Joy is not optional. My therapist told me that a couple of weeks ago. It is not frivolous, she said, it is not the same as taking your eye off the ball. It is as necessary to life as breathing.
Since Trump took office for the second time, in January, I have been mostly joyless. I already operate at a low-grade register of melancholy, with minor ups and downs, but the last three months the base register has dropped several levels, the ups have been lower, the downs deeper. I have been indulging more and more in avoidant behaviors: too much YouTube, porn, doom scrolling.
In many conversations – with my fiancée, with friends, with my therapist – I have referred to the persistent state of being that I am existing in as “anxiety.” But that is not an accurate descriptor, or not the only descriptor. I do feel anxious. But that anxiety is the manifestation of a much larger, looming feeling. And that feeling is fear.
I am scared.
Maybe saying (writing) it out loud will help. Not to alleviate my fear, but to articulate what, exactly, I’m scared of. But where to start? And, good grief, where to end?
I’m scared, in the words of Adrien Piper, that everything will be taken away. I’m scared that the climate around free speech in the United States could reach a boiling point, making me and other journalists eligible for prosecution. I’m scared that the overturning of Roe vs. Wade could presage the overturning of Loving vs. Virginia, making my approaching marriage unrecognized in certain states. And I’m not just scared for myself – I’m scared for everyone who might have some or all of their rights squashed under the authoritarian thumb.
I’m not the only one feeling the squeeze. In the last month, on two separate instances, I’ve heard friends joke about what life in a concentration camp would be like. People are being deported and detained. One of the country’s leading experts on fascism has fled for Canada, claiming that the censoring of free speech and scholarly work here is “inevitable.”
But I still find myself regularly caught between two poles of uncertainty. Is it paranoid of me to be so worried about any of these things coming to pass? Is it naïve of me to not be more frightened? There is no real way of assessing the legitimacy of the extent of one’s fear, when its causes continue to appear increasingly erratic.
Lucky for me, I have experience with this sort of insoluble fear. As a child, I was terrified of the dark. Well, not of the dark. Of what might be in the dark, of what the darkness obscured. In other words, I was terrified of uncertainty. We don’t know what’s going to happen, which fears will become reality. That’s part of what’s so scary. But amidst my fear, I’ve lost sight of what is certain and concrete.
In the last couple of months, I’ve written about an exhibition of seminal Black photographers, including Gordon Parks’s Civil Rights-era images, and a show of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian art at SOMArts in San Francisco. In both of these, I found myself staggered by the human capacity to bend towards hope in times of grave dehumanization. In both cases, art, humanity, beauty and joy persist. Whatever form of fascism we’re verging on or living through, whatever history re-shits itself, joy will persist, too.
I have been treating my joy as an option, and one that I too often decline. But joy is everywhere, and declining it has become exhausting. Why not work just as hard to recognize it?
I find joy, then, in art, in books (Katie Kitamura novels), in movies (Sean Baker, Bong Joon Ho, Steven Soderbergh), in music (Poison the Well fits the mood) in nature (the sunlight through leaves, the scent of rose geranium on my afternoon walks), in playing tennis (a new habit), in my daily ritual of eating overnight oats for breakfast (rolled, extra thick), in good television (Daredevil delivers; Severance verges on art), going to the ballet with Anna (Frankenstein), in writing with the cat on my lap (no notes).
My point is, joyful things happen all the time, just as often as scary things. Miracles and atrocities are not mutually exclusive. It’s just that sometimes the miracles are small and easy to lose track of, while the atrocities are catastrophic in scale and coming at us a mile a minute. Joy, then, is not a practice of losing sight, but rather a practice of paying attention, of keeping your eye on the ball.
Joy is not optional. But it is something we choose to recognize – or not. And it is through that choice that we have any hope of creating any measure of meaningful resistance.