How dare you be happy when the planet is burning, Gaza is bleeding, AI is rewriting your job description in the background of your own Zoom call, and rent is your entire paycheck with a different alias each month, “cost of living adjustment”, “urban vitality”, “market correction”. How dare you sip your coffee slowly and let sunlight touch your bare... See more

As if joy, left uncamouflaged, might invite punishment. As if being visibly okay is a kind of betrayal in a world that’s still burning.

The joy that kicks off its shoes at the door of your sorrow and refuses to wait for permission. The joy that doesn’t pretend everything is fine but insists that something still is. The joy that can coexist with tears in your throat, that doesn’t need to fix or explain or decorate what hurts but still hums beneath it. The kind that sneaks in while... See more

Because now, to be visibly happy is to risk seeming unaware . To enjoy your life without constant editorial footnotes is almost obscene. It reads as either a flex or a failure of empathy. In public, joy must come shrink-wrapped in context, sandwiched between caveats, softened by sadness to be palatable. Otherwise, it looks like forgetting. And... See more

I’m speaking of the kind of joy that dares to exist alongside pain... irreverent, uninvited, uncompromising, even a bit crazy.

The joy that kicks off its shoes at the door of your sorrow and refuses to wait for permission. The joy that doesn’t pretend everything is fine but insists that something still is. The joy that can coexist with tears in your... See more

We don’t know what to do with people who are both happy and smart. We assume they must be hiding something. That they haven’t thought deeply enough. That their analysis is undercooked. Emotional intelligence is measured by one’s capacity to dissect pain, not hold pleasure.

There’s a long, almost devotional cultural history of revering the tragic. We’ve long associated suffering with seriousness, and seriousness with truth. Thinkers in pain are taken more seriously than those who glow. Nietzsche with his migraines, his solitude, his universe of dread and will and collapse. Kafka, whispering from his tubercular... See more

There are days when I wake up, stretch into my spine like a cat, and feel that tight, electric bliss of simply being alive. The man I adore adores me too, madly, completely, without performance. My son, miraculous in his autonomy, is out in the world doing beautifully, his laughter now its own weather system. There’s the scent of brioche drifting... See more

Pain has always had a kind of intellectual credibility. We call it gravitas. We trust it more. We assume that someone who suffers has seen something. That their insights have been pressure-tested in agony. Joy, on the other hand, is often mistaken for complacency. Worse... denial. To be visibly happy is to risk being read as unthinking, emotionally... See more