FLOTATION Devices

FINDING JOY can be DIFFICULT-especially when the WORLD ITSELF doesn't seem particularly JOYFUL. But as DURGA CHEW-BOSE discovered, sometimes it FINDS YOU.

Joy. Begin there because a consideration of joy stands in need of a big drop-cap letter J-like an ornament on the page, decorative yet somehow necessary. Because there's no way to write about it without a little garnish, without sounding sentimental. Joy's discreet, mutable power is a whole lot and also very ordinary: You're flying, on the inside.

I set out to make sense of my ambivalence toward joy. After a long break, I was ready to write again, apparently from a place of sorting through. (It's worth noting that finding an editor, like mine for this essay, who simultaneously guides the writer toward and away from danger, intuiting when it's okay to say "I don't buy it!" is its own joy.) I was certain-often the first sign I've got it all wrong-that joy was not something I prioritized, or was not something I was looking after, the way I imagine many people do in order to safeguard themselves from Everything. I was sure it was rooted in the accumulation of canceled joys like holidays that never occurred or reunions with friends that were pushed and pushed and pushed. I feel, mainly, the effort of all of it: a thickset intensity that hasn't let up. When I do experience enchantment, like from a movie's last line (Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid), I also experience, alongside that enchantment, how unavailable I've been to that fizzy, sweetened frequency.