You know the social media posts, the ones about grabbing all the joy you can find? About discovering joy in ordinary moments, not just big ones? I think they’re annoying. Full disclosure: it’s not easy for me to access joy. I know it when I see/feel it, but it seems to be avoiding me more than I’d like. 

The last year or so, I’ve concentrated on looking for joy in other people and their accomplishments. I jump on posts announcing a new grandchild or a work accomplishment, on reels of photos of once-in-a-lifetime vacations. I can feel the joy in the posts and I celebrate it, even though it’s someone else’s. And for a while, that was enough.

Last week I participated in another one of Martie McNabb’s wonderful Show & Tales events. I highly recommend them, whether you decide to participate or just observe. It’s storytelling for everyone.

One of the participants told a story about seeing a guitarist perform. He was surprised to find out that, at 65, the man had only been playing for five years. How did he get so good in only five years, when playing well had been a lifelong struggle for the man telling the story? The guitarist explained that when you start you’re bad, but the more you practice, the better you get. And he described it with this advice:

My last book - Fag Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Community - took a lot longer to write than I expected. It wasn’t because I had writer’s block, or that my research was hard to compile. I had two major setbacks that I could not have predicted.

I started on the book in earnest in the fall of 2015. The first year of working on it was a whirlwind: interviewing women, doing deep dives into little-known corners of the HIV/AIDS community, revisiting those dark early days of the epidemic. I had so much help, from two small crowdfunding campaigns and incredible leads from friends and strangers alike. People were excited about the book and I hadn’t written a word.

I was in New York City in February, on a bus headed down Broadway towards Columbus Circle. Up ahead, I could see a digital billboard on 59th Street; okay, a lot of them. But the words on one caught my eye:

What’s The Best That Could Happen?

I did a double-take, assuming I’d misread it. It must have read ‘Worst’ not ‘Best’.

I was wrong. 

When we debate making an important decision, we often ask ourselves to imagine the worst-case scenario. But it got me wondering: do we ever ask ourselves to imagine the best-case scenario?

 

Since at least 2013, when my first books were published, people have asked me how to go about writing their own book. They’ve asked about publishing, they’ve asked about writing groups, they’ve asked about how to get the courage to write. Many of them want to write a memoir based on their experiences in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. 

For a long time, I would offer unabashed encouragement and suggestions for how to proceed. I let them know I would answer any questions they had along the way. Some of them took me up on that offer; not all of them followed my advice. That’s okay. The important thing was that they were telling their stories.

When the COVID pandemic began, I joined online writing groups of long-term survivors in the HIV/AIDS community. Some were already published authors; many had never been published. A few of them were considering going that route, but others were mainly interested in recording their feelings and experiences during what quickly became their second pandemic.