The Insanity of Joy

Joy is indistinguishable from a kind of madness—I love Anaisa, but when she visits in someone’s body, I immediately recognize the simmering current in her eyes. She feels to me a few seconds from genuine chaos, no matter what she appears to be doing.

It’s part of why I love joy and her. I love the lit match in her hands and the bonfires she dances in.

It takes a kind of madness to decouple joy from reasons for joy. We think, when we feel something, that it must be justified. Something in our environment needs to make us have the emotion. We don’t have it for ourselves, we must be forced to have that feeling by something that other people would recognize as being the right sort of prompt.

The idea of being socially conscientious, even somewhere as intimate as our emotions, is hammered into us along with the idea that anything which responds to itself, which prompts itself without need for justification, or does not have the right prompt is insanity. Because it’s crazy to do your own thing, crazy to feel how you feel because you feel it.

Because it’s crazy to not need to justify yourself to everyone (and yourself, because you are imagining the audience to justify the response.)

One of my absolute favorite things about spiritual elevation is the insanity of it. I feel because I feel. I make myself feel. I feel for no reason than because I feel.

If I had to urge people to do anything, it would be to notice when you’re justifying how you feel. Who are you justifying yourself to—I promise, it’s someone who isn’t actually there, in your head with you.

You don’t need to justify joy or any other emotion, but just know there’s more joy in the freedom of elevation than there ever was in things that you need the environment to do for you.