Joy Jar

What is a Joy Jar, and why do I need it? For the last three years, I have been trying to help a relative deal with her life – check out the Chasing Crazy Blog. It has been 3 years of overdoses, juggling small children, suicide attempts, resuscitations, car crashes, the loss of a business, hospitals, the loss of my pride, violence, grace, and hope. I will just refer to it as the Hookers and Blow years.

Crazy is a narcissist who suffers, or rather, we all suffer her main character syndrome. She tells everyone she meets that she is the smartest, most beautiful person they will ever meet. She will tell you she has earned her arrogance. I suppose she has. Arrogance is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the quality of being unpleasantly proud and behaving as if you are more important than, or know more than, other people.” She has gone so far as to say that she is the smartest person in the world.

Her days are filled with carefully stage-managed one-act plays designed to ensure that the attention remains solely on her. She can be hanging herself in the shower one minute. Once she has refused medical attention, she changes and comes downstairs naked to show off her toned body to all and sundry.

To the Joy Jar. nearing the end of 3 years of grey cloud after grey cloud, disaster after disaster. Seeming bought of depression after bought of depression. I bought her a beautiful journal and asked her to try the 100-Day Happy Challenge. ( https://100happydays.com/). But for every silver lining, there was a tornado around it. She only ever made it to day 14.

In the dollar store one day, I saw a vase that quite intrigued me, and an idea struck. She needed something more than words. She needed a physical representation, something tangible to represent the joy that creeps into everyone’s day. I bought a bowl, two hundred marbles of varying sizes and the vase. Take a marble out of the Bowl place it in the vase. You could choose a big marble, a small marble, any marble you wanted.

The Joy Jar made it to about 3/4 full; before, in a drug and alcohol-fueled rage, it was launched at someone’s head. I was trauma and drama-ed out by then I did not witness its demise