Joy & The City
Around this time last year, saying I was overjoyed would be an understatement. I graduated in May, which might not be that big of a deal after all. But, it took me two heartbreaks, three relocations, multiple flights across the Atlantic, one pandemic, and eight years. I was in the last round of interviews for my Dream Job. I was so close I could almost feel how victorious it would taste to yet again prove wrong those who told me I couldn’t do it. That year, on my birthday in July, I saw whales. I saw my favorite band twice. I was learning to sail. I fell in love with a musician I met at my favorite bar. That alone felt like nothing other than fate.
The summer, filled with fulfillment, accomplishment and adventure, airplanes and new places, music festivals and friends laughing, was coming to a close with Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. Surrounded by friends, one of the closest visiting from out of town, there I stood in the grove of Golden Gate Park, bathed in the golden hour sunlight that broke through the trees and swirling dust, in the arms of The Musician, who I was convinced I invented so closely he resembled all my fantasies of who I would end up with. I was in awe before the cinema of it all. I’ve traveled so far and overcame so much for this single moment. It might have been shrooms, too, but oh boy, will that moment go down in history as one of the happiest memories of my life.
From that moment, time will fly. I will get a haircut defined by my best friend’s “Oh, that’s how you’re supposed to look like.” I will read at Litquake, and oh, will I be proud. Halloween will come around, and I will be on a frantic spree researching most out-of-this-world decor and snack ideas, ordering plastic bats, buzzing around the house, and giving tasks to my roommates. You will be responsible for the music. The bats are on you. Could you please take care of the candy apples?
Six of us will be cramped in our small communal kitchen, jumping up and down the chairs, putting up streamers, and changing lightbulbs; some will be working, others will be pouring drinks, This Is Halloween will be playing over our laughter and chatter. We will be doing something important; we will be carrying on a tradition, building community, alchemizing joy. In the picture from that night, there will be two slutty vampires, a vampire slayer, a Top Gun, a zombie prisoner, and a chicken. For the longest time, this picture will be the last one in which we appear together because, in two weeks, the slutty vampire will have to leave back home to Norway. The chicken will have already been pursuing his medical degree on the other side of the country, the prisoner too will have abandoned us to the East Coast first and then floated between other rentals and his family’s home, and the vampire slayer will also move out to live with her boyfriend, all of them leaving Top Gun and me to our own devices.
In November, I will punch the fridge door where the Halloween picture of us hung among other pictures because I’ll get so intoxicatedly close, but I won’t get that Dream Job. I will just so happen to read that email in the kitchen.
“Apologies for the delay. Just sent the Venmo - let me know if you didn’t receive it! As for the role, we’re moving forward with another candi….”
BAM!
The Musician and I will face our first big and tragic conflict. It will be in December that I will realize this won’t be over any time soon.
In January, one of our housemates will start talking to himself in the hallway, banging on doors, and yelling.
In February, Top Gun and I will find out that that housemate of ours is a convicted murderer (no, really, yes, you read that correctly). In fear for our safety, we will rapidly evacuate our home. Top Gun will go to live by himself in a cozy little studio in a cute little neighborhood. I, being on the verge of being broke, will move to what I consider a ghost town, the middle of nowhere, Silent Hill, the cold and gloomy outskirts of San Francisco, known to others as Outer Sunset, to live with my Musician and another couple. Our fights will persevere, and think screaming at each other in the corner of the street turned into midnight angry and desperate whispers not to wake up friends because we both are oh so polite. But at least I had an ocean view. Somewhere far, far in the distance.
In the distance, too, was me overjoyed. That moment in the grove of Golden Gate Park felt like I dreamt it. My life that I didn’t stumble upon but created that resembled a carefully curated and orchestrated set my friends and I wanted to make a TV show out of was no longer. It felt like, with a snap of the fingers, it crumbled, and I was holding the pieces of my life no longer in my lap, hunching over them, trying desperately to hold onto them, grieving. But because everything happened so gradually and yet so rapidly, I didn’t realize right away that I was, in fact, grieving. I also didn’t realize that I was very, very angry.
Almost a year later, I still find myself angry and grieving, less so now than back then, but the desire to return, to get it all back, to somehow recreate it doesn’t loosen its grip much. And even though The Musician and I have since majorly patched things up and have moved closer to civilization and made our own beautiful home out of a windowless concrete shoe box, my life, practically jobless and friendless, still feels empty. And an empty life is easy prey for anxiety and fear. A life shaken by instability makes one prone to decision paralysis. I’m sure you have your patches of shaken ground, major or small, be that a job lost or found, a new friend or an old one suddenly upset with you or an absence of friends, a first Hinge date, a partner no more, a new partner, this is all just to name a few. Life is full of instability. For me, come mid-December, I don’t know how I’m gonna make money because my work authorization will run out; come mid-February, I don’t even know what country I’m gonna call home, but despite it all, even as my kingdom as I knew it has fallen and the new one has yet to be built, I really-really don’t want to subscribe to the mindset that I could’ve only been happy within the safety of the kingdom fallen or within the fortress of the kingdom yet to rise. In one way or another, we are way too often in that space in-between, the shaken ground between kingdoms. I’ve read Eric Berne’s “Games People Play,” and I know that the mindset “I will be happy when ____” is no more than that – a game. Although I naturally fall into it because I think there’s some truth to the idea that I’ll be happier shall my life be more stable, for me, for instance, shall I win the green card, there’s also a deep-rooted knowledge that it’s just a trap. It’s precisely on that shaken ground where you need joy and peace of mind the most. And if there’s anything I’m good at, it’s alchemizing joy, according to my therapist.
So, as a self-proclaimed Carry Bradshaw of joy and peace of mind, I invite you on the honest and messy and sometimes ugly journey in pursuit of it. Authentic, kid-like, I want to chase Joy around the Bay Area, America, Europe, Russia, or wherever I am with the same intensity and persistence with which Carry chased Big around Manhattan. With personal stories, research and resources, practical knowledge, and maybe even practical advice, I want to inspire you to do the same should Joy or peace of mind be absent from your life. I hope along the way, we’ll build a community of Joyseekers, and it will be just joy, joy, joy all around, pure joy.
