Today I Choose to be Gleeful – How to be Gleeful

We’re 47 minutes into our family vacation and already I can feel the forced cheer cracking around the edges. Eight adults crammed into a rented transit van: Tyler, Jesse, Amy, Bailey, Brea, Taylor, Curtis, and me, the self-appointed family mood manager. Everyone’s having a “great time” – you know, the kind where shoulders are creeping up toward ears and someone’s definitely going to snap about whose turn it is to pick music.

That’s when I made my fatal mistake. I decided it was my job to be gleeful. Not just happy or positive, but full-on, sparkly, gleeful. Like some kind of human binky for seven increasingly frayed adults who just wanted to stretch their legs somewhere that didn’t smell like road trip snacks and collective irritation.

“Isn’t this fun?” I chirped, my voice hitting that register that sounds like a kindergarten teacher on too much caffeine. “We’re making memories! Look at that gorgeous scenery!” I was cute. I was sparkly. I was amusing. I was gleeful-ish.

They weren’t buying it.

The more I tried to prop everyone up with my manufactured glee, the more brittle I felt inside. You know that feeling when you’re smiling so hard your face starts to ache? When your jaw clenches from the effort of being relentlessly positive? That’s where I was living, in this weird space between what I thought everyone needed and what was actually happening in my chest.

I kept going anyway. Because that’s what you do when you’re 61 and you’ve somehow decided that your job is to make sure everyone else feels good, right? Even when your own emotional tank is running on fumes and irritation.

“Anyone want to play 20 questions?” I suggested brightly, while internally cataloging every annoying thing that had happened in the last hour: Tyler’s music choices, someone’s questionable breakfast burrito lingering in the air, the way Bailey was manspreading across two seats. The more gleeful I became on the outside, the more resentful I felt on the inside.

Here’s what I was learning in real time: when you try to be everyone’s emotional support human, you end up on their page instead of putting them on yours. I was working so hard to lift their mood that I completely abandoned my own. And spoiler alert – this doesn’t work. Gravity pulls down.

By mile 73, I was officially annoying-as-f. Even Curtis, who loves me enough to think my random thoughts are fascinating, was giving me that look. You know the one – the gentle “maybe dial it back” expression that loving partners master after 25+ years of marriage.

That’s when it hit me: real glee isn’t something you manufacture for other people’s comfort. It’s not a performance or a service you provide. True glee bubbles up from the inside when you’re not trying so damn hard to be anything at all.

Remember being eight years old and finding a perfect rock? You didn’t think, “I should be gleeful about this rock so everyone else feels better.” You just were. The glee happened because the rock was smooth and gray and fit perfectly in your palm, and that was enough.

But somewhere along the way – maybe around the time we started managing everyone else’s emotions – we learned to perform glee instead of feeling it. We learned to be sparkly when others were dull, peppy when they were tired, gleeful when they were grumpy. As if our job was to be the emotional weather system for our little corner of the world.

I’m writing this three days post-transit van, and I can still feel the exhaustion in my shoulders from all that effortful cheer. My body keeps the score, even when my mind tries to rewrite the story as “we had such a great time!”

Here’s what I’m learning about choosing to be gleeful at this stage of life: it has to be authentic or it’s just elaborate people-pleasing with jazz hands. Real glee is what happens when you find yourself laughing at the absurdity of being human – like when you’re standing in Target at 2 PM, reading glasses falling down your nose, having a hot flash in the frozen food aisle, and suddenly you’re giggling at the beautiful ridiculousness of it all.

Glee doesn’t need witnesses. It doesn’t need approval. It certainly doesn’t need to fix anyone else’s mood.

The morning after our van adventure, I woke up early and sat with my coffee while everyone else slept. A blue jay landed on the deck railing, cocked his head at me, and I felt something genuinely gleeful bubble up. Not for anyone else. Not to improve the family dynamic. Just because a blue jay was being particularly blue jay-ish and I was awake to see it.

That’s real glee – the kind that e.e. cummings wrote about when he thanked God for “the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky.” It’s not manufactured. It’s not managed. It’s not responsible for anyone else’s emotional state.

So today I choose to be gleeful, but not the performative kind. The Tuesday afternoon kind that shows up when you’re not trying so hard. The kind that finds genuine delight in small things without needing to share the delight or teach the delight or manage other people’s relationship to the delight.

Maybe that’s the most sophisticated response to life there is – letting ourselves be tickled by existence without making it anyone else’s job to be tickled too. Finding that leaping greenly spirit in ourselves and letting it be enough, even when – especially when – we’re crammed in a van with people we love who are having their own perfectly valid experience of being human.

Because here’s what I know after 61 years and one very long family car ride: you can’t gleeful anyone else into feeling better. But you can stop trying to, and in that stopping, you might just find your own authentic glee waiting for you – no jazz hands required.