hello friends.
I’m taking a little break to start off 2024 and work on some other creative projects, so this month I’ll be revisiting past posts from the archive. This post is from the way way back machine of September 2022. When I did my yearly Christmas Amélie watch, I knew I wanted to repost it.
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intentional joy
This time of year always makes me reflective. Blame it on the leaves starting to change, on the goldenrod reaching over my backyard fence, heavy with unapologetic yellow. Blame it on my upcoming birthday, my five-year sober date creeping closer. The container of a year does not mean anything on its own, but it can take on the meaning you give it. How will I answer the question of this next year of life in recovery?
When I think of what I want this next year to feel like, I keep coming back to this clip, from the 2001 French film Amélie. If you haven’t seen the film, it centers around a character of the same name (played by the magic-in-human-form that is Audrey Tautou). Amélie’s young life is full of unexpected tragedy and parental misunderstanding. She isn’t alone, but she is lonely, and so she begins to shape the world with her imagination. Her pleasure in small moments as an adult is a product of intentional cultivation, a deliberate choice, a way that she centers joy and experience not in spite of a world that is unkind, but in resistance to it. Joy becomes the center point of who she is, something to gift to herself and those around her, a way of knowing who she is.
The movie, which is one of my enduring favorites, feels instructive on how to move through an impossible world full of impossible humans and still hold onto the potentiality of joy. The reason that this clip has been on my mind lately is how it reminds me of early sobriety.
I watch Amélie each year around Christmas, and in 2017 that meant that I watched it within my first 90 days sober. I remember how simple all of her joys seemed to me, how easy, how obvious, yet entirely inaccessible to me. It was and still is sometimes, so much easier for me to name my dislikes; to build an identity around the things that I am not or refuse to be.
That year after my yearly screening, I tried to make my own list. I scrawled the heading across the top of a blank page: “Things that bring me joy that don’t involve booze”, and then I sat at my desk, pen in hand, for an hour writing nothing. The hole where drinking had been felt so big in that moment, and I wanted just one damn thing that brought me joy and wasn’t trying to kill me. One thing to hold onto, one reason to keep doing this thing, one way to start to recognize myself again. My list started with one small thing, but it grew.
The space occupied by the culturally-constructed specter of the addict, that bogeyman that has been created to protect people from self-examination, is equal parts sad and bacchanalian. In my drinking years, I thought I was well-versed in joy. But in truth, drinking detached me from my needs and my ability to access authentic pleasure. It was a sorry replacement, and as I forgot how to notice the little moments, I lost connection to myself. Ignored, that joyful, wondrous part of me quieted and retreated back under the stairs like all of the things we are too scared to love.
In so many ways sobriety is still this unexplored map of the self, so much more than the absence of a substance. It is a portal to different ways of seeing the world, to different ways of seeing yourself. And I want to reclaim this year for noticing. I want my list of likes to grow so that I am never again tricked into grounding my identity in what I dislike, or what I am not.
Capitalism thrives by disconnecting us from our needs, creating problems, and selling us solutions. Reclaiming moments of pleasure and joy is a refusal of this co-optation, it is turning around and walking the path back to our birthright with something as small as the sound of a spoon against your favorite dessert or the perfect spot to skip rocks. I’ll end with a non-exhaustive list of joys I have been noticing, cultivating, and cherishing lately. What do you like friend? Let me know you by what you hold dear, your most precious, tiny moments.
A list of tiny joys:
Remy racing Max down the stairs every morning
The way my grandma always tells me she was just thinking about me when I call her. How we laugh at the synchronicity every time
The incredibly loud cardinal who visits the birdfeeder outside my window every morning while I write
That moment on Saturday morning when you have coffee and a whole weekend ahead of you
Young people walking old dogs
Stopping in the middle of making dinner to dance with you
My mother shouting “I love you” through the phone and how she says it over and over until we hang up.
The sound of water at the creek
The sweet urgency of eating an ice cream cone in the sun
New hiking trails in worn-in hiking boots
The way the light slants into my bedroom as the sun sets
That sound when you open a plastic-covered library book
A postcard from a friend used as a bookmark as a daily reminder of love
The prep work for art: cutting thread, washing brushes, gathering ingredients
Fermentation kitchen experiments and how the most important ingredients are time and patience and a willingness to get it wrong
That’s all for today friends. Thank you for being here and for reading. May 2024 bring you more joy than you can handle.
with gratitude,
Lisa
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