The complexity of it all

Feeling joy and grief in the same breath

I originally wrote this piece in September 2021, yet I find myself feeling similarly this week. For anyone else who struggles to live in the space that exists between joy and suffering, perhaps these words can be an invitation to open ourselves to the complexity of all our emotions. May we find strength to have conversations with our communities—offline and surrounded by our loved ones—and create room for any and every feeling we have, even when they exist all at once. Wishing everyone rest this weekend. xx

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The morning sky has been grey in Los Angeles this week, the air muddy with fog or smoke or haze, we’re not sure, it’s probably a mix of everything. The smoke running down like a stream from the Sierra Nevadas, settling above my treetops as a constant reminder that the woods I played in as a child are on fire.

I’ve been sharing on Instagram, but for context: My family lives in Northern California where the Caldor Fire continues to ravage through small mountain communities including my hometown. My parents are currently evacuated and we have many friends who are also displaced. As the fire moves towards Tahoe, the firefighters have been able to hold the line, which is less than a mile from our house. The structure is still standing, but the lasting trauma is imminent even for those whose houses survive.

And while California is, yet again, on fire, storms and floods are destroying the east coast. Turn your news channel, and you’ll see continued war in the Middle East and on women’s bodies in Texas. Oh, and there’s that pandemic still going around.

Yet, amidst the traumatic news cycle that seems to have no end, my husband and I are going to a wedding this weekend. Good friends of ours are finally having their deserved day after a two-year-long engagement.

While chatting with one of them, she shared how challenging it feels to shift attention to a celebration while so much of the world is in pain. How can I not feel guilty? She said. How can we celebrate when people everywhere are hurting?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I pack my bag and prepare for a weekend away with my husband. For three days, we will fill our time with food and friends and fresh coastal air. We will drink and dance under a star-filled sky and, for a moment, it will probably feel as if everything is right in the world.

All the while, I keep thinking, is this allowed? Can we truly enjoy ourselves when there is so much collective pain?

Life doesn’t stop when disasters happen. For anyone who has experienced loss or trauma, you know how the world keeps going, how people continue living despite your hurting.

And this feels outrageous. It makes me want to scream until the world stops and everyone turns towards the injustices. In many cases, we need more of this. People are numb, and also privileged (myself included). Often, when the hurting doesn’t impact us directly, we have the ability to turn away, to claim exhaustion, to check out because it’s just too much and we don’t know how to handle it all.

But the reality is that the world doesn’t stop spinning, as much as we feel like it should, as much as we want it to. And maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe there is a reason for this complexity, something to learn from this.

Pain and joy coexist, I’m discovering. They are not exclusive emotions. We pause to celebrate love and beauty when we have it because we learn how precious the good truly is.

Our pain informs our joy. We dance because we have something to dance for—life, love, the prospect of a peaceful future. Allowing ourselves to surrender to joy doesn’t mean we’re refusing to hold space for hard things. It just means we’re living in a complex moment. We’re creating space for joy not in spite of our brokenness but because of it.

We also dance for the past, for the memories we hold and cherish. I dance for the little girl who ran through the woods, tracing the bark with her fingertips, pressing her ear to the trunks to hear all their secrets. Those trees are gone now, but the memories remain. And those memories become my reason, my hope, my why.

And so this weekend, I will be dancing. I will move my body and sing aloud and cry euphoric tears for the first time in quite a while. How long has it been since we’ve wept for beauty, since we’ve allowed all that is wonderful to bring us to our knees?

As my husband and I celebrate new love and old memories, we will hold onto one another tightly and help our friends usher in something beautiful. The start of another chapter, as well as the continuation of a journey they are already on.

It’s a messy journey, one we’re all on together. And it includes complex and complicated emotions—brokenness and suffering intertwined with happiness and laughter. And it also includes dancing. That is how we get through.