It’s funny how we respond when we’re confronted with happiness.  Specifically, other people’s happiness.

Tim Keller said recently that while the world defines a friend as someone who walks with you through times of misery, a truer observation is that friends walk with you when you’re annoyingly, stinkingly happy.

My track record reveals I have problems with this.  I cringe when I remember the day JB, my roommate at the time, called to tell me she was engaged. I was standing in the dental lab doing work that I felt I sucked at, fresh off a breakup.  I congratulated her, realizing this meant I was losing another roommate to marriage.  My response was so weak that she interpreted it to mean I had known the proposal was going to happen.  I took a break from thinking about how this new development was going to affect me to realize that not only was I being a completely selfish asshole, but I was hurting my friend.  I felt ashamed, and I feel ashamed now as I remember other instances of similar selfishness.  I have been blessed with many friends, one of their most obvious marks of character being that they stood by me during the years it took me to grow up and become the kind of people they already were.

Another friend of mine has three kids: healthy, vibrant, laughing, kickass boys, all of them.  Yet she is still stopped at the grocery store by people who deign to shower pity on her for not having a girl.  How often the spectators in our lives–strangers and acquaintances–stand before a snapshot from our day and whisper among themselves like art critics discussing the ways we could be improved, having no idea what tears, laughter, and life went into making that shot.

I’m as guilty as anyone of the stupidity of assuming that what I say behind someone’s back won’t eventually reach the ears that belong to that back.  So what I’m saying is, I have no room to judge.  With all the evidence from my past to serve as reminders along my path now, I am constantly challenged to abandon the judgment seat and start with humility.  Every time, start with humility.

And so, humbly (and prayerfully, to attain that humility), I approach the things that piss me off.  For the past year and a half of my life, things have gone pretty damn well.  Oh yes, I’ve managed to find complaints along the way, but daily I have woken up to the presence of love and joy and promises kept and potential fulfilled and all in all…it has been good.  And with the good has come the petty: muted support, art-critic whispers about details.  As if, after waiting until I was thirty to fall in love and then another year for him to come around, I should be worried that the BF and I aren’t meeting others’ expectations for our relationship.  I remember one time when we capitulated to hang out with friends on their terms and ended up in a bar filled with wall-to-wall flesh and our conversation was reduced to yelling at each other over some dude’s head.  This is bullshit, we told each other telepathically, because we’re cool like that, and we left that place for the couch and other like-minded couples.  And I don’t regret one second of it.

And now that we’re planning a future together, it’s interesting to see what pops up on the news feed.  Support, congratulations, offers to throw celebrations have shown up in the places I least expect and often not in the places I banked on.  Friends from ages past, mere acquaintances, people I before considered flakes, all bringing me to tears with their sincere expressions of goodwill.  After the road I’ve been on, their cheers are soul-soothing gifts from God.  And from others?  Golf claps and glances at watches.

This morning as I crossed the street, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a wheelchair veering toward me and I feared a collision.  I began to veer in the other direction, eyes soullessly straight ahead like the good New Yorker I am.  Then something inside told me to take a risk, and I did the hard thing: I looked the occupant of the chair in the eye.  Connection.  He was smiling at me.  In that moment, my over-taught yet under-functioning brain remembered what I had learned about cerebral palsy patients: how they often have above-average intelligence but are judged to be incompetent because they are trapped in bodies that don’t work, muscles that won’t cooperate with the mind’s intention.  An outside that belies the inside.

I thought about how, for the rest of us, “normal” means a well-put-together exterior that covers a wounded and flawed heart out of which judgments are made.  I grinned back at this man who is probably smarter than I am, and I said a prayer for healing: his and mine.