December 2020: The Art of Finding Joy Again
Dear lovely readers,
There’s this scene that I can’t get out of my head. I watched it months ago, a moment captured on Tanya Saracho’s show Vida. After their mother’s death, two Mexican-American sisters return to their hometown Boyle Heights in Los Angeles. One of the sisters, Lyn, experiences a growing sense of dread. She does not know if she has any worthy skills. She does not know what she should do with her life. She calls herself stupid and destructive. One night, Lyn finds solace by unearthing a box of her old toys on the roof of her apartment building. It is there that she has a conversation with one of her neighbors, an older woman with a plate of weed pasteles. What follows is a glorious scene: they strap glittery pink wings onto their backs and dance while Carla Morrison’s “Disfruto” charges the night air. Neither of them have the answers to Lyn’s problem; neither of them know, exactly, what she should do. But, in that moment, the pressure to find the “right answer” dissipates. They’re simply two grown women in angel wings flapping their arms. It’s silly and it’s beautiful and it’s okay.
Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.” You can witness that gutting sense of restoration in that scene, that moment, when Lynn—for just a second or two—is no longer haunted by the heavy burdens of what ifs and who am Is. There, on that roof, for that one night, she is free. And, of course, she will return to the falling in the morning; but the ephemeral nature of her redemption is what makes it so alluring and, briefly shunning millennial cynicism aside, heart-wrenchingly optimistic.
The main reason I have been able to keep going is because of the beauty of small moments: a voicemail from my mother, friends inviting me out for bubble tea, drawing in my sketchbook. Life is made up of strange tonal shifts. In Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell (2012), her father wryly notes, “You see, you just can’t keep the mask of comedy at bay. It watches old tragedy doing its bit, and the moment he lets his guard down, old comedy turns up the corners of his mouth.”
That ripple of humor, of brightness, is what makes my favorite films and television shine. Humanity is chaos, but chaos is not simply—or always—dark and violent and red with blood. It can be pure, unfiltered nonsense. It can be the type of funny that makes you want to laugh at a funeral because everyone, even your inappropriate cousin from St. Augustus, looks serious and solemn and it starts to feel like everyone is pretending to be actors in a Shakespearean tragedy and how ridiculous is that, you just want to laugh and laugh and laugh. I need my art to acknowledge contradiction. I need my art to know that humans are not built for destruction—they are hard-headed optimists, always, even when the world is ending.
My father died two months into my first year at college. I refused to grieve. After his memorial service in Florida, I flew back to Rhode Island and pretended nothing had happened. I buried myself in work, rummaging through archives for primary sources, bleeding blue ink on my fingers as I scrawled pages and pages of notes, hiding in the concrete walls of my school library. I laughed too hard at jokes and ate chicken fingers on the grass with my best friends and I told myself, over and over again, everything is okay.
I didn’t realize the tenuous nature of my mental health until I flew to London for three months to study abroad. Suddenly, I didn’t have to pretend anymore. There was no one watching. I didn’t realize how much I relied on external pressures to function like a productive human being until I got there. There were no repercussions—no hurt feelings from friends if I missed lunch dates, no failing grades if I didn’t show up for class. There was no one to hurt but myself. And, as I soon discovered, I was all too fine with that.
Every night, I struggled with debilitating insomnia. I usually managed to fall asleep just as the sun was rising—and then I slept, slept, slept all day. On the rare nights I did doze off, I didn’t wake up refreshed. On the contrary, I woke up feeling even more exhausted—and still I slept, slept, slept all day. I lost weeks of my life in a bleary haze. Near the end of my stay, fearing well-meaning questions from American friends, I dragged myself across Waterloo Bridge and tried to “sightsee.” I visited the Globe. I walked the South Bank and spent hours staring at the Thames River, my mind gray and murky like the water. Over and over, I chided myself for wasting an incredible privilege. It felt like a slap in the face to my mother, who had worked tirelessly to provide for my family. It felt like a slap in the face to the past version of myself, the meticulous robot who had pulled all-nighters and applied to every single scholarship and pushed herself for so long to attain perfection. This inevitably created a darker psychological spiral, throwing me into a black emotional pit. I had struggled with depression for years, but this was the first time it really felt out of my control. I didn’t recognize this grief—and it frightened me.
And then, out of nowhere, I stumbled on a piece of joy.
One night, chest tight with anxiety, I pulled up an episode of Ugly Betty. America Ferrera, dressed brightly in a bright poncho, stumbled into the offices of fashion magazine Mode. A hesitant smile hovered on my face. A laugh bubbled unexpectedly from my lips. Despite the brash taunts and bullying of her colleagues, Betty maintained a hopeful demeanor. She tried, even when no one believed in her. She kept trying, even when she failed. And yes, Betty triumphed every other episode, saving photo shoots with innovative ideas and spotlighting fashion shows with savvy marketing tips. But what I really admired was her kindness. Betty was compassionate. She was forgiving of others and of herself. Again and again, she kept trying, even when she failed.
Her creativity and passion felt like jolts of electricity. I bought myself a sketchbook and a set of black pens. Every night, I put on an episode of Ugly Betty and spent hours drawing. I started walking to campus again, just so I could sit on a bench after class and draw the window panes of the humanities building. I spent afternoons sitting on the South Bank, drawing the spires of the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben and the Thames. I drew night skies tossed with stars. I drew lampposts in the dark, a burst of white light. On my plane ride back home, I drew faces, wide-eyed and contemplative. Betty gave me just enough hope, a sliver of it, a taste of it, to remind myself of something that I did, indeed, like. It was art. It was always art.
At its best, television is courageous storytelling. It requires diligence, persistence, and an urgent hope—a hope to disentangle, to unearth, and, most importantly of all, to understand. I do not begrudge anyone their “gritty” shows, nor do I think there isn’t a time and a place for them. Sometimes, that form of narrative nihilism can be its own catharsis—we witness a darkness that we know exists and we see how it can fester, grow stronger, farther, vaster. It can feel like validation, like a clear-eyed reflection of our personal experiences with something dark or scary or violent. I get that. What I take issue with is the implication that nihilism is inherently worth more. That it is inherently more realistic. That hope and compassion and joy are “childish” things we must forget, lock away, dismiss as we get older. This is simply not true. Cynicism is easy. Hope is hard.
It is not that I want to hide away from the cruelties of the world, but rather that I need a reminder that the world can be kind. Otherwise, these dark, violent shows, the so-called “prestige” lineup of television like Breaking Bad and Mad Men and (once upon a time) Game of Thrones, only confirm my worst inclinations, my worst fears, my worst beliefs—that there is no hope for me or anyone else. It is this type of thinking that originally kept me in bed for a full month. I take issue with the condescending implication that these shows are somehow “teaching” me about how dark the world can be. I know the world can be unkind. I think a lot of us know. And I think a lot of us are desperately searching for evidence that our lives can change, that we can change, and that we can be better, kinder, softer.
On Twitter, writer Claire Willett deconstructed the broader cultural tendency to dismiss joy-centered media as “fluff.” In a detailed Twitter thread (which I highly recommend you read in its entirety), she explained, “[J]ust a gentle suggestion to interrogate your own assumptions that things which are coded ‘feminine’ (romance, emotions, joy, hope) must inherently be intellectually inferior to/less substantive than things we code as masculine (violence, cynicism, dominance, power, control).” Moreover, trauma—death, assault, abuse—is not theoretical for many of us. These are our lives. As Willett notes, our pain is not fictional, but wholly real. And, sometimes, we need to know that our pain will not last forever. We need to see that hanging on, breathing, surviving, is its own type of heroism. It is also made up of internal grit and sweat and gumption. And by hanging on, we can discover joy just around the corner.
In a 1993 interview, David Foster Wallace said, “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical and that still love and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”
And that is the story I will always admire the most, the story I will always return to in my bleakest moments. It is the one that shines a flashlight. It is the one that takes my hand and shows me the way out of the dark.
Love,
Meesh
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