Grasping for Joy
The events I’ve been producing this year are like none I’ve ever produced before, which is fitting for a year that feels like an asteroid. I don’t just mean they were novel in the virtual sense, but in the kind of content. Business as usual is a joke, but business at all feels like a pretense. In a year when nearly everything we hold dear is threatened and we are in an other-worldly, communal existential crisis and can barely tell up from down, it’s hard to take it seriously when people ask you to just give them a to-do list of the things they need to do to get back on track. If there’s anything I’ve got practice in looking for these days it’s a marker of white supremacy culture, and the need for “efficiency,” “productivity,” and “solutions-based thinking” all fit the bill. White people, while I am one of you, I’m tired of you asking me for a toolkit for your hard work.
There is something kind of liberating in building the plane while flying it, especially if we’re all in the plane and building it together. Everyone has a role, and everyone has a lot to lose.
For TCG’s Fall Forum, as an example, we tried a unique programming process that involved an all-BIPOC programming council. I’ll admit, I was nervous about this; not about the fierceness of the council, but about whether I was equipped to facilitate these high-level thinkers in our field. It turns out, I was, and I was so grateful for the time they spent with us, dropping wisdom bombs right and left, making me feel lucky to be a fly on the wall of their conversation.
One of their suggestions was to ditch the expert, flashy speakers for this one (which was fine, because what speakers “on the circuit” charge, or rather what their agents charge, is criminal even in the virtual space and especially during a pandemic). They urged us to focus on building community, on togetherness, and on joy.
Joy.
It’s been a lens for us before, part of our commitments to each other as colleagues and to our attendees, that we would encourage each other to look for moments of joy. But I found myself and my team planning a plenary session entirely focused on the practice of joy as an essential part of our work, especially our anti-racist work. Led by two brilliant leaders in our field, they encouraged us to find our own definitions of joy and to identify our sources for it. I found myself in a small group of 5 or so theatre practitioners, all having a hard time remembering when the last time was we felt joy, or at least, knew what it was when we felt it. That moment last week when I stepped into a hot shower - was that joy, or relief? When my 7-year-old told me a terrible joke he made up and then grinned so big I had to laugh, was that joy, or just deep, deep love? Do I even really understand what joy means to me?
I couldn’t have articulated this then but I can now, after thinking about it for awhile. For weeks, in fact, while staring down an approaching New Year. A new beginning.
I think what’s hard about accessing joy right now is that it’s one end of a spectrum. To experience joy, we also must know how to experience pain, and sorrow; we must have the basis of comparison, the yin and the yang. Yet, there is so much pain and sorrow to contend with right now, we’re all doing what we can to just get through a day without drinking too much, yelling at our kids, or letting a tear fall for fear we won’t be able to stop ourselves from crying all night. I’ve spent the better part of the last year carefully constructing my cocoon; so carefully that I’ve built it to deflect not only the hurt but maybe the joy too.
At the beginning of 2021, as the light starts to show through the cracks in my armor, I am starting to remember the importance of letting myself feel the pain. To stop pushing through for one minute and to mourn, to be crushed under the weight. It won’t stay there forever; it will be lifted soon enough. And there my cocoon will be, in shards at my feet, and I’ll be able to let the joy in again. To stop picking it apart, questioning all its appearances, and to let it be part of me.
