Joy as an Act of Resistance

Joy has been a complicated concept for me this year. At some point over these past 12 months, I came to realize that for most of my life, I thought joy was the baseline of existence. It's where we "should be" at all times, and stress, depression, and pain are unnatural forces taking us away from that natural state. But this year has taught me that I've had it backwards. The natural state of the world in which we live is misery, suffering, and heartache, and joy is something we have to fight for. The world does not want us to have it, so once we do get to experience some of it every now and again, oftentimes we're doing so while simultaneously being enveloped by that real baseline of existence: pain.

Now, this probably sounds really pessimistic, and maybe it is. I don't know. But what I do know is that this new perspective has allowed me to appreciate those moments of bliss like I couldn't a year ago, where happiness was just something I expected the world to give me, taking it for granted when it did and pouting when it didn't. 

For example, I expected the world to hand me joy when my daughter was born. What I got instead was trauma. I wrote about everything that happened in one of the last posts on this blog before writing became too painful to do for several months, so I think I'll spare some of the details, but essentially my daughter was born 2 and a half months early due to a disease that almost killed my wife. I sound much more optimistic and together in that blog post, written on January 22, just 10 days after her birth, than I was actually feeling at the time. In actuality, I was in hell. 

In actuality, I was screaming in the car, banging my head on the steering wheel, ripping the rear view mirror off of my car, and smashing it on the asphalt. We were undergoing some very deep emotional pain from some family members due to a misunderstanding the week before Poppy's birth. I was praying every day that God would spare the life of my baby as she lived in the NICU with a tube in her nose to breath and a tube in her foot for sustenance, because I just wouldn't survive that ordeal if she didn't. For months, even after she came home, the pain and anxiety of the experience consumed my every waking thought. I just could not stop thinking about it.

I think what was happening was that paradigm shift I spoke of earlier: I was seeing just how terrible the world was and it hurt me deeply. The trauma of our experience left a permanent impact on my heart, creating a crater that changed the DNA of my character, so that my personality now contains something it never did before: anger. Where before I had always internalized pain and turned it into silent sadness, my default reaction became externalizing it and turning it into explosive rage. Maybe because it just became too much to internalize anymore.

I hated this new part of myself. All it was doing was burning and destroying, not helping the situation. But at the same time, I had also learned that I could no longer be passive and let people and life do whatever they wanted to me and my family. I had to be able to protect myself and them to make sure that level of pain was never, ever inflicted on us again. And anger was the only weapon of self-defense I could find. So while I hated it, I couldn't let go of it. 

IDLES - Joy as an Act of Resistance
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Some 6 months later, I found myself listening to the new album Joy as an Act of Resistance from a UK band called IDLES. It's punk rock. Angry music, which I had found myself gravitating towards. The first track "Colossus" seemed to deal with the singer's difficult relationship with his father whose "shadow weighed a ton." The second track "Never Fight a Man With a Perm" described the singer getting into a bar fight with a drugged up, muscular man who had been a douche to him. It all sounded pretty normal. He was angry and singing about things that made him angry.

But then the fourth track "Danny Nedelko" came on. Joe Talbot was still shouting and gutturally barking his lyrics like a revolutionary with a megaphone. He still sounded angry but I realized he was singing about how much he loves his friend Danny Nedelko, how he's "an immigrant, a beautiful immigrant" and how "he's strong, he's earnest, he's innocent." I think my initial reaction was to just think it was kind of funny, that he was singing about his love for his friend in the same aggressive way that he had said previously, "I have a penchant for smokes and punching douches in the mouth / Sadly for you, my last cigarette's gone out."

But then he did it again on "Samaritans," barking through his thick Bristolian accent, "I'm a real boy, boy, and I cry / I love myself and I want to try" (a decidedly more self-loving spin on Nirvana's "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die"). And then again on "Television": "If someone talked to you the way you do to you / I'd put their teeth through / LOVE yourself!" 

Now, this is certainly by no means the first time a band has done this, making angry sounding music with a positive message. Far from it. The plight of many an angsty teenager (including myself) to their concerned parents about to throw away their metal CDs is "But Mommmm! I know it sounds bad, but it really has a good message!" But something about the sincerity and realism with which IDLES do it on this record--exhibiting their anger and pain because they feel they have to, not because their genre dictates that they should--really struck a chord with me. Joe Talbot and his band of miscreants were showing me, or reminding me, that anger could be controlled and channeled and made constructive. They reminded me that joy could be weaponized against those who hate you for having it, and righteous indignation can be a healing salve to those whom injustice has injured.

Talbot was angry at all the toxic masculinity he was seeing in the world, but rather than making a song seeking to burn down the patriarchy, he made a song about how he isn't afraid to be a more positive breed of masculine and extolling the benefits of that way of life. He was pissed off at British nationalists treating immigrants like vermin, but instead of penning another dime-a-dozen political tirade, he wrote "Danny Nedelko."

The joy and the resistance in this album are real. They are grounded in actual experiences, oozing with sincerity, and are unignorable in their humanity. And for some reason, to me, that validated what I had gone through, affirming to me that my joy and my thus far feeble attempts at resistance had those same qualities. It gave me the confidence I needed to hold on tighter to the happiness and healing my wife and I had carved out for ourselves from that horrible experience. I'm still very much fighting to control this newly forged angry flame that has begun burning in my heart. But I know better to not be afraid of it. To not shy away at punching back to protect my family's emotional well-being and to not apologize for joy. Because sometimes, at our lowest moment, when darkness surrounds us, joy is all that we have.