… aka my compulsive (yet also consistent) joke I make every year as a kid of immigrants who loves Christmas despite not being of a religion that formally celebrates this holiday. This season, this “happiest” season, can be a strange time. Images of joy and family are obsessively forced on all of us, but joy and family in reality can look like so many different things. So many of us are away from family, so many of us are creating new holiday traditions, so many of us are grieving images of the holidays that we don’t have or never had, so many of us are trying to figure out joy—how to access it, what it means to us, and reconceptualizing that it exists after this incredibly traumatic year. 

 

And that’s okay. The holidays can be messy—they can be triggering and awful, they can be unexpectedly joyful, they can be everything you wanted and also everything you never wanted or needed. I’ve spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time trying to change my relationship with the holidays—a relationship that has been so defined by my craving for that Rockwellian image of the quintessential Western-family-Christmas. I’ve spent so many holidays yearning for something that my family and I are not, and will never be. Accepting this reality has been hard, but I realize now that what I was really looking for was a joy that I already had and yet couldn’t recognize because it looked so different from the ‘holiday joy’ I saw on TV—my joy was brown, Hindu, and just really obsessed with holiday cookies. 

 

This year I’m trying to remember my joy. It feels fucking impossible this year, and the expectations of normalcy and the “perfect” Christmas feel even heavier, but there have been small moments that have miraculously made this season feel immensely joyful: reading new Queer Asian voices in every issue of DIS-ORIENT, feeling seen for one of the first times in my life (and necessarily called out for being too much of a productivity whore), and just being able to be in community with QASC. There have been moments of joy with my girlfriend, who has sat with and seen me in ways I haven’t been able to see myself by doing small yet monumental things (like sending me resources on what it’s like to grow up as a kid of immigrants and “outgrowing”—though never losing—your parents). My dog experiencing her first snow, my mom’s excitement when she received a surprise package of a Queer Asian Social Club shirt... It’s these moments, from small to big, that have shown me that joy isn’t just one thing. Joy looks like so many different things and even though it can be hard to find sometimes—it’s there. Joy is always there when we surrender our expectations of what joy should be.

 

We’ll be back next week with the next full issue of DIS-ORIENT, but we hope you enjoy our little love note and an end of the year Celestial Card Reading by the wonderful Ian Simmons-Francisco. If you are looking for more cozy Queer Asian musings to keep you company this weekend, be sure to scroll down to check out our past issues of DIS-ORIENT.

 

Happy Honda Days—it’s a weird time, everything is weird, but joy is still there. Open yourself up to some joy, let yourself breathe and exist.