Both Joyful and Killjoy

Everything is bad and good, all at once, and we have to navigate this together.

Losing my brother when he was 26 and I was 30 taught me, irrevocably, the lesson that life goes on despite our pain. As bombs fell upon Gaza last October, around the seventh anniversary of his passing, it compounded my unending personal grief. It made the grief so powerful again that anxiety befell me, exhausted me, the way it did in the aftermath of his passing. Every mother holding a dead child was my mother’s gut-wrenching pain, bringing me back to the worst weeks of my life, when the hurt made everything foggy but there were shrieks that broke through. Shrieks that broke through and now follow me through life. Every loss shatters lives, and here was loss and its companion, the shattered life, multiplied by the thousands. I could not put myself amid the bombing, the horror; I could put myself in their grief, their rage. I think many people could, and that is why the outcry has been so loud.

The grief, my burnout, the need for life to go on despite everything culminated in a weeklong illness through which I took necessary meetings that would allow me to keep working: I was sick in bed, ice on my sinus cavities to keep the swelling down, taking the meetings I’d long dreamed to take while feeling my brother’s absence more acutely and watching a genocide unfold that I was powerless against—I signed letters; I re-committed to boycotts; I shared the work of journalists on the ground. It was a disorienting time. It was, at a very heightened state, exactly everything that life is, that the world is, all at once. The things we want most; the things we fear most: happening simultaneously.

The writer Rachael Ann Jolie has been chronicling an unimaginably tough time and quoted the musician Nick Cave in a recent edition of her newsletter “radical love letters.” Cave appeared on the podcast “On Being,” discussing “the audacity of the world to continue to be beautiful and continue to be good in times of deep suffering.”

Cave has lost two of his sons in the last decade. That is unfathomable, and yet it lives alongside the unimaginable, unfathomable suffering of millions. How often a conversation might center around who has more of a right to their pain—there is nothing like death, at individual or mass scale, to show us the pointlessness. We are all vulnerable to it; it should be that very reality that fuses us together, that forces a baseline of humanity, that makes us want to even the playing fields.

We all want loss to follow a natural path, to not happen out of order; we don’t want to lose our family and friends in useless war (and they’re all useless) or genocide, and we don’t want to see our children or our younger siblings die. It ruptures something in us when it happens. And while I spent years angry at my brother, at the world, now I feel soft. I feel almost weak. And I think that weakness is a strength, even if it brings me ultimately back to an enormous platitude: I just want everyone to be happy, to be fed according to their needs and desires, to have what they need and also some things they don’t need—things that are just beautiful, things that just bring them peace.

I still have some fight in me, but I have so little will to bring that fight to other people, to other people who are like me and are trying to grapple with the experience of hitting enormous highs and crushing lows concurrently. Who are seeing their grocery bills inflate, their rent increase, their cars break down, their loved ones given terrible diagnoses, with no possible “win” making up for that. There is only endurance.

The duality has seen me try to find mindfulness in little actions, to seek the control the world cannot provide through giving my own life more order that enables my meaningful labor, my writing. I am mindful about what ingredients I buy, about how I prep them, about ensuring a clean and organized house. Bringing mindfulness to the seemingly Sisyphean tasks of daily life soothes me, somehow. It allows me to approach both work and the horrors of the world with the attention they deserve. 

At the end of last year, on social media, I saw a lot of yelling about who was posting what, who wasn’t posting enough, etc. I understand the frustration with those who have large platforms that have otherwise stayed silent. I understand especially frustration with wildly wealthy celebrities who stay silent. Yet I think these frustrations are a product of anger at bigger systems, and it’s never been more clear that we lack an organized way to express this anger in a way that actually creates change. Politicians do not listen to their constituents; the president sends more bombs without congressional approval. The clarity with which we can watch democracy fail us in this moment… what do we do with it?

I like to say that not everyone has to care about food at the level that those of us who are obsessed with food—eating it, cooking it, studying its systems and history—do. But it is the job of those of us who are obsessed to make its realities, painful or joyful, apparent to those who don’t. It is our work to seek ways of making the necessary engagement with the food system by all people, who all eat, less of an ethical conundrum. The goal is that by accessing food and eating food, one isn’t necessarily buying into systems of exploitation—including one’s own. How do we imagine that world to look, and how do we go about creating it? 

Not everything is everyone’s responsibility, is what I’m saying. Everything can’t be. Of course, the world—politics, economy, the war machine—is built to be stacked against most of us, and I do think it is our responsibility, especially if we believe ourselves politically and socially engaged, to find our way in a lane of change, to agitate power in a way that makes sense for us. If we believe ourselves politically and socially engaged, we need to offer others who are not a hand rather than fire and brimstone. 

What I see happening is a current of rage that sees it as everyone’s responsibility to be in every possible lane, to be agitating in every way. It’s not the best use of time, of energy. As Diana di Prima wrote, “it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.” I see people positively or ironically identify as a “killjoy,” and while I understand that, while I might have done so at one time myself, we always have to ask ourselves whose joy we are killing and why. What’s the power dynamic in this destruction? People use it to say, “I’m going to rain on your parade, even if we’re ostensibly on the same side against incredible odds.” That’s less killjoy, more asshole.

At the same time, I do think joy and niceness have real limits in use. They can enable. Sara Ahmed wrote, “Happiness is used to justify social norms as social goods.” Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.” The former quote forces reckoning; the latter, while noting joy is a fine initial act of insurrection, could likely be understood as more akin to “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.” Which way forward? I’ll go with di Prima, the Brooklyn Beat: all of them.

We’re angry with corporations, with algorithms, with the government, and this lack of control has spun out into a screeching online culture of blame and bad faith. This isn’t a new or novel statement (what is?), but it did seem to reach a fever pitch over the last few months. The anguish over holidays going on as usual while genocides occur—I understand it. At the same time, who can risk unhappiness, loneliness? Who has been grieving their own losses and finds the holiday lights, the parties, a helpful source of cheer? Who knows this will be their last holiday, or the last one of someone they love? We have to figure out a productive way to engage with the world as it is, in order to work towards the world that we want. Do we use joy for that? When people ask, “Am I allowed to feel joy right now, while I know of and empathize with and am enraged by the pain being experienced by others?” We have to say: Yes. The way forward is honesty about the coexistence of it all, of forward movement within the messiness.

(What is happening in Gaza, of course, tests the limits of this. I’ve long believed, really, that people have the power. Now I’m not so sure, and if I’m honest, living in Puerto Rico has not served this belief. Seeing colonialism and its enforcement up close—geographically, economically, and psychologically—doesn’t serve hope. That’s their point. Who has to find hope and resilience despite horror? Whose joy isn’t a “fine act of insurrection” but a necessary expression of the will to live despite the suppression of actual insurrection and liberation?)

It’s interesting, too, how much we can differentiate between the world beyond our screens and the worlds within it. How often on a daily basis have you had conversations, exchanged pleasantries as fellow humans, with someone who believes quite differently about you on a range of things? Likely, quite often. Oftentimes, yes, you must be the killjoy when someone says or does some horrifying thing, endorses some horror. Yet online, we expect and build our echo chambers—I think this is perfectly sound behavior, because there is no benefit to opening yourself up to hatred and abuse and bad faith. But despite the echo, we keep screaming. Why? What more productive, generative work can we be doing within them? Indeed, more joyful work.

I believe, more and more as I age, that I need to be moving toward people and seeing their needs and desires—as frivolous as they might seem at times, as frivolous as my own often are—in a clear-eyed way, and then understanding how I can work that into my own writing. I want to open up to all of the complications; I want to bring them in. How can I meet you where you are? Because I want to.

Last year, I had to do a lot of thinking about my own lane, about where I am most useful in the world. I want to be better, do more, but I am one person with very real limits—just as we all are. Food is my tool; writing and research are my tools; and I use them to imagine a new world, against all odds. A little killjoy here; a little joy there. We need them both, shoving shoving shoving…

This Friday’s paid subscriber post will be the January edition of From the Desk Recommends… featuring the pieces I’ve loved most over the last month, with a focus on really good opening lines. I will also be sharing a list of books I will be giving away to readers in the U.S.—first come, first served. I am going to make this a habit in order to get my books in order!

I’ll flip the switch on $50 annual subscriptions tomorrow—for today, still $30.

A recent kitchen still-life.

News

This is a fresh year and there’s no news yet. But I do have exciting news coming!

Reading

Artless: Stories 2019–2023 by Natasha Stagg

A Lifestyle Note

Since I am doing my monthly eating and cooking roundups now for the paid subscriber supplement The Monthly Menu, I thought I’d use this space to share what’s been making me better, happier, more productive.

I’m measuring my work in candles burned at my desk and to start the year, will be listening to the Pain and Glory soundtrack. We rewatched the movie over the weekend and once the strings came in, I thought, This is what I need.