intentional joy

dispatch 26

hi there friends.

We did it, it’s September somehow. I turn 5 years sober later this month on the 25th, so I’ll be talking about sobriety a whole lot this month as I navigate all of the annual Big Feels (TM). Five years is a stretch of time that still feels completely impossible to me, and I am grateful to live within the evolution of this thing. I respect and love the ways that the practice of recovery has continued to shift for me. That’s something that no one told me about recovery…it would grow. That I was not a list of problems or vices to solve or do away with, but something formless and shifting.

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Image credit to Film Grab.

intentional joy

This time of year always makes me reflective. Blame it on the leaves starting to change, on the goldenrod reaching over my backyard fence, heavy with unapologetic yellow. Blame it on my upcoming birthday, my five-year sober date creeping closer. The container of a year does not mean anything on its own, but it can take on the meaning you give it. How will I answer the question of this next year of life in recovery? 

When I think of what I want this next year to feel like, I keep coming back to this clip, from the 2001 French film Amélie. If you haven’t seen the film, it centers around a character of the same name (played by the magic-in-human-form that is Audrey Tautou). Amélie’s young life is full of unexpected tragedy and parental misunderstanding. She isn’t alone, but she is lonely, and so she begins to shape the world with her imagination. Her pleasure in small moments as an adult is a product of intentional cultivation, a deliberate choice, a way that she centers joy and experience not in spite of a world that is unkind, but in resistance to it. Joy becomes the center point of who she is, something to gift to herself and those around her, a way of knowing who she is.

The movie, which is one of my enduring favorites, feels instructive on how to move through an impossible world full of impossible humans and still hold onto the potentiality of joy. The reason that this clip has been on my mind lately is how it reminds me of early sobriety. 

I watch Amélie each year around Christmas, and in 2017 that meant that I watched it within my first 90 days sober. I remember how simple all of her joys seemed to me, how easy, how obvious, yet entirely inaccessible to me. It was and still is sometimes, so much easier for me to name my dislikes; to build an identity around the things that I am not or refuse to be. 

That year after my yearly screening, I tried to make my own list. I scrawled the heading across the top of a blank page: “Things that bring me joy that don’t involve booze”, and then I sat at my desk, pen in hand, for an hour writing nothing. The hole where drinking had been felt so big in that moment, and I wanted just one damn thing that brought me joy and wasn’t trying to kill me. One thing to hold onto, one reason to keep doing this thing, one way to start to recognize myself again. My list started with one small thing, but it grew.

The space occupied by the culturally-constructed specter of the addict, that bogeyman that has been created to protect people from self-examination, is equal parts sad and bacchanalian. In my drinking years, I thought I was well-versed in joy. But in truth, drinking detached me from my needs and my ability to access authentic pleasure. It was a sorry replacement, and as I forgot how to notice the little moments, I lost connection to myself. Ignored, that joyful, wondrous part of me quieted and retreated back under the stairs like all of the things we are too scared to love.

In so many ways sobriety is still this unexplored map of the self, so much more than the absence of a substance. It is a portal to different ways of seeing the world, to different ways of seeing yourself. And I want to reclaim this year for noticing. I want my list of likes to grow so that I am never again tricked into grounding my identity in what I dislike, or what I am not. 

Capitalism thrives by disconnecting us from our needs, creating problems, and selling us solutions. Reclaiming moments of pleasure and joy is a refusal of this co-optation, it is turning around and walking the path back to our birthright with something as small as the sound of a spoon against your favorite dessert or the perfect spot to skip rocks. I’ll end with a non-exhaustive list of joys I have been noticing, cultivating, and cherishing lately. What do you like friend? Let me know you by what you hold dear, your most precious, tiny moments. 

A list of tiny joys: 

• Remy racing Max down the stairs every morning 

• The way my grandma always tells me she was just thinking about me when I call her. How we laugh at the synchronicity every time

• The incredibly loud cardinal who visits the birdfeeder outside my window every morning while I write

• That moment on Saturday morning when you have coffee and a whole weekend ahead of you

• Young people walking old dogs

• Stopping in the middle of making dinner to dance with you

• My mother shouting “I love you” through the phone and how she says it over and over until we hang up.

• The sound of water at the creek

• The sweet urgency of eating an ice cream cone in the sun

• New hiking trails in worn-in hiking boots

• The way the light slants into my bedroom as the sun sets

• That sound when you open a plastic-covered library book 

• A postcard from a friend used as a bookmark as a daily reminder of love

• The prep work for art: cutting thread, washing brushes, gathering ingredients

• Fermentation kitchen experiments and how the most important ingredients are time and patience and a willingness to get it wrong

Assorted, rad things: 

• Moominvalley in November by Tove Jansson: I love how Tove used seasonal transitions in her Moomin works. This one is about the prickliness of building community and how we construct our identities around our fears. As always, just the right amount of ominous whimsy.

• Friendlove episode of How to Survive the End of the World: This season Autumn and adrienne are exploring love in all its forms through the lens of bell hooks’ All About Love. Friendship doesn’t get the cultural recognition that romantic partnership does, though it should. I just really loved this episode.

• An Attempt At Exhausting A Place In Paris by Georges Perec: A short experimental book in which the writer spends three days logging what he observes from cafe tables in Paris. It’s a kind of reporting of the ordinary that points out how much we miss or write off as unimportant is life itself. The book is a sweet reminder to look closely.

That’s all for today friends. I’d love to see you in the comments and hear what you think of this dispatch! September…what a world!

with big, organized Virgo season love,

Lisa

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