For the past month or so, I’ve been prone to weeping quite a bit. It’s not a reaction to the many reasons the world is giving us lately to weep or even the always-present missing of my dad. Rather these tears are coming from a poignant place, pulled from a well of joy. It’s a watering hole I haven’t visited in quite some time for myriad reasons. Yes, the past year has been chock-full of the serious adrenaline that came with caretaking decisions while watching my dad negotiating an ever-increasing challenging life, but this sense of seriousness has been with me for quite a while. Guarding against giving fully into joy has heretofore seemed a necessary protection. Over a good long portion of my adulthood (who am I kidding, these layers were laid from pre-teen on up), I adopted an attitude that being too outwardly joyful was to be cheesy, unintelligent, a sucker’s game where life would then circle behind and drop you when you least saw it coming. Music and literature were chosen with deep thought in mind, designed to shake out the innocence of idiocy in order to face and embrace the world filled with dark challenges. And that was all before I moved to NYC.

But throughout, there have always been two specific areas I feel prone to passion: music and clothing. With the former, well, anyone who’s read this space for any amount of time knows what schisms happened there (even though I’m just now digging deeper in articulating it to myself), and the latter fell sideways off my life map after we moved out here to SoCal and the pandemic happened and there was less reason to put on outfits other than for myself, my dad, and Dennis—not to mention there were far more things to think about than what was fun to layer over what. Also, the thrift stores were closed. So that bit of joy went to ground.

But now has come the weeping period. I’m feeling tenderized. My heart cracked and instead of actively trying to find sturdy siding to nail up around the opening, I’ve hung a curtain (velvet, burgundy) where I’m cautiously allowing a few things to cross the threshold. Honestly, September 30 is marked as the date when a particular swoosh rushed in. That being the day when late in the evening I first heard this band that I’ve become besotted with. Breaking down why I’ve become so enamored that I now watch TikToks of the singer with his cats (you’re welcome) is something I’ve given some thought to. It’s not just the music that evokes in me unadulterated joy, but it’s also that they combine my love of style with a jolt of reminiscent power chords, vocals, and all the rest. Sure, my early rock swoonings like L.Zep, Bowie, and Roxy Music were no slouches in the style department, but by the time I was having my insides turned out with Nirvana and Pearl Jam, it was hard to imagine the guys in those so-called grunge bands brushing their hair or even changing out of what they’d slept in before they went onstage. And of course, in that moment that was the point: a reaction to all the plastic detritus that had been populating the music business since Freddie Mercury laid down his microphone for the last time. The point was to ignore consumer-driven moneyed fake foo-fah and get purely moved by the sound that was being laid down. It was a cry for simplicity, listen to this with no silky-scarved distraction. That was why when Marc Jacobs trotted his grunge collection down the runway in 1993, lit matches of high-holy-hell were pitched from many music-makers and citizens (even I sent out a torch). Sure Courtney Love, Babes in Toyland, 7 Year Bitch, and other late nineties bands got stitched up with the fashion term Kinderwhore, a media-created word for the babydoll dress fashion they stomped the stage wearing. The term now incredibly cringe-worthy given its suggestion of how young girls are filtered through a looking glass of sensuality.

Back then, I was embracing the serious, rejecting the joy, on guard against the cheesy, defined as anything that on the surface was too filled with smiles and lightness. Because, you see, my sense was that while lifting off the ground with joyful buoyancy a small army of evil lilliputians would pierce me with their reality arrows and I would die. Or something like that. So, you know, I had to be very vigilant about that!?!? I would not, in the words of The Who, be fooled again. The first time I’d been fooled? Well, I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but I felt the fear of it and that’s what mattered.

Then two-decades on and suddenly, this crack. And the weeping, even dancing, all in the face of a world that is not presenting a lot of reasons to joyfully move, although in some ways I think that letting the lightness touch me while it can is a way to honor the hurt both in and outside of me. In the past month, I’ve danced wildly and with abandon around our apartment to many many Måneskin songs. The only beings who’ve been terrified by this have been the cats. They are 100% confused by this wild flailing that doesn’t seem to move me any closer to their food bowls and therefore seems to serve no purpose. Not to mention, my face while flailing appears to concern them, (I see the looks they exchange) yet they don’t run away. Just stare. I’ve also taken to sobbing with happiness as soon as all the junior bakers for the 2022 season of the British Junior Bake Off enter the tent and begin making cakes and things. Especially Lola. Oh-mi-lord, the pure joy of nine-year-old (now 10, I s’pose) Lola. I’ve taken to thinking, “What would Lola do?” when faced with any bit of drag in life. Young Quique is my number two joy-bucket favorite. I’ve checked myself for mortification, blushing embarrassment around all these gushing, expressive geeking-out moments. I haven’t found those particular emotions. So I step through. Even venturing into my closet where I’ve begun to pull things out to take a twirl in. I was especially happy to see the photos below from the Paris shows, the one on the left in particular who appears to be having the kind of fun the fashion world is not prone to expressing. (I worked in the Condé Nast building where Vogue lives. No joyful vibes were ever felt by me when riding in elevators with the magazine’s editors and the like. Also, see “Why Do Runway Models Always Look So Grumpy? gifted link. I mean, shoes?)

I’m attempting to stay open to this newly found emotion understanding that I’m living it as a woman of a certain age and have the advantage of bringing some life experience to the enterprise. But still, sometimes I just feel 12. The other day I passed two young women outside the grocery store. Their foreheads were touching in that intense way that happens when sharing a screen while staring at something so thrilling as to stop them from breathing. As I walked by, one put her hand up to cover her mouth, her eyes wide, and she uttered a sound that seemed to say “I’ve never” and “I may die” and “I’m feeling SOMETHING.” Something new maybe. Something she was sharing with her friend but not really. To me, she registered the absolute isolation of a momentous emotion all her own. I didn’t stop to tell her she could probably handle it. I didn’t say I hoped she would hold on to a bit of that bliss into her future years, or mention that the feelings would likely not kill her because, of course, I can’t say that. I don’t know. I’m still negotiating with my own gods of joy. I walked on, listening to a song that I now know all the words to, maybe even backward, smiling to find myself in this vessel that is currently floating above my inner sharks.