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I know what it means to mourn. I know what it means to look at what was once a life full of joy and levity — only to see heaviness and despair left as the fruits of the harvest of life. Since 2017, I’ve been in a free fall, rattled by loss. In a five-year period, I’ve lost one of my dearest and closest friends from graduate school, two beloved aunts, and my dad.
In five years, I’ve watched my social circles get smaller as grieving made me shrink into a more fearful version of myself, always crouching somewhere safe within my psyche to avoid experiencing the pain of loss, especially sudden loss.
Often people say that grieving is lonely. And it is. When you grieve, whether a person, place, thing, or a state of being, you are actively calling back the love and affection you poured into that person or thing, trying to understand how to extend that care to yourself again.
That is inherently lonely, because it is your relationship that you are mourning; no one else can know the depth or realities of it. No one else can relate to your pain — your grief is yours alone. Grief requires a reordering within of everything you formerly knew about the self attached to that other entity — work that could assuredly take a lifetime.
The Importance of Harnessing Joy When Living With Grief
My grief that I have carried in this period of life, as profound, life-altering, and cataclysmic as it has been, is not unlike the grief that most other Black people have experienced. Whether it’s due to police brutality, the ills of racism in general, or watching our loved ones, friends, and community members die of COVID-19, there is so much to grieve, so much to mourn.
Black collective grief has been at the forefront of my mind in my time of mourning, as are spots and places of joy. We all will have to endure the inevitable heaviness of life; how we harness joy to keep us anchored to this world can act as our guiding light. Our guiding force. A North Star of Joyfulness.
The queer womanist writer and thinker Audre Lorde is known for writing beautifully about self-care and what it means for Black people to care for ourselves in a world anchored in our degradation. In her book A Burst of Light: And Other Essays, she famously writes words that are often repeated: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Self-care and Black joy are linked; one happened to pave the path for the other. Black joy is many things: Black people centering our levity and ease, cultivating and tending to the safe spaces in our lives for support when life becomes perilous, taking a break from the oppression we experience to be present in our lives in other ways, such as by spending time with loved ones and stepping away from social media when news updates are triggering. Black joy is much more than deciding to be happy and to have fun; it is a direct response to us living in this anti-Black world.
It is us saying, “Yes, the violence of white supremacy is draining and exhausting, but there is still much brilliance, vibrance, and vitality within us despite that.” Being Black is not hard — dealing with the external forces of racism is. Black joy is giving ourselves gentleness and compassion and using that to fuel community care a step further. Choosing to embrace joy is intentional, radical subversion in a world that would prefer for us to only find suffering where there can be delight.
The origin of the term “Black joy” varies depending on whom you ask. The most general assumption is that it originated as a hashtag on social media. The other prevailing thought is that the concept — and the subsequent movement it has become — are the brainchild of Kleaver Cruz, a writer in New York City who identifies as a Black queer Dominican American. In 2015, they started using the phrase online after feeling overwhelmed by the excess of Black death and pain in their sphere. From there, they have built The Black Joy Project, where they show glimpses of joyfulness in Black people online as a reminder of our joy inheritance.
Where and How I Find Joy, Even When That’s Difficult
Cultivating joyfulness for myself personally is often a challenge. When you’re in a prolonged state of mourning like I have been, giving in to that heaviness becomes instinctual. To shake up my energy, I have traveled a lot while mourning, and that has given me a place of spaciousness. Being able to literally transport myself to other places in the world to be reminded of the beauty that exists all around us has been grounding. In this way, joy has become more than just something to turn to, to search for, but a centering of sorts.
My main source of joy, though, has been connection with other Black people — notably via online grief support groups where I can talk openly and honestly about what it means to mourn as a Black person. One of these is a grief group called Black Folks Grieve, led by the grief guide Naomi Edmondson. In these special spaces designed for only Black people grieving, we share our losses, what’s coming up for us, and how we’re creating space to be buoyed in those happy moments that still come.
Sharing and Spreading Joy
Like the grief support groups that have brought me connection and contentment during a time when I felt mostly emotionally unmoored, there are many other individuals and groups creating space and holding space for others, or simply writing their way toward more joy. Of the latter, Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts wrote about joy and how we can look to it as a means of resistance in her book Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration. Released earlier this year, her lyrical essays on joy are framed as a beacon of hope and a steady reminder of what we can look to grab from this life, even when it seems out of grasp.
There are joy collectors in our midst, and joy reflectors: those who send up a smoke signal that while this life may be painful and full of things to heal from, things to grieve, we can harness something powerful. Something so pure that when the weight of the world barrages our souls, we can look at one another, and at our strength, love, and joy that are rooted in one another, and declare all to be well.
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