own life battles and who have been stuck in the pit, just like her.

I like to think that there is a part of us that nothing on this earth can touch.  It is the strongest part of our soul, the eternal part that is housed within our temporal bodies, yet exists outside of time.  It is the part that is not subject to the laws of physics.  Gravity can’t drag it down.  Entropy can’t break it down.  Nothing done to it can destroy it.  It is the part of us that has the capacity, though it may be consumed in the fire, to rise up from the ashes and fly once again.

I know some people don’t believe that.  Not everyone realizes that they are more than their failures or bad circumstances...or disobliging brain chemistry.

For my part, I have been pummeled by shame, anxiety, and hopelessness so dehumanizing and demoralizing that I have wondered whether or not I would lose myself to them entirely.  I have feared that the very things that made me me were dead and gone forever.

In the past decade alone I have been diagnosed by medical doctors and psychiatrists with Dysthymic Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, an eating disorder, and a seizure disorder – labeled to the point that I could no longer see myself as simply “woman.” Nor could I see myself as a writer, an artist, a lover, a daughter, a sister, or a friend.

About two years ago I was good and ready to give into the message that I had nothing more than a whole lot of dead weight to offer the world.  Joelle Deyo: The Disorder. What a wretched title to live under – one that I now know is categorically untrue.  

In the middle of one rotten day not so very long ago, something happened that radically changed my view of myself.  I laughed.  I was speaking on the phone with my sister and she said something that was so wonderfully refreshing and apropos of where I was in my life right at that moment, that a genuine belly laugh came bubbling up out of nowhere and escaped my lips.  It took me by surprise and I recall stopping after I hung up the phone and asking myself, “Where on earth did that come from?”  I’d hardly cracked a genuine smile in weeks.  I certainly hadn’t laughed very much. What right did I have to take delight in anything when I felt like such a monumental failure?  

The answer came to me while I stood over a sink full of dirty dishes, scrubbing day old pesto sauce off of a stack of plates.  Every right.  I had every right to want and need a joyful spirit.  I had every right to want to be silly, and to laugh for real.  I had every right to allow laughter into the middle of the turmoil and do what it does best – repair.  I knew in that instant that the intelligent, brave, kind-hearted, totally goofy girl that I had once believed myself to be was not lost.  She was still there, on life support perhaps, but definitely fighting for her place as my True identity.  She was beyond fed up with being silenced, ignored, and told who she was and wasn’t allowed to be.

She was and is my Laughing Heart.

Finding laughter again after going for so long without it was therapeutic for me.  The more I allowed myself to enjoy life again, the more I saw myself as a whole human being.  I began to distance myself from the negative labels that had been defining me and move toward a picture of myself that integrated my strength and compassion.  I began to see a future in which I was not the crestfallen poster child for depression, but a survivor, a fighter, and a champion for the cause of growth.

Laughter has also helped me both to let go and to hold on.  Where I have said goodbye to the belief that my old life was the one that I wanted and deserved, I have had to embrace a new way of being and thinking.  

As I have sloughed off a decade of distraction, disorder, unhappiness, and mindless void filling, I have had to embrace the words “possibility” and “capability.” To do these things I have had to celebrate my ability to laugh, to be a little bizarre, and to delight others and be delighted even in the middle of dark days.

A few weeks ago I grabbed a late lunch with a good friend of mine.  At the moment, we were both going through a lot of crap in our day jobs.  We sat commiserating over sandwiches and cookies and for some reason ended up laughing ourselves sick about the idea of dressing up as Batman and Robin and pathetically hurling ourselves off a bridge somewhere.  It was really a morose picture, but if you knew where we were emotionally that day, you would have laughed too.  I have laughed more with him over the saddest, dumbest, most unfortunate situations than with any other person this year.  He doesn’t know it, but because he was willing to sit and laugh in with me right in the middle of the mire of my life, I got through my divorce and the early months of my out-patient recovery program with more perspective and grace than I ever thought I could.

Other important people have come into my life with incredible gifts of goodness and humor as well.  As I have witnessed the rebirth of my core self, I know I have them to thank, at least in part, for the change that I now see inside of me.  All of them are survivors.  All of them are walking bravely toward joyful lives.  All of them have been instrumental in helping me to see beyond my labels, let go of my past, hold on to hope, and to truly live again…with a beating, breathing, laughing heart.