A Year of Flight and Color

Today is my 40th birthday. It’s also the day that a flurry of executive orders threatening the well-being of many people I love are expected to be signed, and a few days into a tentative ceasefire after over a year of genocide and devastation in Gaza. What does celebration mean in a world on fire? What does it look like to protect moments for joy while refusing to turn away from the terror and pain that surrounds it? How do we hold space for happiness at the same time as horror?

I’ve been wrestling with these questions this week, certainly, but it’s simply a microcosm of the way I’ve long considered my place within such complexities. You see, I’m a joyful person. I’m always looking for the aspects of beauty around me. And I will laugh until I lose my breath, even when surrounded by death. If there’s something I’m ready to grasp hold of now, as I enter a new decade, it’s that this can be a gift.

It’s not always, certainly. Toxic positivity abounds, and there are ways that looking for beauty can be used as a means of ignoring power, sweeping the effects of domination under the rug–pretending as if people aren’t dying around you, as if you yourself aren’t part of the system causing the harm. And white women in particular are adept at using “joy” and “beauty” in this way, as a means of willed ignorance and desperate grasping for innocence.

At some points in my life, I did as well. And my first inclination, when facing how whiteness uses positivity to obscure power, was to overcorrect, to think that I could never be joyful, that that was always a function of privilege. But the more I read Black feminist writers, deepened relations with BIPOC friends, engaged in queer and trans community, the more I realized joy in the midst of pain–holding both at the same time–is necessary. That laughter pulls us through. That my tendencies toward finding those moments, holding tight to them, making space in them for others to enter, can be useful for collective struggle. And that to attempt to squelch something so deeply meaningful to me–and at which I’m talented–is not the answer. What I needed to figure out was how to use it well.

Earlier this year, I read a story of mine called “The Devil’s Hand” on Story Hour. It’s a silly story, taking down power structures with baking and cat videos. Not one I would consider among my most meaningful, or important. But a friend of mine watched the recording, and a few days later, thanked me profusely for it. “Thank you for making me laugh,” he said. “In the midst of everything happening, I really needed to laugh.” He told me my humorous stories were important–they gave a little bit of joy to those wracked by pain. That I should write more of them. Because there would always be people who need a reason to laugh.

I’ve been thinking a lot since then about how finding moments of joy and levity can be a talent, how I might lean into it as means of building radical community and opening spaces for imagining liberation–and how accepting what brings me joy can put me in a healthier position for supporting others. Joy can act as a means of igniting passion for continuing the fight against systems of oppression, as well as sharing the intimate moments of connection that ultimately are what make such fights meaningful.

Here, at the edge of 40, I don’t know what the next decade holds, but I know what I carry with me. Over the past three years, I’ve marked the turning of the year (quickly followed by my birthday) with setting a theme, if not precisely an intention. Each of these years the theme took on unexpected life, teaching me deeper lessons than I anticipated.

2022 was a year of fire. I left my partner of over a decade, as well as my job and city, and moved alone to Phoenix, burning things down and rebirthing anew in the ashes.

2023 was a year of water, of the magnitude of the sea. Having freed myself of an emotionally abusive space, I needed to sound the depths of my own feelings, discover how much they could hold, how much pressure, how much depth. I was startled by how much feeling my body could hold, after years of numbness.

2024 was a year of land, of rooting in relation and reciprocity. After sounding my own depths, I found my footing once more through rooting deeper in relation to land, water, season, place, and community. I learned how to better respect others’ agency (whether human or beyond) as well as my own, to express what I desired and allow others the space to respond.

And here we are in 2025, a year of wind. Of, as I titled this post, flight and color. When I expressed this theme to my queer life coach, he suggested that wind is also what powers voice, and that this could be a space for exploring and expressing my own intuition. I didn’t really expect it when I started writing this post, but I think part of what I know, what I’m ready to express, what I carry with me into my 40s, is a sense of how my capacity for joy can be a gift to those around me–and that the work I’ve done over the past three years in particular has prepared me to use it as such: I began anew, creating the space to decide what commitments I wanted to live by (i.e., justice, community, imagination) and plumb the deep recesses of myself and evaluate whether I am doing so well, and what needs to change if not; community is what enables that kind of growth, and so I focused on rooting, deepening intimacies and relations, transforming as I did; and now, I’m ready to lift off, take flight, watch as brilliantly-colored wings flash for just a moment, reflecting the sun.

Even amidst the storm.

I created this collage for the year, thinking only of wind, and was surprised by the amount of color, the vibrancy. It’s currently hanging on my front door, so I see it every time I leave the house.

This year will certainly not be easy. But there will be flashes of color, moments of vibrant joy, spaces that urge you to take flight.

For my birthday, take a moment to celebrate with me by exploring your own gifts. What are the talents calling for your attention? Things that bring you joy, that you deeply desire, that you might also turn toward strengthening intimacies across difference, coalitions for justice, collective imagining, even–and most importantly–in the midst of all the pain?

Hold it all. Hold each other. Hold on.