Volume 3, Issue 16: We All Deserve Joy
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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.
First is by “should-ing” myself. I wouldn’t let myself sit and watch cartoons if I had reading to do or cleaning to do or other “productive” things because I should do those things first. With reading specifically, I wouldn’t let myself read the fun books because I should be reading whatever heavy, social justice nonfiction just came out. Or I should be writing. I can’t bake because I should work on decluttering the apartment.
I “should” myself a lot and it results in rarely doing the joyful things because spoiler: there is always writing to be done. There is always cleaning to be done. There are always important, heavy, educational books to be read.
The other way I found myself avoiding joy is by thinking about other people. That sounds bad; let me explain. Sometimes I get an overwhelming sense of all the awful things going on in the world and a tiny, scolding voice inside my head says, “How can you possibly think that joy is something appropriate to chase right now when so many people are suffering? How dare you be joyful at a time like this? This is a time for sadness and rage and if other people are hurting you should be hurting too.” I guilt myself into turning away from the things that bring me joy because “how dare I?”
It’s fucked. I know. And I know I’m not the only person who does this.
We all deserve joy. Right now. Right this minute. Not in some nonexistent time when all our productivity is done. We do not have to earn our joy. We deserve it merely by existing. I’m going to say that again. We do not have to earn joy. Regardless of our jobs, our identities, our class, our education, how much money we have: we all deserve joy. Unless, of course, you are a terrible person who derives joy from the subjugation of others and in that case, fuck you.
Joy is not a finite resource. If I have joy in my life, and assuming I’m a decent person, it does not mean that someone else has less joy. It is not pie. It is not a scarce resource. There’s enough for everyone. Deliberately depriving ourselves of joy is a fucking miserable way to live. It is so important to stop putting off joy until we think we deserve it because we already do. Why are we even still on this damn planet if not to experience joy and wonder and connection? “Later” isn’t promised. I’m doing my best to lean into opportunities where joy presents itself whenever I can.
Like baking a cake as the sun rises.
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