This is not a political post, except that it is, because what isn’t political?
If you sift through or scroll past all the heartbreaking breaking news updates, you will hear the thinkers and the poets and the activists and even the bigger-hearted journalists urge you to find joy. To do your part to help however you can, but also to keep doing whatever makes you feel joyous, that joy is resistance, that joy is something that can only be taken from you if you let it. That’s what the memes say, and sharing happy and funny memes with my people is part of my joy these days, so I’ve been sending and receiving that one—Joy is resistance—a lot lately.
I’ve also been dancing. It should be noted that I am not a dancer.
When the anxiety builds up and needs to come out, the remedy, I learned long ago, is movement. I’ve combined that coping strategy with another I’ve been using since I was a child and unable to turn my brain off: loud music pumping through headphones. I can’t listen to the distress loop if I know all the words and guitar solos! To escape from the news when I need to, I’ve started putting on music instead of podcasts when I walk or box or strength train, and then one day I didn’t feel like “fitnessing,” but still had all the nervous energy and the music was already pulsing in my ears, and I just started dancing. It helped enough that now, dancing is an almost immediate impulse to hearing bad news.
And of course, there is art. I woke up this morning and wrote the first poem I’ve written in…I don’t want to think about how long it’s been. I’m writing on Substack about one of my passions. I’m writing with a friend, back and forth, an exchange that builds support and accountability into both our lives, around our shared love of storytelling. I’m writing. That’s the point.
I don’t know what your coping mechanisms are, historically or in these present hard times, but I hope they include writing. Writing is documentation of what’s happening, so no one can ever gaslight us into believing it wasn’t so bad, or that our memories are wrong. Writing is a bid for connection. Writing and art are our best chances at reaching others when they seem unreachable. Writing breeds empathy. Writing has a long, rich history in resistance. For many of us, merely writing our truths is a radical pushback on oppression, which can only thrive in our silence.
But writing specifically for joy, or about joyful things—in other words, documenting and insisting upon joy—is a finetuning of that coping mechanism.
What brings you joy? What makes you happy every single time you think of it? What joyful things or practices are part of your life, but you have never considered could be part of your writing life? Combining the two might be the coping cocktail that gets us through whatever is coming next.
A writing exercise
Make a list of joys in your life. Not just things you are grateful for, but things that actually bring you true pleasure, that make your heart swell. They can be big things, like the sound of a grandchild’s laughter, or little things like a sprout on a houseplant you thought was dying or when your favorite song from your teen years comes on over satellite radio in your car.
Make your list, then identify the items on the list that you’ve never written about. Choose one and write about it. Any way you want to, any way that comes to mind.
That’s it. Choose joy. Write joy. Insist upon joy.
And take good care.
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