On"Stolen" Joy
making art, making love, and truly living in captivity
This past Wednesday, I rose at 4:15am, Lucas driving me in my tiny black hatchback the 45 minutes to the airport to catch my early bird flight.
This is my third and hopefully final flight to Washington, D.C. for our second shoot for the docuseries I’m a producer on.
These trips inspire and invigorate me, and they also deplete and drain me.
For me, at least, creativity isn’t an endless well. It’s a spiritual birthing practice, one that requires the same mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual awareness as physical birth. That slimy, bloody, crying thing still attached—still draining the blood and milk from me as I learn to mother it.
On one of our first shoots for the series, I actually dreamt I birthed a baby. In the dream, I carried this new baby with me in a carrier, hiding it away from the crew—afraid to expose that I was a new mother again.
But in real life, there’s nothing shameful about being in the liminal space that creativity often requires. Like pregnancy, like birth, like those early days of newborn caretaking—my body is exhausted, but my mind, my heart, my spirit is being called to learn and grow and stretch. To nourish something new.
In the year of our lord, 2000, when it was time for me —a fresh-out-of-high school baby 18-year-old — to choose a college, I chose Pepperdine University, a small liberal arts school in Malibu, California. Truth be told, it wasn’t the best fit for me, but I chose it mostly because it was beautiful. The campus sits atop a cliff overlooking the ocean. And I figured, even then, it was the last chance I’d have to live on oceanfront property.
I toured the campus early in my senior year. Driving through the towering canyons in the middle of the night with my dad—shadows hovering like spirits over his little black pickup—I heard them calling me.
When I was accepted that April, I figured I’d find a way to make the academic part work out in my favor. And I did. But what I never really fully considered, didn’t understand at such a young age, was just how expensive Pepperdine was.
I worked several jobs to make ends meet and felt a constant sense of anxiety that at any moment I could come up short and not be able to pay my way through school. I came close to having to drop out several times. But those years, equal parts stressful and stimulating, were some of the most creative of my life.
During breaks between classes, I’d sit in the courtyard, writing music, singing half-baked songs into the echoey air. In the evenings, I’d head to the painting studio on campus, globbing thick layers of oil paint onto huge canvases with my roommates (also art majors)—never too concerned if what I was painting was taking shape. Late at night, I’d scribble poems or essays into my journal. Work that bubbled up inside of me so easily, I never even bothered to read it again.
Those were creative years, filled with the twin muses of naivety and angst. Me, exorcising myself of the constant fear that I wouldn’t measure up, couldn’t compete, wouldn’t be able to stay.
They were also years filled with community. With experience. With life.
Now, my creativity operates under different constraints, different responsibilities, different inspiration.
Then, what I did I did for me. But now? A sense of urgency, a deep-seated fear that I am running out of a different kind of time compels me. The spirits of my ancestors visiting me in spurts and fits, urging me to get to work, to fight for their freedom and mine—a thing they could not, did not get to know in their lifetimes. A thing under threat in mine.
This is something that has always frustrated me about myself. The limits of my mind and body seem so…well, limiting. I’ve noticed that while other people seem to push through, I really struggle to do that. Or to do it well, I should say.
My body, my brain go on strike when they’ve had enough. They’re just done when they’re done. I’ve always been this way. Infamously turning in a scarf I’d knit for one of my art finals in college—and no, it had no relationship to the actual assignment—so done mentally, physically, and emotionally, it was truly all I had left to give.
Case in point: After returning from my last work trip, my brain felt like complete mush. Like I was trying to ask it to perform and in response it heard, “gruel, please.” If you’d opened it up for inspection, you’d find nothing but a pot of brain oatmeal simmering on a stove. No thought bubbles to be found.
To top it off, back home for less than a day, sitting in our family room, the telltale flicker of lights that signals a power outage began. Once. Twice. Then that decrescendoing hum that crackles into silence, dropping along with my stomach into the pit of my gut.
No power. For days.
I was cold. Exhausted. And still, I had to drag myself to kid performances and social events. All things I actually wanted to go to but was much too tired to really enjoy.
The following Saturday, I made up for lost time. Simmering in my own funk, hair unkempt, a massive fuzzy blanket like a nest around me—I laid around all day. What the kids call “bed rotting,” though technically it was couch rotting. I didn’t really do much of anything. It was the weekend I’d needed the week before but was too busy to actually get.
For some reason, I spent most of that day thinking about Assata Shakur, the Black Panther activist targeted by the U.S. government. I read her memoir this summer and it has stayed with me.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Two things were on my mind: How could she enjoy making love in a jail cell? (Yeah, a thing she did with her partner, Kamau Sadiki, as they awaited trial.) And how the fuck did she escape a high-security prison? I wanted the answers. I felt, I feel somehow they would give me answers to similar questions I have today.
Oh, how I wish I could ask her.
As we turned out the lights in our bedroom that night, and Lucas reached for me in the dark, I was still thinking about it.
Let’s be real: I am having a harder time enjoying life than I’d like to admit. Shit is bad. People are being hunted. Missing. Tortured. How can we go on with our lives each day as if things are normal? Okay?
Sorry to be a buzzkill, but I kinda can’t.
So, yeah, I was thinking about this while attempting to get intimate with my partner. (TMI, sorry.) Thinking, how did she do that? Did she enjoy having sex in the middle of a jail cell? That’s some next-level zen. That’s carpe diem shit to the max type badassery. And I want to learn her ways.
And then I woke up the next day and learned that while I was thinking of her all day, it was actually the anniversary of her escape.
I’m convinced my body knew. Somewhere in the complicated web of exhaustion and grief and love I was feeling, my body understood something learning about Assata’s life has taught me: Escape can be freedom. Rest is resistance. Life is worth living no matter the conditions.
I’ve always assumed creative energy is finite, just like amniotic fluid, blood, physical energy, muscular strength, life itself.
We only have so much time on this earth.
Fascists know this too. It’s why they spend so much time assaulting our senses, heightening our fear, isolating us from one another.
But during birth, it’s common to experience something called time distortion. The intensity, the pain causes the brain to experience chronological time unusually. Stretching out moments of rest and respite across an endless expanse of time and shortening unbearably painful moments so they feel like mere seconds.
While in D.C., visiting the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture a few weeks ago, one of the exhibits showcased all the ways Black people have always lived their lives on a second shift. During slavery, they were forced to labor for free during the day, but still spent their evenings building community, loving and connecting with their families. Long nights traveling to see family they’d been separated from. Big cookouts. Celebrations. Live music around big, open bonfires.
In spite of everything, they made art, they made love — they lived.
I can only hope time slowed and stretched in those small moments of “stolen” joy.
Before you go…
This week because I’m traveling I’m taking a break from “What I’m reading/watching/thinking about/listening to.” I’ll have plenty to share next week. But, if you have new music, movies, books or other art to share with me, lmk!
And finally one last thing you can do for me:
Please like, comment, and share! It really helps. As always, thank you for reading. It means so much to me.
This really resonates with me today as I have jetlag from flying home from New York yesterday. I had ambitions to write today, but I can barely string two words together and just want to rot on the couch instead.
Diana Cherry’s piece is a soul laid bare tender, exhausted, defiant. What makes it so heartbreakingly human is the way she writes through the fog, not around it. Her creativity isn’t romanticised; it’s blood and bone, stretched thin between deadlines, power outages, and the ache of the world. She doesn’t just make art she survives it. The image of her couch-rotting, thinking of Assata Shakur, is not weakness it’s resistance. It’s proof that even in captivity, joy can be stolen back. That intimacy, rest, and creation are acts of rebellion. Diana reminds us that being alive isn’t tidy. It’s messy, sacred, and worth fighting for even when the fight is just getting out of bed.