Like just about everyone else on this planet, I’ve been having a hard time lately. The world’s on fire, and denial and cruelty seem to be the law of the land. I’m tired and angry and heartbroken.
It’s been more and more challenging to imagine a future or find pockets of joy, but I know I should still try. Late last year I saw an opportunity to do just that with Jane’s list of delights. I’ve done it before, and I wanted to do it again. It seems like such a simple and doable thing to pay attention to the surprises and strange little blessings that drop into ordinary days. So I opened a new document and titled it Today’s Delights.
I opened my eyes wider. I waited expectantly.
I waited some more.
Nothing happened.
The list stayed empty, and I felt deficient.
Part of the problem may be that in order to encounter new and wonderful things, it helps to leave the house. But I’m high-risk for COVID-19. So I don’t really go out, and haven’t, for a very, very long time. My life happens almost entirely within the walls of my house, and my partner’s house, and what I can see out the windows.
Delight is, or was, a big part of my public persona. I first got into science writing because I was dazzled and overwhelmed by the miracles of this world and universe. I wanted to learn about all of it, and tell everyone. Delight was my motivation. It was my career track. It was my brand. It was everything. I started freelancing as a science journalist, offering readers fascinating facts that would astound and delight them. I wrote about squid vision and plant communication. The funniest parts of the human body. Dog friendships. The taxonomy of clouds. I even created a twee Twitter handle: @delight_monger.
Around the same time, I was in graduate school—a science-medical writing program housed in a school of creative writing. While I was there, I took advantage of the program’s classes in memoir and essay, and a new world opened to me. I started to write not just about the things that I was finding in Science and Nature, but the things I was experiencing in my own body and life.
Most of those things were not delightful. They were gritty and embarrassing and isolating. They were not bite-sized, fun, or quirky. They were difficult and messy. They were important.
I felt my career turning in that direction.
It’s not all I do, but now, by day as a health communications specialist, I write about disease and health disparities and the ways in which our society, our government, and our healthcare system are failing the most vulnerable among us. At night as a poet and essayist, I often write about hardship and suffering.
My primary motivation now is the same one I had in my delighted days: to connect with my readers. To give them something. With this difficult work, especially the personal writing, my goal is to create a mirror in which people see themselves and say It’s not just me. I’m not alone. There could be a path through this. Maybe I’ll be all right.
The most vulnerable, miserable, private things I’ve written and published have been the things that prompted the most enthusiastic responses from readers. It’s not the retweetable facts about dinosaur feathers or baby galaxies; it’s the moments when I get real about trauma and self-destruction and the misery that comes from being disabled in an ableist world. About gendered violence and the pressure to be silent. About being unhappy. About feeling bad. In all this, readers tell me they find comfort, companionship, and relief.
I still take great pleasure in the way that I communicate, even when the content is uncomfortable or dark. I luxuriate in both the art and the craft of writing. I still make beautiful things, strange things, surprising things. Subversive things.
Gratitude journaling works; there’s more than enough scientific evidence to convince me that writing down the things I appreciate can improve my mental health. But maybe right now it’s less important for me to force myself to incline my mind toward the stereotypically marvelous than it is to appreciate what is marvelous about the work that I do, and the gifts that I have, and give.
Maybe my definition of delight has been smaller than it needs to be. Maybe there can be delight in getting a letter from someone who felt seen and held by something I wrote. Maybe there can be delight in a musical turn of phrase, a clever line break, a haiku about something that hurts.
I think all that is probably all right. And I think I will be, too.
+
Images via Unsplash
I am delighted by this sliver of insight [comment edited by moderator, who notes your years of kind comments].