No Mud, No Lotus : On happiness

Sometime while writing it is easy for me to focus on why life is hard, to focus on how different things hurt, and to spend my time trying to explain what my experience feels like. While this kind of writing is laudable it certainly doesn't reflect the entirety of my life. Recently I have been asked two different questions that have reminded me of the importance of expressing more completely the entirety of my life, including the happiness and the joy.

It was in a delightful interview with a member of my stake presidency that I was asked the first question. In essence I was asked which type of person was I? Was I an LBGT member of the Church who routinely struggled or was I happy? I struggled to find an appropriate answer. How do I answer a question like that? It was only later that I realized how impossible that question is. If I am happy, can I still struggle? If I struggle, feel pain, and feel lost does that mean that I cannot be happy? That underlying assertion really confused me. It may be that my dabbling in Buddhism or my study of ancient Stoic philosophy has corrupted me, but I don't think that happiness means freedom from pain, hardship, or even suffering.

Happiness is a state of life. Happiness is a sense of moving forward, of progressing towards God. I think it is possible to be thoroughly miserable in a moment, but to still look at the entire direction of your life with a sense of satisfaction and contentment. Gender dysphoria still causes me a lot of pain. I still wonder how to best live my life, how to best balance Church and dysphoria, and I still routinely feel lost. On bad days, I still occasionally cry myself to sleep in Amy's arms.

But, during moments of calm clarity I wonder at how marvelous my life is. I have someone in my life who loves me, completely accepts me, and wants to support me and be with me forever. I've stopped feeling ashamed of who I am. I'm open and honest about what living with gender dysphoria is like, and I have some dear friends who really want to understand and be supportive. 

These are things that I never would have imagined only a handful of years ago. These are wonderful joyful reasons to be happy. So, sure. I struggle. It hurts sometimes. I wish I had answers about how to best live my life joyfully and authentically while being a faithful member of the Church. But I refuse to allow these facts to deny me my happiness.

I was also recently asked if I thought it was even possible to balance my need to deal with gender dysphoria in a proactive manner, my desire to remain in complete fellowship with the Church, my desire to avoid conflict and not cause waves in public, and my desire to be transparent and really talk about what being transgender really looks and feels like (particularly with those closest to me). Yeah, that is a lot of balancing... and if I'm really being honest the answer is that I have no idea if it is even possible. I might be just like Captain Ahab chasing his white whale, spending my life searching for the impossible and never reaching a destination. 

But isn't this a desire worth pursuing? Sure it may be impossible to balance all these desires. It might be impossible to be an authentic joyful transperson with full fellowship in the Church and minimal social conflict. But if this were possible... what would it look like? How much authenticity, openness, and femininity would it take before my dysphoria fades away? At what point does this expression start to cause distress to others? Where ultimately does the moral line of right and wrong exist in regards to the Church? It seems to me that to be fully Mormon and fully transgender is to pursue these questions in a thoughtful and personal manner.

Perhaps that is where joy is finally found in knowing that you honestly and earnestly pursued the paradoxes of belief and identity. Perhaps happiness is found not in the destination but entirely in the journey. As the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn says, "no mud, no lotus."