Joy = Resistance

What Ryan Coogler's "Sinners" did for me.

I’ve never been diagnosed, but I strongly suspect I’m prone to depression and anxiety. That sense has only intensified since Donald Trump took office. I’ve had days where I can barely make myself work, because I’m grieving at what’s being lost.

Sent this message to an editor on Thursday:

I am not stoic or manly.

But something else happened on Thursday: A friend persuaded me to go see “Sinners,” the new Ryan Coogler-Michael B. Jordan movie.

And folks, it was fantastic.

Here’s what I wrote on Letterboxd:

I woke up this morning still buzzing about the the film, which contains moments I can only describe as “ecstatic.”

You know what? I got my work done today.

I talked a few weeks ago about why weird art matters. But I want to put an addendum on that. Fun art matters, too. Joy matters.

That’s not always easy to summon at the moment, at least for me. And maybe for you.

I’m thinking about what Trump lackey Russ Vought said before the MAGA crew returned to the White House:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

He was talking there about federal employees, but I suspect it’s a strategy — purposeful maybe, or perhaps simply born out of Trump’s own chaotic instincts — that White House crowd is applying to the non-Trumpian part of the American populace.

If they simply induce enough despair, maybe everybody will just give up.

It’s a smart strategy. It’s harder to resist, to critique, to make your voice heard if you don’t even want to get out of bed. Audra Lourde¹ figured this out a long time ago.

So as counterintuitive as it is, I think this is a moment to embrace and cultivate joy. For me, it was seeing a fantastic movie. For you it might be gardening or reading or getting a massage or just being around the people you love. It will give you joy. And joy will give you resilience.

This is particularly important at the moment, because I suspect and fear the avenues for experiencing such pleasures might be narrowing. We’re all going to be a bit poorer, maybe a lot poorer, living in a meaner world.

But joy — where and when we can find it — is fuel.

1. My brilliant, beautiful wife pointed this quote out to me this morning.