Chasing Joy
Is it a possibility in 2025?
2025 was going to be my year of joy. I even wrote it down online, which automatically makes me accountable. But it’s January 3 of 2025, and I have to admit an early defeat. I need to raise my own white flag. I understand three days in that I was over-ambitious with my intentions.
Joy is going to be challenging to come by in the next four years. I might have to settle for contentment, belonging, and safety—all positive and important, but a far cry from joy.
Of course, I’ll look for small pockets of joy as I can—phone calls with my kids, snuggles with my pups, a cardinal in my yard, a ray of sunshine peeking through the gray, watching a new season of The Great British Baking Show with Julie.
But unadulterated, celebratory joy? I think that’s going to be more than elusive.
I’m still coming to grips with no longer having living biological parents. Or a living sister. Of being the matriarch of my own family while existing without my family of origin. I’m jealous of all the holiday pictures of people my age who still have their parents and their siblings, smiling together in glittery dresses and seasonal suits, bowing their heads toward each other in love. I’m jealous of the other mothers whose kids are able to come home for the holidays, for birthdays, for big dinner gatherings at long tables. I’m so incredibly proud of my independent kids who are making their way in different states across the nation, but I won’t say that I don’t miss them every single day.
My precious wildflowers.
And let’s talk about this nation of ours for a minute. In eighteen days, we’re ushering an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon into the White House. We could have taught our daughters that they can be anything they want to be, but instead, as a nation, we taught our sons that they can lie and cheat and rape and mock the disabled and denigrate immigrants and demean women and lead an insurrection and still attain the highest position in our government.
It’s astounding to me.
As a woman who has been sexually assaulted multiple times, knowing that a sexual predator is leading our country leaves me more than unsettled. And at 54, that feeling of unease is no longer about me, it’s about my daughter and her friends and their friends and your daughters and all the other vulnerable women in this country, which is, of course, all of us.
I’m no longer afraid for myself. I’ve seen the darkest sides of humanity and have come out bruised and battered and alive on the other side. But no one should have to fear for their lives because of their sex or their color or their sexual orientation or their nationality. No one. Women shouldn’t have to learn to hold their keys between their fingers as a weapon, to look under their cars before they step in, to know the most vulnerable part of a throat and exactly where to strike. My daughter shouldn’t have to be the one to teach me that if you hide a baseball bat under your bed and you put a sock on the end of it, that when you swing the first time, the attacker will grab the sock instead of the bat and you’ll be free to swing again. That the crushing blow is the second swing.
When women walk through the woods or on a mountain trail, we should be prepared to deal with big cats and scary bears and charging moose, but we shouldn’t have to be prepared to deal with predatory, entitled men, the most dangerous of all the wild animals.
Our country said collectively that it’s okay, though, to be lead by a rapist. We should be afraid of the message that sends. Every one of us. We should all be horrified by the “your body, my choice” rhetoric. We should all be marching in the streets, protesting the evils of this kind of dangerous patriarchy instead of policing women’s bodies and stripping away their rights.
We should be listening to women, not silencing them.
We are living in the upside down, and my gut tells me it’s going to get worse. Much, much worse.
Friends, I hope I’m wrong. I hope I can sit here at my computer on January 3, 2026, and eat crow. I’d be more than happy to. I just don’t think that’s what’s going to happen.
Money talks in this capitalistic, patriarchal nation. It yells. It screams. It’s the loudest guy in the room, the one who declares he’s the smartest and the sexiest and the fastest and the best. And does anyone ever love that guy? There’s nothing worse than a self-proclaimed expert. And yet, that’s the guy to whom we’ve given the castle keys. That guy and the guys who are just like him. The Old Boys Club. The Rich Boys Club. The Do-Whatever-You-Please-And-Get-Away-With-It Club.
It’s horrifying.
We did this, America. I’m so ashamed of my country. I’m so ashamed of what we’ve become, of what we’re enabling, of what we’re promoting, of what we’re allowing.
And it’s not a Republican versus Democrat thing. I used to vote Republican in my earliest voting years, back when the lines between the parties weren’t unnavigable, dangerous oceans full of sharks and other creatures who could swallow you whole.
This is different.
When I told people I once loved to “unfriend” me on social media if they voted for Trump, I meant it. And they did. And I understood then who they really were. Because if voting for a rapist who may or may not give you a tax break is more important than voting for kindness and inclusion and important lessons for our younger generations, then we have nothing in common. And the saddest part is that we never did.
Most of those people were also loudly “Christian.” And it’s not lost on me that the combination tracks. If I live a thousand lifetimes, I’m not sure I’ll ever understand how the “Christian” community aligned itself with Trump. But this nation continues to get stranger, more disconnected, and more disappointing every day.
I had a former friend tell me that there was “something about my political and world views that she didn’t agree with” before she ceased all communication. I asked her to elaborate, but she didn’t. I’m only left to wonder. Is it because I don’t unequivocally love this country? Because I’m disappointed in my government and in my fellow Americans? Because American exceptionalism makes me sick to my stomach? How in the world can we think we’re a better country than all the others when we disparage everyone who’s different from us? When medical debt is crushing 100 million of our friends and neighbors? When we punish the unhoused by tearing down their camps, but we offer no alternative solution for them? When we demonize and criminalize poverty? When the wealth class is so ridiculously imbalanced that the richest among us could solve all of our country’s problems—and yet, they choose not to? Instead, they choose to make life harder for so many by chopping programs and aid that help the most vulnerable and at-risk.
So, I’m walking into 2025 cautiously. And unbridled joy and caution don’t necessarily travel hand-in-hand. But I’m also moving into 2025 with my eyes wide open and with compassion in my heart. That doesn’t mean I’m going gently, though. I’m ready to march for every marginalized human, to defend the rights of those less fortunate, to shout louder and more fiercely than those who speak and rule and oppress with dollar signs.
And I’m also going to love this amazing earth, to revel in its beauty, to remember to practice gratitude for what it has given us, even as we collectively ignore its cries for help. I’m going to read as much as I can—books that inspire and enlighten and provide escape from the brutalities happening around us. I’m engaging in more face-to-face encounters and fewer online moments. I’m going to prioritize travel; to visit my loves and to marvel at the wonders of this world. I’m going to sing again, to take lessons to strengthen my aging voice, to reignite the pleasure I used to find in performing. I’m going to support causes that inspire me, to give my time and my money to those making positive changes on this earth. And I’m going to love my compassionate, hard-working, change-making, humanity-supporting friends and family and strangers with an open heart—beginning with myself.
First, an experience, and a thought: my divorce from my ex was horrific. He reacted as the drunk always acts, as the addict always acts, when you stop supporting the addiction. Striking out, scorching the Earth black. I was left with nothing, not even my children. I won them back, I earned my settlement, and I made a new life from zero. And I thought I would never be happy again. And somewhere along the way I learned that happy/joy is so elusive. It’s the oasis on the far side of the desert, but it’s not right next to you. Sometimes you get there, but you can’t live there. Being content is a place I can live. That doesn’t mean I’m not often happy and joyful but being content is the greatest gift of all, to me.
Second: it’s all horrific. I’m trying to keep creating, building community, and hunkering down. And I know we are in a position of privilege because of our white skin. As a Karen, we too, could get away with murder… Until we can’t. Until the leopards eat our faces as well. Know that I’m in it with you for the long haul.
The earth is my church now, and taking care of it, and my community is my great commandment.
Love you, my friend, and we’ve never even really met.
I was at a dinner with friends as close to me as my own heart, and the unanimous plan for the next however many years til we pull our American heads out of our asses, was to hunker down within their relationship and family, and spend time near close friends in their community. I can’t think of anything better.
I also know lots of people don’t have those things to hunker into.
I feel every word of what you wrote here. I feel like even since the election, so many of us have drifted off to sleep in the warm water, forgetting that it’s on its way to a boil. 17 fucking days.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. Everything I guess. But mostly that I’m with you. And I appreciate your voice — now more than ever.