Accept Our Gladness

There was a strange new lightness the morning after Boris’s landslide victory. Novelist Diana Evans described that contradiction crisply: ‘A crucifyingly depressing result but at least now we know exactly what fuckery we’re dealing with.

Numerous therapists have compared the Brexit trauma to the five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, sadness and acceptance. The first four ones blocked my possibilities to contemplate the full picture. Beauty existed, though. In neighbours knocking on the door, an email from my then manager, a text from my partner’s family, or a café nearby offering free drinks to EU citizens thanking our contribution.

I find a silver lining in acceptance, almost an obligation. American poet Jack Gilbert said that ‘we must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.’ Gilbert wasn’t particularly naïve; that same poem doesn’t begin cheerfully: ‘Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere.’ But he was willing to look at every corner.

History books don’t focus on happy times, and 2020 will have its own chapter. I want 2020 to be the dark year in which, nevertheless, I learnt to accept my gladness. Writing 366 snippets of beauty, of positivism, of light, of a temporary paradise. I, an anxious person, easy at anger, terrible at forgiveness, and with difficulties to look at any problem from a different angle beyond criticism. Whether 2020 will hit me first, it’s still to be decided.

Picture: a moment of supreme gladness in Crete, September 2019.