This is a paid subscriber-only issue of Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice. Please do not forward this email (but you can totally share a link to the newsletter https://www.theinfophile.com/). I appreciate your support and respect for my work!

Hi friends! As I mentioned last week, I am still waking up ridiculously early and it still feels weird but I’m rolling with it. “The only constant in life is change” etc. etc. I had told my therapist I have more hours in my day now and that I am trying to not fill it with productivity. As always, she said I could use it to rest (lol) but also, I could use that time for things that bring me joy. “You could bake!” she mentioned and I laughed at the idea of baking a whole-ass cake at 6am. It is so incredibly absurd and just thinking of it makes me giggle incessantly. I am a person that will do things for a laugh as well as doing things that will give me a great story to tell. It is only a matter of time before I bake a cake before the first rays of sunlight hit our window.

I think about joy a lot. I’ve mentioned before that we have a banner in our apartment that says, “Joy is an act of resistance.” At the same time, I noticed that I have been avoiding things that bring me joy, especially since the pandemic started but sometimes before then as well. I tend to come at it from two directions.