I Love to Laugh!

I mentioned in a post awhile back how laughter/laughing has a special meaning for me. As you might have noticed, instead of a write-up about me on my blogger profile I simply have one phrase: I love to laugh!. Well, this is going to be the post that explains why I love to laugh. I warn you, I'm not great at storytelling. I can't seem to find the right words but at the same time, I can become overly wordy. Please, bear with the Wordy Cordy. :)

Picture if you will, a girl around 11 with short kinky blonde hair. (This girl has always liked her hair short, but rarely takes the time or has the patience to style it. For the longest time, the girl was petrified of hair-dryers.) This kinky blonde is wearing a green striped shirt, purple gray rollerblades, red/blue/gray helmet and a newly gifted red and gold striped scarf. (It's August...she's wearing a scarf...) But we're not done here, to top the look off this girl, who at 11 should have had better fashion sense, is sporting a full smile that Norman Rockwell would envy. A smile much like this one:

Minus the black eye! :)

As I hope you guessed, that girl was me. It was on my 11th birthday and I couldn't wait to try my new rollerblades (gifted by my parents) and to wear the Gryffindor scarf my sister had bought for me. There are a few pictures of me in similar ill-chosen wardrobes choices but they didn't bother me. I was more or less in my own world no matter what others thought of that world. Now, fast-forward a little bit.

Two or three years later my family and I have moved for the third time in my life. (Which actually has never bothered me. Because we have moved fairly often, it didn't really bother me.) We were living on the east coast and lived only two hours away from the ocean! They had THE BEST thunderstorms!! :D We lived in the east for a little over two years and in that time I lost a lot of things about myself, including that smile.

Unfortunately, I started listening to many outside influences and voices that, simply put, tore me to shreds. Pressure mounted and I lost my perspective on life very quickly. By the time I was in my mid-teens I was not in great shape. I fought dark thoughts and dreams and struggled to find reasons to just exist. I felt very alone and very weak.

So, I came up with a 'solution' to 'strengthen' myself. Two solutions actually. One, I started writing a book. That book has since been 'retired' and I do not work on it. It served its purpose. The other solution--shut myself down. In the theory of 'protecting' myself, I locked any emotion or feeling that I had inside of me. I refused to let anyone affect me.

It didn't start out so extreme in measure. I thought that ignoring would be the extent of things. I started with only wanting to be unaffected by some of the degrading comments around me.

Did it work? Yes, it did. Those around me could not hurt me but it wasn't because I was ignoring them, it was because I didn't feel. It wasn't just a poker face situation. Poker face nothin'! I didn't show emotion because eventually, as I worked under my solution, I truly didn't feel anything. I didn't understand or notice the full extent of the damage done by my solutions until after my family moved back west.

Coming back west, returning to a place I have come to consider home, I started to feel just how shattered I was now that I was removed from the harmful environment. I finally realized that in shutting down what I considered 'one side of me', I had inadvertently disabled every other emotion that I had. In spite of my efforts, I had become as hard and rough as the situation I had left.

I felt defeated and I remember praying and pleading for help and guidance. After reading my scriptures and having a heavy and brutally honest self-evaluations, I was able to concoct a plan of counter attack. I told myself that I would start to laugh. I noticed that I wasn't laughing and I wanted to laugh again. So I told myself and I forced myself to laugh when something 'should' have been funny. I continued this project for several months perhaps even a year until I finally started to feel the humor of the moment and the natural urge to laugh was slowly beginning to return.

**I am sorry, this is a little long winded and more personal than I normally get in my posts. I try to keep my posts impersonal for the most part and this post is a monstrous detour from my usual style so please, don't feel obligated to continue reading. :) I'm being entirely serious.**

Again, the results of my solution crept up on me in several small moments and over a few years. I didn't truly begin to grasp the successful effects of my experiment in laughter until I was watching an old Disney movie called "The Rescuers". I hadn't watched it since I was really little and I was watching it before taking it to my cousin's for a babysitting night. (My cousins loved all the wonderful 'older' Disney movies that I brought when I babysat. You know, like 101 Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, Pocahontas. Those old ones. ;)) Anyway, I was watching this movie and the strangest thing happened when I listened and watched this scene:



I just started crying. Feeling Penny's loneliness was heartbreaking for me. I remember pausing the movie and giving myself a stern look in the screen wondering what in the world I was coming to. I don't cry during movies...and an animated movie? Sheesh! I didn't think any more about it while I finished watching the film.

I don't know whether it was a month or several months later that I was reading "Return of the King" for my second...actually maybe my third...oh, never mind it doesn't matter, when I got to one of those horrid scenes where **um, spoilers** Denethor is treating Faramir like an unwanted shoe and the strangest feeling of remorse came over me for Faramir's sake but I didn't think anything more about it. I read on. Now, I had come to King Theoden's death **end of spoilers** and again, I was overcome with emotion. This time I slapped the book closed (you slap paperbacks closed, you slam hardbacks closed...just so you know :)) and started talking sensibly to myself. (Can you still be sensible while talking to yourself?) Cordy, what is the matter with you? You have got to pull yourself together. I didn't finish my reading time that night but found something else to do.

By the time my last experience occurred, that experience being listening to this song from Disney's Pocahontas, I had generally diagnosed my easily emotional behavior so I wasn't as surprised at the tears that fell that time.

Just as consciously deciding to block my emotions had hindered and disabled them entirely, releasing and consciously working to open back up to emotion had been enough to gain my other emotions again.

Trust me, I wasn't this cute.

Lest you now believe that all laughter has done is make me into a crying fool, :) I will tell you that I laugh and smile with the same ease that I now cry. For example, the other night, my bosom friend called me from school with some stories to tell me. (I feel so bad for her sometimes. While her stories are funny after the fact--they were most defiantly difficult in the moment.) But as I was listening to her stories as I was lying comfortably on my bed, I couldn't help but notice the immeasurable smile that spread the length of my face and remained there for the duration of the conversation. It felt so natural for me to laugh and smile wholeheartedly. Perhaps that's one of the reasons I'm sharing this story now. I was reminded of how far I've come, full circle and after quite a few years, I'm okay again.

I wouldn't have you think that I managed this transformation all by myself. I have a loving family by way of a watchful mom, a supportive dad and patient siblings to help me along the way. And most of all, I have my Father in heaven who is attentively, very mindful of me and my troubles.

I will admit openly that while I am far from perfecting this reaction I can say that I have become noticeably better at laughing in even some stressful situations. I have also gone so far as to laugh at the most ridiculous things. For example, I really, REALLY, don't like Alice in Wonderland (I didn't see the first movie), but Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter in the Into the Looking Glass trailer is hilarious. I sometimes feel like I have lost my marbles for thinking such things because, truly, those are NOT my kind of movies.

Sorry, for this exceedingly long post about myself but it was not without cause. (At least I hope not!) Knowing where I have been, being able to share these kinds of personal hard stories, might possibly somewhere, either help prevent a duplication of my own situation or perhaps encourage others in their own struggles. With all I have said, please remember:

So now you know.
Laughter is a healer.
It was a needed bit of medicine.
Because I went without it and felt the lack of laughter, I have learned to love to laugh.

Yours truly,
Cordy