Moments of Joy
I read Normal People (Sally Rooney) a few weeks ago, but this isn’t really a post about Normal People. (It was good, by the way. Very good.) It’s a post about infertility.
There’s this part in the book where one of the characters is going through a depressive episode. During this time period, they go out to a book reading and end up having a nice evening. They go home and re-read old notes they made about a story they wanted to write, and the character describes this moment of happiness inside the hell that is depression “like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything” (p. 228).
Despite everything.
The words felt familiar because there were moments like that with infertility; moments where I felt this break in the heaviness and I got a full ten minutes of feeling happy before the other feelings started flooding back in. It reminds me of painted photographs. Do you know how people take black and white photos and use paint to dot in colour in one tiny section of the photo? Like a black and white photo of a woman, but the rose she’s holding is a dusty pink. Or a black and white photo of a child holding a balloon, and the trailing balloon is a cheery yellow.
Spot colour photography. It’s like that. Unexpected colour; unexpected happiness.
So the words felt familiar, but I couldn’t actually pull out any happy memories from that time period. I could remember a lot of not happy moments without needing to consult a diary or photo album to remember. But I couldn’t think of moments of joy like that despite knowing that they must have existed since the words in the book felt so familiar.
Maybe we just remember sad moments during sad times more vividly.
7 comments
We went to the Cloisters for the first and only time and took a tour with a Columbia grad student / medievalist after my BIL passed away. It helped to be in a new place because we were so changed. I could never go back so it’s a memory I actively summon.
those moments do come. I’m right in the middle of dealing with infertility, pregnancy loss, and the depression that comes with it. I hope I remember those seldom moments in the midst of the hell. Because like you said they are unexpected and yet so beautiful! I’ll have to make a conscious effort to remember some of those moments.
What an apt metaphor. And exactly as you say. I can’t call up any particular memory, but I do have the sense that there were spots of color during that very dark time.
I don’t think I remember them either. Maybe we don’t remember those moments because our narrative was such — “this sucks” we told ourselves over and over, so that’s what we distilled.
Things still suck in many ways nowadays, but I also have kids and yes, they have a way of making me aware of that cheery yellow balloon trailing behind them in the black-and-white-orama. At that very moment. And this mindfulness both changes my narrative and makes me more likely to remember the yellow in the future. At least I hope it does. (I often feel like Jim Carrey’s character in “eternal sunshine of a spotless mind”, desperately trying to hold on to some little memory fragments that will soon be erased and gone. “Please… Remember this moment”, I plead with myself, though I fear it’s in vain. Time is rather cruel.)
I remember that quote in the book, because I white about that quite a bit. Noticing those fleeting moments of joy heeled me understand that I would be okay later. For me they were small – the feeling of warmth from the sun on my back (both my losses were in summer), a beautiful scene (we escaped for a simple picnic to a cliff), laughed at something silky on a sitcom. But I remember them. Partly because I know I felt guilty after feeling good and forgetting, if only for a few seconds, and the guilt was the stronger of the emotions I was feeling. But, eventually, learning to embrace the pleasure of those little things helped me heal.
I like your analogy of the spot colour photography. It describes it exactly.
Write, not white. Stupid predictive text.
Looking forward to reading this book! 🙂