Despite It All, I Still Love the World

An Essay on Risk, Joy, and the Discipline of Openness

I do not write about joy easily, and perhaps for good reason. If there is any through-line in my life, it is that the world is not organized for my comfort. It is a place that, for all its passing beauty, has rarely spared me pain. It is not a site of relief, but of confrontation. Of disappointment. Of abrupt ends and premature understandings. I have not lived amid abundance or ease. Most of what others take as given—security, affirmation, even quiet—has often seemed reserved for another class of person, or perhaps a different incarnation altogether.

The world, in my experience, is more likely to punish than to reward. It offers no guarantees of decency, no promise that suffering will be repaid, no special exemption for the earnest or the honest. And the people in it—kind though many try to be—too often prove smaller than I hope. Their vanities, their evasions, their cowardice, are not theoretical. They intrude. They injure. Even those with the best intentions fumble it, fail themselves, and sometimes take others down in the process. Especially the well-meaning, it seems.

It is a kind of miracle, then, that I am not merely still here, but that I can say this without irony or affectation:
I love the world. Despite it all.

Joy Isn’t Innocence

But let me be clear: this is not a love rooted in naivety. It is not a love based on the expectation of comfort or the illusion of safety. My joy is not the joy of the unwounded. It is not clean, unmarked, or without context. It is the joy of the returned. The joy of someone who has surfaced after nearly drowning and finds the air sweet—not because air is good in itself, but because they feared they’d never taste it again.

This means that I do not trust joy. Not entirely. I know its cost. I know how easily it can become a trap, how quickly it leaves you exposed. It disarms the vigilance that pain made familiar. It softens the armor that kept me upright. To feel joy is, always, to lower one’s guard. To open the gate just wide enough to let something good in, even knowing that whatever enters may also bring its sharpness with it.

That’s what makes joy dangerous. And sacred.

The Texture of the Real Thing

For me, joy is not oblivion. It’s not the roar of a crowd or the performance of laughter in rooms where silence would feel more honest. Joy isn’t intoxication. It isn’t numbness. It isn’t the cheap mimicry sold by algorithm and anthem and algorithm again.

My joy arrives like breath after holding it too long. It is sharp. It stings. It reminds me I am alive because I had started to forget.

It is breathing next to someone I trust, when my body finally allows itself to rest. It is food shared with those who do not ask for performance. It is silence allowed to stretch without suspicion. It is petrichor on asphalt after a heatwave—the smell of the world remembering itself.

Joy happens when the world is allowed to feel real again. When nothing is edited. When I don’t have to explain the context or correct the assumptions. When my body stops bracing for impact.

It’s not escape. It’s presence.

What Joy Risks

Joy is the risk of being undefended in the presence of something good.

It means allowing yourself to want again. To hope, without scaffolding. It means letting go of the illusion that you are safest when you expect nothing. Because you aren’t. You’re just dead sooner.

And so, I let it in, sometimes. Not often. Not unguardedly. But sometimes, and only when I know someone else is there to keep watch while I breathe. Someone who would carry me if the weight returns too suddenly. Someone who knows that joy isn’t lightness—it’s what happens when you let yourself stop carrying the whole weight of what might go wrong.

Love That Doesn’t Pretend

When I say I love the world, I do not mean “humanity.” I do not mean “life” in the abstract, or nature, or beauty in the philosophical sense. I mean something more specific and more difficult:

Everything that is not me. The world in its unchosen, uncooperative, unaccountable specificity. The world that refuses to be tamed or explained or resolved. The world that sometimes shows kindness and sometimes does not, and never once pauses to justify itself.

I love the world because it is not me. Because it reminds me that there are things outside my suffering. Because I can still be touched by something that does not belong to me, does not perform for me, does not even know I am watching.

That’s the deepest surprise: that after everything, after the heartbreak and fatigue and the quiet indignities too boring to narrate, I can still be moved.

Not a Manifesto, Just a Pulse

So let this piece stand not as a declaration, but as a record of a fragile, defiant fact:
Joy survives here, in me. Despite everything. Despite the structure of things. Despite the many lessons that pain has insisted upon. It survives.

And if I have not written about it until now, it is not because I did not feel it. It is because joy felt too private to explain. Too sudden, too costly, too easily misunderstood. It has always felt like breathing: necessary, unnoticed, and—if you have ever truly suffocated—more precious than anyone else can know.

And so I write this, now, for those who have lived long in the dark, and still keep a seat at the table for the sun.