If you happen to’re suffering emotionally and don’t know the place to seek out hope and pleasure nearest the result of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, you’re no longer lonely.
Along with more or less part of the rustic, even the self-proclaimed “Joy Lady” Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts is having a dry generation within the election’s aftermath.
“Sis is struggling,” she admitted to theGrio.
The idea chief, scribbler, and storyteller defined that, within the first few days following the election, she’s been suffering to understand how to steer others against pleasure “in such a way that it doesn’t feel like I’m diminishing their rightful, righteous rage; the rightful grief and sorrow that people are feeling.”
She persevered, “And so I’ve been struggling a little bit, because it’s like, I’m the Joy Lady, right? And so I’m supposed to be bringing the joy, and I’m trying to find it for myself. I’m trying to do the work that I’ve done over these last few years, to locate joy in my body so that I can get clarity on what my next move is.”
Even if it can be tricky to grab pleasure at this pace, Lewis-Giggetts, creator of “Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration,” and its fresh follow-up, “Black Joy Playbook: 30 Days of Intentionally Reclaiming Your Delight,” thinks pleasure is precisely what the ones suffering want at the moment.
“I will say that even in the midst of my struggle, I still believe that joy and reclaiming joy, accessing joy, is a huge factor in how we move forward,” she stated.
Lewis-Giggetts stated that in the long run, pleasure can grow to be our best asset. Alternatively, one has so that you can snatch the generation and aim to seek out pleasure to bring to “wield it.”
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“Joy now becomes a tool for resistance, yes; but also a tool for healing,” she stated, including, “Specifically, we now can wield our joy, wield our humanity, wield our all of it — all the ways in which we move into the world, we can wield it in such a way that it defies what this person [and] these entities are trying to do.”
Although, she added, “We can’t wield something we can’t access. We can’t wield something that we are not willing to get still and acquire.”
Getting nonetheless and obtaining pleasure can seem like many various issues to many various family. For Lewis-Giggetts, in quest of out laughter — in her case, from Netflix’s standup comedy choices, tending to her farmland, and going for walks — are a couple of techniques she unearths pleasure.
The “HEARTtalk” podcast host stated discovering pleasure may also be slightly easy. It doesn’t should be reserved for heavy such things as holidays, milestones, and primary moments. It may well be meditating, journaling, and even amassing your family and being a number of the ones you’re keen on. It could actually also be as reputedly minimum as placing on Beyoncé’s “Cozy” right through a pace of scribbler’s ban and dancing it out, she stated.
“I think the next thing for us to do is for folks to get still enough to access all of the parts — the ways, the grief, and the joy that live simultaneously in our bodies,” Lewis-Giggetts stated. “So that we can get a message as to what the next step is; what the next move is.”
For the ones rightfully asking “What now?” or what the after journey is, she admitted, “I don’t know what the next move is. I wish I did … Like, how do we organize? What do we do? Do we just ‘Blaxit’ out of here, or do we stay and fight?”
What Lewis-Giggetts is cloudless on is that we should first honor the area we want to procedure. “What I do know is that we’re not going to be as effective as we would like in whatever the answer is if we do not take a beat here to restore,” she stated. “[To] restore ourselves, refresh ourselves, [and] you know, access joy.”
