You're Allowed to Be Happy While the World Is Burning

The radical clarity of letting yourself feel one thing at a time

For a long time, I believed that joy needed a disclaimer.

Before I could share a moment of peace, I had to acknowledge the chaos.

Before I could celebrate anything personal, I had to name everything political.

I saw friends announcing pregnancies by first referencing mass shootings.

Instagram carousels that opened with, “this year has been hard…” just to show a picnic.

Smiling family photos captioned with, “the world is on fire, but here’s a moment.”

I did it, too. Not because anyone told me to, but because it felt like the right thing.

The moral thing.

I thought: if we forget how bad things are, we might stop trying to change them.

But that instinct, to preface joy with grief, always, wasn’t helping me or anyone else.

urgency vs effectiveness

Looking back, I can see that I was in pain.

And it alarmed me to witness other people smiling.

I needed them to know how serious things were.

I wanted company in my despair.

I mistook urgency for effectiveness.

It took me years to understand that I wasn’t actually doing anything.

I was alerting. Broadcasting. Tethering every experience to a headline.

I thought that naming the problem over and over was a form of activism.

But it is not. I was not changing the world, I was just exhausting myself and others.

I needed direction.

trusting joy

What I know now is this:

Joy is not a betrayal of grief.

We do not need to collapse every emotion into a single statement.

We are allowed to feel one thing at a time.

As adrienne mares brown writes, “We are not taught to trust joy. We are taught to earn it, justify it, or apologize for it.”

We are not required to feel all things at all times.

We can grieve in one breath, and laugh in the next.

We can mourn what is being lost, and still let delight move through us without guilt.

Grief and joy are siblings. They metabolize one another.

If you want to add your voice to the conversation, this is a good place to do it. I write every week, and I read the comments with care.

blooming

A plant is nourished by everything - the sunlight, the rain, the detritus, the rot. Even what has broken down becomes part of the soil that sustains it.

It doesn’t compartmentalize, it digests. It turns whatever it is given, rain or sunshine, into growth.

We can do the same.

This is how we process a world in collapse and turn it into something that might still bloom.

You don’t owe anyone a justification for your joy.

You don’t have to preface it with the apocalypse.

You can feel your grief. And then, when the sun touches your face you can lift your head toward it.

You are allowed to be happy while the world is burning.

Not because the fire isn’t real.

But because joy is one of the ways we carry water.

This is a space for reflection, not just information. If something struck you, or you’re holding something you want to share, my inbox is open. Hit 'reply' or send me a message below.