joy is the most vulnerable emotion
This month I took myself to the sea. I waded endlessly knee-deep in the turquoise lagoon, basked in the late afternoon sun burnishing my skin, delighted in the shape of Spanish on my tongue, sipped caipirinhas while walking miles along a stretch of white sand, shot many intimate self portraits (workshop coming soon!), catnapped lightly, slept deeply. It was glorious, joyful, tender — a week of hard anniversaries held gently, with care.
This weekend, in our last session together, I asked my students to ask themselves: how can I invite tenderness and pleasure? For several of us, this was the hardest prompt, and in some ways the most painful, for the reminder of how we deny ourselves. I find that this too is the work of nourishment — not just allowing our delight, but holding it with just as much as sacredness as our grief.
When I started writing this newsletter last fall, a little seedling of what I was allowing to gestate and grow, I found its values easily:
deeply intimate
infinitely caring and loving (as bell hooks defines love)
abundantly embodied and femme
turning towards pain and unafraid to do so, but also unafraid of joy as the most vulnerable emotion
That last one is a lesson my therapist has been trying to teach me for the last four years, and it is the one that makes me most nervous — still aspirational, not yet comfortably lived in. Joy is vulnerable because it reveals our deepest hopes, the longings we are too afraid to admit out loud.
This week is my birthday, the end of a year in which I collapsed, the start of a year that is bursting forth recklessly. I am turning 32, an age that feels solid enough to be a capital-A Adult, the Grown-Ass Independent Woman era I have wanted since I was little. I am celebrating differently this year, tenderly — perhaps with a hike, nor’easter permitting, or with a soak in the salt baths of NYC. There will almost certainly be oysters and a citrusy martini in some dimly lit stunning corner of the Lower East Side — and there will be an announcement: the launch and birth of my little company, paperwork filed and all.
This is my joy — the wonder of stepping into this beautiful era of my thirties, the hard-won confidence of founding a business grounded in my most closely held values, the gentle delight of celebrating with the sea and the sun and the twist of gin-soaked pomelo and the tender crocuses in the woods.
a few medicines, or a few pleasures:
“In the very grooves of my being is the desire to bust open, and the certainty that it is right to begin to live again even after long periods of cold and darkness.” — on being born in March, from Jenny Slate’s book Little Weirds, h/t to my sister.
The touch of pomegranate-dyed silk yarn, a first skein from the hands of an incredible human.
I found the hidden quilt hanging in a secret gallery in the Met — directions thanks to Public Library Quilts.
Diaspora Co’s guide to my other favorite city in the world — I had forgotten how much I miss Kala Ghoda Cafe.
until next time.