A Year of Joy

"Is it possible to do great work without being miserable or insane? Do great artists need messy lives? I know it's a cliché question, it's a cliché idea, but it is what it is.... Tortured lives. Do we need them? Don't know the answer... I do know what's great about being a creative person or an artist as opposed to an accountant. I mean, if you're an artistic person, whether that's a painter or a stand-up comic or a writer, a musician, a poet, whatever it is, that the worst shit you go through is just fodder. It's just material or it's fuel for your creativity. It's some weird gift. If you're an accountant, it just makes you blow your brains out."

Maron, Season 3, Episode 8: "Professor of Desire"

I'm happy. I have been, almost non-stop, for a solid year. It's an odd state to find myself in after spending twenty years numbing myself with booze against a life of quiet, desperate, frustration peppered alternately with rage and desolation. Not that I didn't find my happiness in there, too. I did. I am generally a positive person and find the little shoots of love and joy where I can, even when the garden is generally barren. And my son has been a riot of color and beauty and adventure and growth right in the middle of my life since the day he arrived, no matter what the other circumstances have been.

Two and a half years after the moment when the life I thought I would always live came finally crumbling down, I have found my groove. I know who I am, and I like that guy.

I haven't been writing here much, and I wonder if that's why. I don't entirely agree with the cliché idea Marc Maron considers in the quote above; I was miserable and didn't create very much of anything. I'm happy and am creating more and pushing my boundaries as far as what creativity looks like for me, but it's true that I'm still not doing as much as I imagine myself doing. I think the real key to creativity and productivity is not misery but discipline, and I don't have a lot of that. But I'm working on it, and I'm OK with it as a characteristic rather than a character flaw. I'm enjoying the ongoing effort to change and grow several things about me, including that lack of discipline. That's who I am.

But my particular happiness over this particular year didn't happen solely on the strength of my own change in perspective. At the age of 20, I had a perception of love and partnership that mostly boiled down to, "You can get through anything as long as you're both still willing." Once we said our I Do's, I thought the "both still willing" part was settled, so of course we would stay together and work through anything and everything.

It sounds nice, but it eventually devolved into hunkering down and accepting general unhappiness as a way of life.

Now, I have a better understanding of compatibility. My ex-wife and I didn't have it, or we lost it not very long after we tied our destinies together. If trying is like pulling, we were both pulling, but from opposing directions. Compatibility means pulling together from the same side. And I have that now, with a surprising woman. And I'm grateful and joyous.

I think I told you all of that to tell you this: I want to tell you about her gift to me. The first anniversary of our first date was yesterday, and she gave me a gift last night.

She danced.

Those words don't describe it.

She came from Bangladesh to New York at a young age. She thinks that performing traditional dance may have been part of her early childhood in Dhaka, but it truly became part of who she is during her childhood in Queens, when she was collaborating, choreographing, and performing with her friends. She was a natural. She cultivated a style that was a fusion of traditional Bengali dance forms and more modern Bollywood choreography. She reveled in the positive feedback she received from her community. She loved it, and she was good at it.

She danced less over the years, as the demands of education and adulthood and marriage and parenthood all rose in importance in her life. She rediscovered the joy of it when she danced at her sister's wedding last year.

Like me, she has been on a journey of self discovery and self rediscovery. It's one of the reasons we're compatible.

So last night, she danced. For me. I have seen her in a running skirt with adorable braided pigtails. I have been stunned by how she looks all done up and in heels for a night out, and I've melted at the sight of her in a bright yellow sundress. I've seen how cute she is in pajamas with bed-tousled hair and her eyes barely open. At Christmas, she wore a lovely kameez of white and sea foam green. But I've never seen her in a saree until last night.

She showed me what a skill it is to wrap it properly, to get the length right and to make the folds hang just so. It was the first time I'd seen her barefoot with her nupur, heavy strings of bells wrapped around her ankles. She wore a tikli and dangly gold earrings like little chandeliers. Never had I seen her looking so poised and exotic. She put on a song called "Cham Cham" from a recent Bollywood movie. It was perfect. The words "cham cham" are meant to convey the sound of dancing feet, and the lyrics describe feeling compelled to move to the music, careless, heedless of anything but the joy of it. True to the song, she improvised her dance, but nothing about it looked improvised. Her bare feet struck the floor to the rhythm, making the nupur ring with a sound that only a hundred tiny bells can make. Her arms carved graceful arcs from the air. Her hands and wrists spun in whole circles in a way that seemed to defy the limitations of human bones and joints.

And she smiled with a pure and joyful radiance.

I teared up watching her. I teared up writing about watching her.

We've gone dancing. We've done swing, and two-step, and the free-form rhythmic moving that people do in front of stages at live shows and beneath lights at clubs. I've seen her move, and I have for a year admired her grace and confidence. I've noticed the clear influence on her style that her traditional dance background exerts on her movements, no matter what music is playing. But never had I seen her in her element, performing, taking charge of the space, turning her body into a work of art. And she did this for me. It was a gift to me.

So yes, I tried to turn this into something, some kind of an essay on art and happiness, on relationships and compatibility. But mostly, I just wanted to tell you what a lucky man I am and what a year with this woman in my life has meant to me. I just wanted to say, with a dreamy and faraway look in my eye, "You should've seen her..."