Welcome back! Rounding out this series on hope, we’re going to be diving into the liberatory practice of joy. We’ve talked a lot about leaning into mourning, of letting ourselves wound so we can witness, and not turning away from discomfort. And while I think that’s crucial to continually resist what I call “cop out privilege” - aka the kind of privilege that lets you opt-out of difficult conversations because it doesn’t directly impact you, the kind of privilege that let’s you opt-out of difficult learning, of really looking at the impact of how you're living in a critical manner, and opting-out of the pain of redefining what you think you know by claiming neutrality - Liberatory practice is also all about joy.

Because the point isn’t to suppress our experience of joy or peace when it shows up. Joy, peace, and happiness are actually really important aspects of liberatory practice, hope and dreaming. And it’s important for us to know that joy and mourning are not mutually exclusive; we can hold all of this at a tension with each other, as integrated with one another.

So let’s chat a bit about how we can resist cop-out privilege while still allowing ourselves our full capacity for joy.

Let’s first start off with questioning our understanding of happiness and the ideas we’ve been brought up to believe about happiness. I’m going to read an excerpt of Sara Ahmed’s critique on the definition of happiness in her book, Feminist Killjoy:

“[As Feminist Killjoys] we might do something different with our happiness. Like refuse to let it be our end. The English word happiness comes from the word hap. meaning chance. The word happiness shares its hap with the word happenchance and haphazard. But happiness seems to have lost its hap. Becoming not what happens to you, but what you have to earn. We put the hap back into happiness, taking a chance on it. We could be happy to be queer without turning happiness into a project of becoming worthy or deserving of it.”

“We might need to claim the freedom to be unhappy, in a world that assumes happiness as evidence of being good, or at least the freedom to remain profoundly ambivalent and unsure. Life is complex and fragile and messy, and so are we.”

“We need to shatter the illusion that happiness is inclusion…We don’t tone it down, straighten ourselves out, try to be more like you so that we can get through to you. We spill over onto the streets, fierce and fabulous, our protests, parties. We spill over, we spill out.”

So if happiness isn’t something we have to earn, if it isn’t something that tells us whether or not we’re good or moral, if it isn’t something that we have to hold on to at all costs, if it’s something that we can let happen to us, if we free ourselves from the idea that happiness is liberation or that happiness is earned and something we have to prioritize proactively getting, what does that open up for us? What does that open up for our liberatory practices?

As therapists, we know that we can’t just selectively numb one side of the emotional spectrum. And that it is in letting ourselves feel the uncomfortable, the painful, the gut-wrenching, that we also let ourselves feel the joy, the connection, and the healing beyond what capitalism tries to sell to us. So why would that be different when it comes to liberatory practice?

Not to mention the whole capitalism thing? It’s exploitative, it’s a scam, and it doesn't work anyways; the most wealthy people often have such an innate spiritual pain of being the epitome of an unwell society. After all, what is well in a world that is so unwell? What is healing in a world that glorifies the harm we work so hard to attain, only to have to recover from it?

If we can let go of our obsession to be happy, if we can let go of our narrow ideations of what it means to be happy within this colonial, capitalist paradigm, then perhaps happiness will happen upon us.

One of my favorite quotes from Audre Lorde is “I feel, therefore I can be free”.

At first I didn’t get it, I couldn’t wrap my head around how feeling could be liberation. But now I think what it speaks to is the process of living and existing under oppression. Because at the end of the day, if you are having a response to the system, the atrocity, the cruelty, then that means you are not consumed by it, and you haven’t been overtaken by it. It brings into consideration that feeling deeply and without the restraints of having to earn happiness, and without conforming to the societal norms of happiness that works to invalidate our humanity, that we are resisting the very systems that tries to disconnect us from our divinity, our humanity, and our interconnectedness.

If we think about happiness in this way, if we forgo the idea that happiness is the peace we must consistently try to attain, but instead think of liberation as peace, we might see that believing happiness to be peace is all but a process of numbing. A numbing that requires us to turn away, a numbing that believes that in order for us to feel at peace in our lives we need to remove all that has us feeling anything but happy.

If we let ourselves connect, instead, to the paradigm of liberation as peace, we might start to let the hap back into our happiness, to experience how liberation as peace includes happiness and joy as a pause for breath, a pause for hope.

Because joy, too is an act of resistance. And while happiness is not hope, there is an inherent hope when we choose to opt in, rather than to opt out, and sometimes happiness, joy, and peace, not only allows us an emotional latitude to opt in but also becomes a treasured function of our opting in.

In the pursuit of collective liberation, the happiness that happens upon me when I choose to opt in, often comes in the form of connection and knowing that I am not alone in this work. Whether that is through encountering thought-provoking ponderings that reads like poetry or being able to engage with a group of people who are all envisioning and working towards the same future, liberatory practice becomes joy. Liberatory practice is the antidote to apathy. It becomes agency and meaning, and connection, and purpose. Liberatory practice releases you from the narrow ideations of what it means to be good under a colonial, capitalist, racist, cisheteronormative, anti-fat, classist, and ableist paradigm and instead allows you to rest into the connectiveness of solidarity.

This work was never really a sacrifice. It’s a healing practice that allows us to come back to ourselves and each other. To look at a world constantly telling us we are not good enough and not worthy and go “this is a distraction”. This is a distraction meant to keep us profitable rather than imaginatory, to keep us exploitable rather than in connection with each other, to keep us apathetic and hopeless rather than resisting and dreaming up the world that could be.

This work is a healing practice that bids us to lavish in the joy of the little minute moments because we know the lineages of resistance that made them possible. This work helps us let happiness happen upon us as we connect with the communities that makes living worthwhile…

Because your hope will never be enough if the hope is just yours.

You feel powerless up against these systems, because the systems have a lot of power. It’s by design! But we are not powerless when we’re together.

And if mourning is what forges solidarity, then hope is being part of something bigger.

Vikki Reynolds talks about vicarious resistance as opposed to vicarious trauma. (The TLDR of the idea is that vicarious trauma assumes the folx we work with and their pain is what harms us. The folx we work with do not harm us. It’s the fact that they are suffering and we have no means, in our limited, individualistic, therapeutic profession to comprehensively address the root of the pain with the urgency that would honour its magnitude - that’s what harms us. I’ll link Vikki’s article in the email that accompanies this audio. If you’re not already on the list, head to www.reflectingonjustice.com/hope to get a copy)

In contrast to vicarious trauma is vicarious resistance - the recognition that the folx we work with brings about a resistance that we are also transformed by. That it is in the presence of such resistance that we build our foundations for hope. That it is in our being transformed that we expand our beliefs of what is possible.

As Angela Davis says in her book Freedom is a Constant Struggle:

“[Communities] are the people whom we have to thank for imagining a different universe and making it possible for us to inhabit this present. There was Claudette Colvin, too, who has a wonderful book, Twice Toward Justice. All of you should read it because Claudette Colvin refused to move to the back of the bus before Rosa Parks’ action. Claudette Colvin was also arrested before. You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history. That is why we like to focus on Dr. Martin Luther King, who was a great man, but in my opinion his greatness resided precisely in the fact that he learned from a collective movement. He transformed in his relationship with that movement. He did not see himself as a single individual who was going to bring freedom to the oppressed masses.”

Community is essential to hope. Hope is someone believing in you when you don’t believe in you; hope is collectively carried, not a thing you have to conjure up in you in the midst of despair (because let’s face it, sometimes you can’t)

Hope is sharing what you do and seeing other people shift and transform in minute ways. It is having infuriating conver