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Finding joy can be difficult—especially when the world itself doesn’t seem particularly joyful. But as Durga Chew-Bose discovered, sometimes it finds you.
I set out to make sense of my ambivalence toward joy. After a long break, I was ready to write again, apparently from a place of sorting through. (It’s worth noting that finding an editor, like mine for this essay, who simultaneously guides the writer toward and away from danger, intuiting when it’s okay to say “I don’t buy it!” is its own joy.) I was certain—often the first sign I’ve got it all wrong—that joy was not something I prioritized, or was not something I was looking after, the way I imagine many people do in order to safeguard themselves from Everything.
I was sure it was rooted in the accumulation of canceled joys like holidays that never occurred or reunions with friends that were pushed and pushed and pushed. I feel, mainly, the effort of all of it: a thickset intensity that hasn’t let up. When I do experience enchantment, like from a movie’s last line (Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid), I also experience, alongside that enchantment, how unavailable I’ve been to that fizzy, sweetened frequency.
Recently, I was sent a quote by the writer and academic Saidiya Hartman. In it, she describes her relationship to joy as a form of floating: “It’s about being nothing and being everything at the same time—this sense of the self disappearing in the context of the vastness of the earth, the ocean, the sky, the land.” It’s an experience, she says, “of transformation or release from the constraint or costume of the individual … into this other form.” Another form. This way of understanding joy resonates with me because joy is not simply controlled; it’s constitutional.
Original article on Baazaar
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