Joy and Resistance

And what it really means to find it in ourselves

I promise I’m not going to mark every milestone of time passing this way, but can you believe that it’s already been a month since Trump was inaugurated?

Can you believe it’s only been a month since Trump was inaugurated?

It’s been a pretty terrible month writ large. From cuts to life saving programs in the U.S. and around the world to the really heartbreaking stories of park rangers and other federal workers who lost their dream job with no warning and no recourse to the deeply terrifying firings of the people who have kind of important jobs like managing our nuclear weapons, keeping an eye on the whole bird flu situation, and monitoring people for Ebola at international borders. And that’s just the bureaucracy. There’s also the fact that in the ongoing cold war between autocracy and democracy in international relations, we just switched sides, or the federal government trying to bribe NYC’s mayor.

Suffice to say none of us have been having much fun paying attention to politics. But I’ll be honest, the last week was particularly rough for me - partly because I was getting over a cold, partly because I was having trouble sleeping. I’m no stranger to insomnia but there’s something particularly galling about it when you’re sick and you know that a good night’s sleep could cure you. And on top of that, the news is relentless, time is passing impossibly slowly, and in the back of my mind is an insidious whisper.

What’s the point? What’s the point of enjoying myself when the next breaking news alert is going to break my heart again? What’s the point of thinking about the future when Elon Musk is just going to buy the future, strip it for parts, sell it off to the highest bidder and then wave a chainsaw in my face to gloat about it? How do you plan for the future in a moment like this? How do you save money? How do you write a queer romance novel when it feels like the whole world is about to tip over into war and repression and fear?

I don’t know how this manifests for you, but for me it’s blankness, or as I put it in a text message to a group chat this week, I’ve tapped out on outrage. I’m at capacity, I have no more room to feel anything. Okay, here’s another thing. And another. And another. Let me do another Monday New York Times crossword about it.

But it was this stupor that forced me to finally understand what it means to believe that joy is resistance. It’s one of those pillars of dissidence that I always heard, believed but never really thought about - something I assumed wasn’t really for me. There’s a lot of ease in my life, and a lot of love. Joy should be much too accessible to really count as resistance. And yet, as I went through the motions this last week, my phone on do not disturb so that I could read my fanfic in peace, there was something niggling at the back of my mind. This is what they want you to feel, it said. Don’t give in.

There are some pretty basic reasons why the current administration wants us to feel like this (and I’m not just saying that - newly confirmed OMB director Russell Vought actually wants federal workers to feel traumatized coming to work). For one, I didn’t call my Senators or my representative at all this week. I didn’t respond to stuff in my politics group chat, I didn’t engage in my organizing Slack or write this substack. Aside from some posts to Instagram, this administration got no resistance from me of any kind last week, joyful or not.

Depressed, downtrodden and/or hopeless people don’t act. They don’t fight back, they don’t help each other. They don’t make art that changes minds or celebrates life. They don’t tell stories. They get up, they go to work, they spend money, they go home. The relentless firehose of atrocity, the attacks on queer and trans people, on immigrants, on the very concept of diversity - the goal is to make us small, to make us retreat, to make it easier to force people to conform to systems of oppression that empower and enrich the very few at the top of the pile.

Wouldn’t outrage be a better motivator? Our current circumstances are, at their heart, completely outrageous. Wouldn’t my rage serve me better? Possibly, but I don’t know that you can have one without the other. Joy gives space to grief, to rage, to fear, because it is the thing those other emotions feel the absence of so keenly. Finding a way to revel in little luxuries, to be in community with each other, to dream about the future makes us vulnerable to the pain of losing those things. But it also helps us find our rage and our power when those things are taken away - from us or from anyone else.

There’s a quote I’ve been seeing around that I keep coming back to, from Dan Savage, a writer and activist: “During the darkest days of the AIDS Crisis,” he wrote in his advice column, “we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced at night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn’t look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing.”

Which is a long way of saying that on Friday afternoon, I bought Brie and crackers and oranges when I was shopping for dinner, and while my sister and I finished off the last of a bottle of vinho verde we had in the fridge, I arranged a little appetizer on a serving dish shaped like an open book. When I posted it on Instagram later, I said “We’re creating joy, goddamnit. And if we don’t feel it yet, we’re faking it until we do.” And that night, when more awful, scary breaking news hit the group chat, I went and found something galvanizing to share in response. On Saturday morning, I finally tuned back into my podcasts and my news-y emails.

I’ll tell you the other thing I think helped me though. When the malaise started to come on Tuesday night, I let myself feel that too. I gave myself a little deadline. I knew I’d need my wits about me to write this weekend, and I said babe you can feel or not feel whatever you want until then. The malaise is going to come back - we’re not meant to withstand this level of insanity and heartbreak all the time. Sometimes I’m going to need to step back, to make a little cocoon inside myself and hang out there for a while. But it’s so important to remember what we’re fighting for, to feel the joy we’re fighting for, to act it out so our friends and family can find it in us and in themselves too, and to remember that we are human and beloved and we all, every single one of us, deserves to shine.

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Some Democracy Saving Stuff to Share/Do

• Check out and share excerpts from J.B. Pritzger’s State of the State speech in Illinois: ““I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.”
  
  Read the whole speech here. It’s particularly good.
  

• There is an extremely important State Supreme Court race coming up in Wisconsin that Elon Musk is trying to buy. He would absolutely love for the state supreme court to flip back to a conservative majority that can uphold abortion bans and gerrymandering and voter suppression. Let’s not let him do that. Sign up to phone bank or write postcards, or donate to the Wisconsin Democrats here.
  

• Check out these live cams streaming on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Youtube page. I watched the bay one and the deep sea tank one while knitting today and it was very soothing.
  

• Trump’s polling is under water. People are not happy. Keep sharing, keep fighting, keep telling stories, keep dancing. It’s working.