#59 The right to joy

Fight for the right to your joy like your birthright is to feel it - because it is.

The frost is finally here. In Amsterdam, on the 27th of December — in the in-between years week — I leave the house early to work from my beloved coffee company. Real ones will know I spent all my 20s in coffee companies in Rotterdam and then Amsterdam, first as a student who grew sick from fighting for a spot at the school library, then as a freelancer who gets bored of her environments quickly, needing a rotation of landscapes and seats to feel locked in. (ew lol).

This also means we recently attended the fabled Christmas company party. This is a universal concept for people working in most companies around the world: the one night where it’s socially acceptable to drink excessively with your colleagues, stuff yourself of free dinner, and maybe end up in a dive bar on a Monday night because Monday Madness is always open (this is a real story, and I was expected to log on at 9 am on Tuesday).

What stood out to me during the company dinner party wasn’t the delicious food or the ever-running stream of wine. (These are fan favorites at the Company Christmas Party and you feel a slight, exciting pressure to consume as much of the free stuff as you can). It was a conversation with an intern who recently turned 23. I can’t remember exactly what it was I said, but whatever it was doesn't really matter. She just turned to me and asked me how old I was. Twenty eight! I tell her. She seems to sigh a little (relief? I’m not sure) and smiles. You give me hope, she tells me. That when I get older I won’t have to be so serious. And it could’ve been the third glass of white wine or the atmosphere of a hedonistic staff party that only occurs once a year (I think they should happen more often); but I leaned across the table to get closer to her and said with all the seriousness I could muster, it's all bullshit! they're lying to you. Don’t believe it! I ran off somewhere else and we didn’t get to discuss it for longer. But I’m still thinking about it a few weeks later, and I think I had to write it to you.

The world is going through it. It takes about ten seconds to read the latest headlines and feel muscles cramping up in 28 different places in your body. And as you get older, there’s always something more to be scared of. In my 28-year-old body, some fears are being exchanged for others, newer and exciting ones - do I want to have children? and if I do, is it true my uterus will wither away as soon as I hit 35? what if I haven't met someone I want to have children with by then? is the career I’ve built starting to bore me? am I meant to stay in this profession forever? - the fears all wear different faces but the feeling is the same. If you’re a woman in her late twenties - or a person in their late twenties, really - there begins a little, ticky tocky clock sound that subtly starts trying to tell you that time is moving faster. Or maybe you're completely serene and in full acceptance of your life, trusting your timing resolutely - and if you are, I commend you. Skip this part.

In these moments, it is easy to lose sight of joy. It is easy to let this effervescent feeling take the backseat and focus on Bigger Things and Other Priorities. We also happen to be in the era of self-improvement and personal development. We have never had more access to workbooks and resources than we have right now, at this very moment. A quick Google search tells me that in the U.S. alone, 15,000 self-help books are published every year. Can you imagine? 15,000 new ways to work on yourself, from attachment styles to healing from emotionally immature parents (a big hit!) to learning how trauma is stored in the body (the body do be keeping the score, another hit). It is a lot. There are endless options and routes you can take towards being a better you, towards uncovering something new, towards leaving no stone unturned, no mystery unsolved.

And yet, for all the things you could be better at, for all the self-improvement hiding under a slight terror of not enoughness, joy persists. I find the feeling of joy akin to what people call silliness. My whole life, some of my most persisting memories of feeling like an outcast are tinged with a scolding — don’t be silly, don’t laugh so loud, don’t be so noisy. And I was a chatterbox from birth, so you can imagine how that went. I was always reprimanded for the same qualities that, every year, my friends write beautiful birthday messages about: my lightheartedness, my sense of wonder, my jolly personality (that's a new one this year), my silliness.

I derive incredible satisfaction from making people laugh, especially when it’s an unexpected one. I love the look of brief surprise and delight on someone’s face when I tell them I’m not havermelk elite by choice — if I drink cow's milk I'll shit myself. Or when I tell a colleague a detailed story of how I thought I would actually shit myself at the office at 9 am on a Tuesday, how I imagined calling an ambulance to pick me up, how my denim pants were the lightest blue I owned. (You get the idea).

Besides stories about doing a voluntary or involuntary #2, I think silliness is akin to the feeling of joy because what silliness really is, is your ability to tap into the feeling of joy you hopefully experienced as a child. That kind of joy isn’t aware of societal conventions of what is acceptable or passable or in good taste. Oh my GOD, I HATE the phrase “in good taste.” the harbingers of good taste are often insufferable, so why should I care what they think is appropriate? Besides the obvious faux-pas like making people uncomfortable at the workplace, ,harassment or puking in front of someone's dinner, I don’t find an occasional overshare or an unexpected inappropriate laugh such a sin. Ever since I started my first office job (a student assistant at my school’s admissions office), it baffled me that we didn't have more laughs or really tried to talk to each other. I understand the world is serious and the job is serious and what you make of your time here on Earth is serious. But so much of that seriousness goes into the sacrifice of feeling unbridled silliness or a moment of real, pure joy.

Slowly, these moments are stored away preciously for the next holiday or the weekend or waiting for Friday or drinks with your girls. And those moments are beautiful. They are worth feeling all your joy for. But I think there’s something to be said about safeguarding your capacity to feel joy to its greatest extent in your daily drudgery of mundanity (if that’s how it sometimes also feels to you). You deserve to keep your relationship to joy and to mend it, to nurture it, to take it seriously. Because it is. Because keeping a direct line, access to joy — it is part of the biggest, most serious work you can do in your life. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that. Go back and read a few headlines.

We have never been so alone together. We have never been so aware of everything that is happening, of everything that could happen, at any given moment in time, in our history. I avoid horror movies and violence in films because there is enough violence around me. I read about the latest updates in Luigi Mangione’s case and I read about how Blake Lively sues a man for undertaking a sophisticated — and very effective — smear campaign on social media. I think about how difficult it is to tell good from bad when there’s imperfect victims, and people’s selective outrage when violence is direct and tangible instead of systematic (ahem, the thousands of preventable deaths a year in the U.S. due to the predatory healthcare system).

And then, what do you think I do? I think about my values. I think about my choices. I think about all the ways I’m going to get older (if I am so lucky) and how I don’t want to cut out parts of myself so as to not be affected by the world.

So what is the next best thing? What is right at the touch of my fingertips? Unbridled joy. Unbounded silliness. It is the one thing I believe is every human’s true birthright - to feel it. To toil and toil and try and try and work and still, find the time to hold it in your hands and enjoy it for what it is - a magnificent thing in the mixed shitbag that life can be, and often is.

This is where I tend to get very impassioned and very serious about joy - because it is a precious source of energy, what lightens up the world around you, what can fuel you when nothing else is left. Don’t listen to killjoys, to people who tell you you feel too much, to people giving you weird looks because your laugh is confusing or a little too loud, because making snorting sounds in a fit of laughter is in bad taste, or to those who tell you that growing up means taking things seriously and taking yourself seriously.

Yes, take your growth seriously. Take your ability to learn from your mistakes seriously. Take your relationships — choosing them, maintaining them, nurturing them — seriously. As Esther Perel says (and I’ve quoted more than once), the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.

And yet - be very serious about your capacity to feel joy, and the flip side of the coin, which to me is grief. Be very committed to your ability to feel it and its many manifestations in your life. If there is anything real and true in this world worth keeping, it is your joy and your silliness, and you should never compromise on that. It gives you strength. It energizes you. It touches and ripples over everyone around you, and in a world where we tend to feel alone together, this is the most natural, most abundant gift you can give.

As we get older, I don’t have a doubt in my mind that some things will become more difficult. Getting older also means more things happen in a life; we are at its mercy. Things happen all the time to people we love and to us, and they will continue to. Across the world and close by, wars are being waged. Violence continues to be a tool of oppression. There are people who would hurt you for their benefit. There are people who profit off many, many dark things, too many of them to list. Human nature can be scary to face and we are capable of causing horror and strife for each other — that’s most of what we’ve done for centuries. I am not a positive person because I am delusional. I am optimistic because it’s the only way I can live and cope with being in a world where everything beautiful and everything terrifying happens in equal measure, at the same time.

So it is important, it is the work of a life to find that joy, to keep that joy, to claim a right to it. It is important to keep a connection to joy because living in a world like ours requires us to live with everyone else, a massive group project on the brink of extinction. Can you imagine holding all that existential weight on your shoulders and then being disapproved of, outcast, not taken seriously for being silly? for feeling unbridled joy? Absolutely fucking not.

Fight for the right to your joy like it is your birthright to feel it. Because it is.