In Defense of My Happiness

It is a cold Monday evening, and I am making a case. Not to a judge, not to a jury of peers, not even to the people who have, in their various ways, suggested that my contentment is naive or unearned or somehow beside the point. I am making the case to myself, which is the only court that has ever had true jurisdiction over me. The evidence I have assembled is modest: a warm room, a pair of headphones, and Joy Oladokun’s voice coming through them like a hymn that has not yet decided whether it is mournful or triumphant.

The song is called “Breathe Again.” I have been listening to it on repeat for the better part of an hour, which is the kind of behavior that would alarm a therapist and delight a poet. There is something in Oladokun’s delivery, that specific quality of tenderness held together by steel, that I find myself returning to whenever I need to be reminded that surviving something is not the same as being finished with it. Surviving, she seems to suggest, is in fact where the real work begins.

I have spent a great deal of my life being apologetic about wanting to be happy. This is not an uncommon condition. There is a particular strain of seriousness, fashionable in certain intellectual circles, that treats personal happiness as evidence of limited imagination, as though joy were a small room that only small people would bother to furnish. We have built entire aesthetics around suffering. We have rewarded the literature of devastation. We have made saints of those who could not stop bleeding and looked with faint suspicion at those who healed.

To want to be well is not the same as wanting to pretend that the world is fine. Those are two entirely different projects.

But I am older now, and I have noticed something. The people I most admire, the ones doing the most necessary work, loving the most fiercely, making the most honest art, are not the ones who refuse happiness on principle. They are the ones who pursue it with the same rigour and intentionality they bring to everything else. Their peace is not passive. It is a position they have taken and continue to defend, against considerable opposition, every single day.

Joy Oladokun is a Black, queer woman who grew up as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants in a small town in Arizona, attending an evangelical church that did not know what to do with her. She has said in interviews that she spent years learning to disappear, to take up less space, to make her existence more palatable to rooms that had not been built with her in mind. Her music is, in the most literal sense, what happened when she stopped doing that. It is the sound of a person deciding, deliberately, daily, against all the accumulated gravity of a world that preferred her smaller, to be fully here.

This is what I mean when I say the case for happiness is a serious one. It is not a case for comfort, or for insulation from grief, or for the particular numbness that masquerades as contentment in people who have simply given up being disturbed by things. It is a case for presence. For the radical act of remaining available to your own life. For choosing, on a cold Monday evening, to sit with a song that asks nothing of you except that you keep breathing and deciding that this is enough, and that you are enough, and that the warmth in the room is not something you need to apologize for.

I think about the version of myself that would have found this essay suspicious who would have read it as soft, as avoidant, as a failure to take the darkness seriously enough. I have some sympathy for him. He was carrying a great deal, and he had not yet learned to put it down without feeling like he was abandoning it. He thought that if he stopped grieving, he would be betraying something. He did not understand yet that you can hold loss and still open the window. You can know the full weight of the world and still let a song make you feel, briefly, like you will be all right.

The defense rests on this: happiness, when it is real, when it is not denial dressed in nicer clothes, is an act of resistance. Every person who has been told, implicitly or explicitly, that they do not belong, that their presence is a problem, that they should want less, need less, be less, and who chooses anyway to want and need and be: that person is engaged in something political. Something philosophical. Something that deserves to be taken seriously.

Oladokun ends “Breathe Again” on an unresolved note, which I find honest. The song does not promise that everything will be fine. It promises only the breath, this one, then the next. It promises the continuity of trying. It promises, I think, that to still be here, to still want to be here, is its own kind of victory. Not a small one. Not an embarrassing one.

Outside, the cold is doing what cold does. Inside, I am warm, and the song is ending, and I am about to press play again. I am not apologizing for any of it.