letting joy
...in (all the way); ...exist (and coexist); ...stay (and linger); ...be held (and hold). [or: reasons to live through the apocalypse]
That more than one emotion can coexist at once, even (especially) if they contradict, has been a mantra or salve of sorts—particularly through my experience of immigrating, and certainly through the pandemic.
Letting that paradox simply be—resisting the impulse to line emotions up in a row as if they’re about to face off in a boxing ring—is both liberation and challenge. [in my boxing ring, it’s always the more positive affect that gets knocked out first.]
I am trying to carve more space in this paradox for the emotions I tend to restrict or ration, in this season of life one in particular: joy.
Of course, naming emotions is tricky business, and sometimes what we feel has no name at all. A single named emotion may contain a constellation of feelings and associations. I say joy and not happiness, bliss, or pleasure, although of course we might substitute these. What I’m calling joy you may call by something else, in the same way that we’ll never know if your blue is my blue.
Writing about joy right now feels strange and egregious; my impulse is to render my own small joys in relation to ongoing and devastating atrocities throughout the world, as if somehow holding joy were an offense, an ignorance, a certain kind of hedonism.
And before we continue to follow joy for awhile here, I also want to name the presence of outrage—as America is on the brink of overturning 50 years of abortion rights, with consequences devastating to the health, wellbeing, and rights of people with uteruses, indeed for all of us. (I have so much to say about this… but for now — Roxane Gay’s recent NYT opinion piece is worth a read, and here is a list of local mutual aid funds in every US state).
What room, then, is there for joy in a world which feels every day to be more on the brink of collapse? (all the room, I want to argue, although admittedly trying to convince myself)
How do we hold joy — defiantly, purposefully, generously, presently?
How do we move through the world differently when joy is centred, above things like ambition/anxiety/profit/scarcity?
I happen to be in a life season that feels impossibly abundant* and ripe. As I write this, one of my dearest friends from the US is sitting on my couch; we’re about to embark on a four-day through-hike in Southern Sweden. T and I recently reached a hopeful transition out of a few very challenging work-and-identity-related months. And, we have been planning our wedding celebration which, now only three weeks away, feels like it actually will finally happen (*fingers n’ toes crossed*) — after two years and three pandemic-related cancellations. (side note: you never realize how enculturated you are until you plan a wedding...especially a multicultural one that has moved itself, along with its humans, across borders)
*To be clear: I’m not suggesting that times must be abundant for joy to be present; far from it. I’m only noticing how this current abundance is a prism through which to observe what happens (in me) in the presence of joy.
Recently I’ve been finally allowing myself to indulge in an image I suppressed over those two years of painful uncertainty and waiting: the moment I see most of the people I love in this world in the same room, together. (If the picture of it blows my mind, I don’t even know what the lived experience will do...)
This image conjures in me two contradicting responses: an overwhelming surge of warmth and love and expansion and limitlessness and…joy; and a gnawing discomfort and worry. An expansion; a contraction. A discomfort of how to possibly hold all this joy; a worry that it may not come to pass.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this tension. One friend recently expressed noticing her impulse to numb with social media is most urgent in two times: the hard ones, but also the joyful and plentiful ones. In both, escape beckons. Another friend, moving through an incredibly challenging season of life, noticed her impulse to want to “save up” her joy until she was feeling better, until recently finding the possibility of joy to coexist right alongside pain, and to claim all of it as hers to feel.
These weeks, I’m observing all the ways I respond to all the joy knocking on the door of my house with enthusiastic force, asking to be let in, to be fully felt. Which is to say, I’m observing all the ways I move, almost like a reflex, to squander or even sabotage it. What I’m finding:
The easiest joy for me to hold is the one that follows my own exhaustion and immense effort; the one that feels earned. (i.e. after an “achievement”)
The hardest joy for me to hold is the unconditional, the abundant kind that seems to come out of nowhere but good fortune and love, and—importantly—the one over which I have no control over its entrance or exit.
My impulse, in the presence of this joy, is to want to ration or mediate it.
I recourse to hypervigilance, scanning for all the crevices through which it could seep out. An anticipation of when and how it might get away.
Or I move to alchemize it—so that I can give it away.
There is so much here to unpack, and not all of it is for a newsletter, except to say that these recourses have their roots in a long personal (and also political/feminist, I’d argue) history of restriction—of pleasure, of receiving, of abundance.
I’m realizing more clearly, as I work to shed these layers, how they only have one inevitable endpoint: a wrenching from the present moment, a denial of a sensory openness to life, and, crucially, a distance—not only from myself but from the people I love, the ones who make joy all the sweeter, the ones I want to savor it with.
I love what Ross Gay has to say about joy as shrinking alienation:
I have really been thinking that joy is the moments — for me, the moments when my alienation from people — but not just people, from the whole thing — it goes away. And it shrinks. If it was a visual thing, everything becomes luminous. And I love that mycelium, forest metaphor, that there’s this thing connecting us. And among the things of that thing connecting us is that we have this common experience — many common experiences, but a really foundational one is that we are not here forever.
And that’s a joining — a “joy-ning.” So that’s sort of how I think about it.
It’s not about deluding oneself that those other emotions—guilt, worry, anxiety—won’t cohabit with joy, in the same room, the same boxing ring, the same dance floor. It’s just to claim and defend the right of joy to exist right alongside them, to speak to them, to take up at least as much, if not possibly more, space.
We typically talk about tolerance and holding space for negatively-valenced emotions—especially discomfort—but what about tolerating joy, pleasure? How do we expand our capacity to sit with it, to hold it? How, in other words, to receive?
Joy is not made to be a crumb.
Joy is not an affront.
And try as we might, we cannot titrate or ration our own joy in effort to offset the sorrow of another. We are not nearly so omnipotent.
There is however, I do believe, something contagious and effusive about joy when it becomes claimed and held and defended and...most importantly, allowed to be. To hold, to behold, and to be-held.
A student of mine recently described receiving as “life-giving,” life-sustaining. I love this idea. The giving of life, by being open enough to fully sense it—every shade, every valence. That none of us can fully give to (or receive from) life from emptiness or self-denial or restriction; that abundance and openness to sensing and receiving is the space from which we can begin to pursue personal and collective wellbeing.
As Audre Lorde, in Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, writes:
The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
I don’t at all mean to suggest that joy is a panacea or antidote, nor to assume that it is even present or accessible at any given moment. I only mean to offer that carving more space to invite and to witness and to hold it, amidst all the grit and beauty—is worth pursuing, worth following, worth feeling. And so are you.
I, for one, cannot be reminded of this enough. But I am, finally, ready to live into it.
Writing Prompts
Inspired by Nikita Gill — list your reasons to live through the apocalypse.
If you feel so compelled, share your reasons with the community — I think we could all use more of them:
Joy takes you by the hand: she has something to show you, something hiding in plain sight in the shadows of the everyday. What do you see?
A newsletter note:
I’ll be taking a Swedish “semester” (holiday) from the newsletter through June (although I may pop in to share a publication). I’ll meet you back in your inbox with the next full issue the first Friday of July!
In the meantime I wish you an early summer of noticing and letting in joys in all forms.
WITHIN updates
WITHIN is my workshop series on writing from/through/into the body—weaving yoga asana, meditation, breathwork, and writing in intentional community. To speak of joys, this community and practice are some of the biggest joys in my life.
Our Spring Series of monthly labs recently drew to a close. I am currently taking a hiatus from teaching over the summer to work on my book.
We begin again with our 10-week series, Season 4, in September 2022; early bird registration opens in late July.
If you want to mark your calendar already, we’ll gather on alternating Sundays starting September 25, to December 4th. Sign up for the waitlist and vote for your preferred times.
Resources
reading with:
Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power by Audre Lorde
Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness by Sara Ahmed
Inhaling Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy
Leslie Jamison’s essay on daydreaming in Astra Magazine
listening with:
This Morning Walk — a podcast on walking and presence — with Libby DeLana and Alex Elle
giving with:
Repro Legal Defense Fund — covers bails and funds defense for people investigated/arrested/prosecuted for self-managed abortion in the US
Razom for Ukraine — on-the-ground support for the people of Ukraine, responding to the invasion with humanitarian war relief and evacuation of vulnerable populations