Celebration As Practice

I’m no stranger to madness.

One of the biggest pieces of my childhood trauma involves becoming a caregiver at such a young age to my grandmother who had schizophrenia, which brought me decades of grappling with my own sense of sanity.

So as the world descends into madness, while I marvel at the sense of calm that I’m able to access, especially as a trans immigrant of color living in the US in this challenging political moment, I’m not completely surprised.

But in a chaos of this magnitude, when the immense disparity of perceived-power enforced by the systems and structures we’ve co-created and blindly played into (yes, including those of us in progressive movements who try to do our best to fight injustice), comes to hit us with a stronger wave of consequences — a pandemic where we fail our most vulnerable, terrible acts of genocide that leave us questioning our humanity, and rising fascism in the most influential countries in the world — what are we to do?

For many of us, at least in trans and queer communities and communities of color, to be under-resourced and persecuted has been part of our inheritance, and so are the resilience and ingenuity forged by the fires of the generations of oppression and silencing we’ve experienced in our lineages. So much so that we have in our bones, a sense of survival that tends to feel more at home with pain and suffering, leaving joy and ease and pleasure and celebration imprisoned by a lens shaped by colonization and capitalism — considering them a luxury.

So even when we occasionally give ourselves permission to celebrate and be in joy, difficult moments activate an undertone of guilt deep within our being that limits our capacity to truly let it all in.

In the Philippines, we mark holidays for the death of our heroes. They’re for the commemoration of the sacrifices our martyrs have given for the country but, honestly, between getting days off work and a dash of Filipino humor, they can tend to end up being pretty celebratory. I don’t subscribe to the idea of martyrdom, and my anchor partner MJ and I giggle at the thought of Filipinos celebrating death, but there might actually be wisdom in this odd alchemy of generating joy from tragedy.

Isn’t it, after all, another form of tyranny to try to control when we’re allowed to feel joy?

Here’s where I think the progressive side of the political spectrum gets a little too close to becoming the monster its trying to fight — we hyperfocus on setting up external guard rails for the futures we want to see at the expense of the fullness of our human expression, we make conformity a measure of our belonging, and along the way created conditionality in our relationships that make us afraid to fully be in our truth.

Our truth is so much more than just our identities, our ideologies, and our suffering. Our truth is also found in our core desires, expressed through our joys, our pleasures, and our celebration, and we need to be a stand for these energies so they too can make their way to the futures we’re building together.

I don’t mean for celebration to be a disconnected all-will-be-well-rainbows-and-butterflies-lalala either. True celebration we tap into from the heart can hold the complexity of the moment we’re in while holding real joy.

I gifted myself with an astrology reading this week for my birthday and my lovably quirky and wise astrologer Caroline W. Casey described the moment we’re in as a time where tyranny is liberating ingenuity. As the world descends into madness, especially when the world descends into madness, may celebration be part of that ingenuity and may we make it our wild and sacred work.

And through celebration, to borrow more of Caroline’s words, may we be strong enough to be gentle, stable enough to be wild — I have a feeling that’s how we’ll keep ourselves and each other sane in these difficult times.

Image credit: Thais Aquino
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