Joy Is Your Birthright

Even now, even now, even now

Hello friends.

Check out my friend Danijela’s clothing line, it will make you smile

Last Saturday, some of my dearest friends threw a Unicorn Death Match. It was our contribution to a communal creative event called Competitive Winter Picnicking, which is held each March in a different park somewhere in Brooklyn.

Unicorn Death Match involved some amateur stage wrestling; three-on-one pillow fight action; an inflatable T-Rex; multiple bubble guns; a small parade; a cake smash; multiple delighted children, some of them dressed like Ruth Bader Ginsburg; and, of course, unicorns. I laughed until I cried.

We are at a peak of revelry in the many calendars of the earth. 蛇转乾坤 shé zhuǎn qián kūn – “The snake turns the world around”- Year of the Wood Snake celebrations concluded March 2. In the Catholic world, Mardi Gras/Carnival/Carnaval just passed. And in Judaism, next week is our own drunken masquerade holiday of Purim.

I grew up in Louisiana, where we dance at funerals. I love a party, and costuming is part of my spiritual practice.

But these days?

To state the obvious, things really suck right now. A lot. Pretty much everywhere you look.

We’re stressed, our attention divided. It’s not safe to glance at your phone at a party—one push notification can change the whole mood.

It can be hard to get your mind off things. It can feel like the mature, serious, moral thing to do is to pass up the chance to celebrate. It can feel callous and perverse to flaunt your happiness and good fortune in times like these.

Kim, people are dying

I want to gently offer another way of looking at this. (Thanks to my sister for talking this over).

Love for the world in all its imperfection, abiding joy, play, silliness, the pursuit of pleasure—these are necessary for survival. They are not optional.

If you spend time around kids, you know this. I often think about a story I did for NPR in 2019 when president Trump was separating migrant families at the border. There were thousands of children in federal detention.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced that they were out of money for these children, for anything that was not "directly necessary for the protection of life and safety.” Meaning, like, soccer balls and art supplies.

So I called up child development specialists, who told me that opportunities for recreation do in fact, rise to the level of necessity. Play is needed for healthy physical, mental, emotional and social development. And, emerging research suggests that when people are under conditions of great stress, they need to play even more:

“A very simple thing that Dr. Pamela Cantor told me is that when your brain is being bombarded with stress hormones every day, you actually need to move your body even more than usual so you can get oxygen to your brain. And this oxygenation - it helps buffer, potentially, long-term damage.”

There you have it. Physical play is oxygen to the brain, especially when things suck.

Now, it’s not always possible to put on a happy face. We’ve all been in situations where we’re called upon to celebrate but circumstances conspired against it. Maybe it was New Year’s Eve but you were sick. Maybe it was the holidays and you’d just lost someone close to you. Maybe it was, I don’t know, your 40th birthday in 2020. (It me).

But the polycrisis, the mess we’re in, goes beyond immediate circumstances. It’s all-pervasive. And we aren’t just affected—we are implicated. So if you wait to have fun until things are going okay, I have news for you: everything is never going to be okay. The only time to have fun is now, while things are fucked up.

And this is a lesson I’ve also brought home from a lifetime of carnival. Mardi Gras doesn’t wait for you to get your life together. People who are grieving, afraid, lonely, poor, hungry, sick, and struggling—in other words, all of us at different times—are all invited to the party. It’s also a major sensory overwhelm and endurance test, so no matter how well your life is going, Mardi Gras will always mix in a little rawness and even sadness with the joy. And that’s how it should be.

I shared a version of this reflection last year. This year, I thought about a new dimension. I thought about what my friend Elke likes to call “making the revolution irresistible.”

And what the sociologist Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence,” those unifying rituals and heightened emotional experiences that lift us up together and help us imagine or collectively conjure a more ideal world.

One of the nicest things about Competitive Winter Picnicking is that it got us sharing food, drinks and laughter with strangers; not just members of our broader weirdo community, but also the regular folks who happened to be enjoying the park in Bed-Stuy that day. They may not have totally understood what we were up to, but they were down.

This year will doubtless require me to show up, express myself, build community in all kinds of ways. I plan to do at least some of it with cake on my face.

P.S.

As you know, I have mixed feelings about "the kids give me hope" trope.

But I honestly, teared up so many times interviewing a dozen trans teens about their lives under Trump 2.0. for New York magazine.

I wish everyone who had doubts or who is "just asking questions" about kids and their health care and their right to exist would do themselves a favor and listen to them for a minute.

For a last word on joy, Here’s K.C., 17, from New Jersey.

A lot of people think you have to have dysphoria to be trans, but in most circles it’s more about what euphoria we can bring to others and bring to ourselves. Using the right pronouns and name can be a source of euphoria.

Transmasculine people getting binders, or starting T and seeing their voice starting to drop, is definitely a source of trans joy. Being able to see that in others and cultivate it is a source of great positivity despite all the things that are happening outside the community.