Sharing joy. What a concept. Sharing joy is one of those things I’ve discussed with my therapist and then realized I have some stuff around. When the idea of starting a newsletter began to take hold in me, I was unloaded on by a metaphorical dump truck of fear—both inherited and acquired. My mind became preoccupied with the capital T-ruth of my joy. All of my fresh creative energy was spent on an anxiousness that asked me what I was allowed to share, how much of it I should share, and the question of what was really real and alive in me. Listen, I’ve googled enough apple pie recipes to know that a lot of what’s floating around on homesteading blogs is an altered reality. For a few bad attempts at cooking to be the only 'wrongs' displayed in the public sphere feels a bit inauthentic to me. I wasn't expecting life here to be all rhubarb jam, but where can I put that—the "bad" stuff? And what about the good stuff? How to get across—even when I’m uploading pictures of the best of the good—that it’s not all sprouting seedlings and pizza parties? I’m not interested in adding to the plethora of perfect life stories that we all consume on social media daily, it doesn’t feel true to me.
But more interestingly, I found that it felt even more foreign to share it—the joy, I mean. With writing, my comfort zone has somehow mostly been about sharing what is most vulnerable to me. If you’ve read things I’ve written before, you know my go-to shares are focused on things like feminism, my history with bulimia, and personal narratives around social justice issues. I’ve shared things that were happening in the world, my feelings about them, and how they showed up in my life. I’ve written very sad poetry, I’ve written very angry essays. Not so much happiness.
Where's the line between bragging and sharing joy? Is it subjective, then? Perhaps because of my own inability to entertain this question, sharing joy has always felt alien to me. It’s as if in the past, I haven’t even allowed my joy to be reflected back to me. It's that constant presence of the anxiety bug which asks me how I know I'm happy, how fleeting it will be, and whether or not I'm worthy of experiencing it. Vulnerable I might have been, but I’ve also felt scared to share the upsides of my healing, to make everyone else feel seen or heard in their pain, but not their happiness.
What I’m trying to say is, I want to be honest here. I want to be honest about my joys and my struggles and my wins and my losses, my hopes fulfilled and my place of complete hopelessness. Because right now, things seem pretty good. I don’t want to have to side-eye every good thing that comes my way and already anticipate its leaving. I’m working on that, on trusting that I get to feel good and that doubt is part of the process.
To tie this back in with my intention of sharing joy, I want to say that the joy I share in this newsletter is not separated from my doubts— it’s interwoven in them. Perhaps it is because of my doubts that I get to experience the joy of noticing myself grow. I know I probably won’t be erasing them forever. They live with me like little reminders of the things I didn’t allow myself in the past—to pursue with uncertainty, to take big risks for big joys, to give myself fully to what I don’t know. Yes, it's scary, but dammit—it’s real.
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