The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration by Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration by Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts With deeply personal and uplifting essays in the vein of Black Girls Rock, You Are Your Best Thing, and I Really Needed This Today, this is “a necessary testimony on the magic and beauty of our capacity to live and love fully and out loud” (Kerry Washington). When Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts wrote an essay on Black joy for The Washington Post, she had no idea just how deeply it would resonate. But the outpouring of positive responses affirmed her own lived experience: that Black joy is not just a weapon of resistance, it is a tool for resilience. With this book, Tracey aims to gift her community with a collection of lyrical essays about the way joy has evolved, even in the midst of trauma, in her own life. Detailing these instances of joy in the context of Black culture allows us to recognize the power of Black joy as a resource to draw upon, and to challenge the one-note narratives of Black life as solely comprised of trauma and hardship. “Lewis-Giggetts etches a stunning personal map that follows in her ancestors’ footsteps and highlights their ability to take control of situational heartbreak and tragedy and make something better out of it….A simultaneously gorgeous and heartbreaking read” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com if you ever come here in the internet podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. As always, the drill. What is the drill?

What is the drill, Chris? The drill is you go to YouTube.com or tell your friends, neighbors, relatives to go to YouTube.com. Tell them to join the family that loves you but does not judge you. The best kind of family there is at YouTube.com. Fortuna S. Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Goodreads.com. Fortuna S. Chris Voss.

You can see my books over there and everything we're reading and reviewing as well. You can also go to all the groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those crazy places we're just killing it at, except for Snapchat, for the most obvious of reasons. Poor Snapchat, you can say pick on them. Anyway, also go to the LinkedIn newsletter. This will appear on a LinkedIn newsletter probably the next day or two. That thing is killing it over there. LinkedIn really is becoming something in our 132,000 group on LinkedIn as well. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life,

and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold. Today, we have an amazing author on the show. I mean, just always, when don't we have amazing authors? I mean, well, sometimes it's just me talking to the mic, which is

disappointing to everyone, of course. But today, we don't have that. We have a brilliant author on the show. She is the author of the new book that just came out February 1st, 2022. I don't know why I decided to mock myself there. That's horrible. The new book 2022 just came out. and I am, of course, having a Monday, and my brain has gone to another world of whatever, and I'm still trying to find it. As a writer and educator, Tracy offers those who read her work and hear her speak an authentic experience, an opportunity to explore the intersection of culture, identity, and faith and spirituality at the deepest of levels. She is a professor of English, and clearly she's going to smack my hands for all the bad English I have, and Black Studies at the Community College of Philadelphia and founder of HeartSpace, a healing community created to serve those who have experienced trauma of any

kind through the use of storytelling and the arts. Welcome to the show, Tracy. How are you? I am well. How are you? I'm hanging in there. I don't know, man. It's been a weird Monday. Our guests I had on earlier, I was, I just, I don't know. I guess I just got, I spent too much time on the weekend getting out of the groove, but now I'm back in it. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book. Tell us your plugs for people going to find you please on the interwebs. Sure. They can reach me at www.tracymlewis.com. That's an entry point. I'm on Instagram at TMLG writer and Twitter at TM Lewis. There you go. So what motivated you want to write this book? Is it your first book? No, this is actually book number 18.

Oh, good for you. Thank you. But this is actually, I've done a lot of work with independent presses. So this is like the first one that's kind of been with a major house. And the birth of this book really came from my own exploration. I was in the midst of grief and I'd sat down with a therapist and the therapist asked me, what does joy feel like? And I couldn't answer her. I didn't know. Who is this joy?

Sorry. No, I love it. What does joy feel like in my body? Probably that's not a better way to reframe that. Yeah, we'll leave that to your husband to figure out. So I took some time to really discover what that journey was. And as I was doing that, I also began to look at black people and how we've been able to use joy and wield joy as a form of resistance, as a way to heal. And that's sort of where their book came from, from there. Awesome sauce. People go through a lot of trauma in their life and especially like childhood trauma and it can really affect you through your whole life. So this kind of helped there. Awesome sauce. People go through a lot of trauma in their life and especially like childhood

trauma and it can really affect you through your whole life. So this kind of helped you as you were going through that recovery experience of reconciling what you had gone through? Yes, definitely. Things had compiled. So I'd had a childhood trauma, childhood sexual abuse, but then I'd also had recently had some loss. I had a family member that was lost to racial violence about a year prior. And I was just spiraling and my daughter was watching me grieve. And so the first step for me was just figuring out how to access joy in my body. I was really into like somatic and understanding how our emotions show up. And in doing that, I got some revelations about how my people had been doing that all along. Yeah.

I know she had James Baldwin on the back, and he dealt with a lot of loss, especially when they lost Malcolm X. And I forget the name of the one person that doesn't get cited a lot in history, Martin Luther King, of course, Malcolm X. Yes, yes. There we go. And he was so eloquent in his writing and speeching about you're gonna flunk me as an english teacher his speeching the poetic license

is what i take a lot that's my excuse but no he wrote so eloquently and beautifully with a lot of intelligence and motion just makes i really love to hear him but yeah so are the stories of resistance resilience and restoration per the book title, your stories, or have you collected some? Yeah. So these are all my personal stories. And so what I tried to do was to take these events over the course of my life and use them, as I said, as an entry point to explore Black joy, right? And the thing is that I don't like to claim that I have the blueprint. I mean, Black people aren't monolithic, right? We're not all the same. And so I don't necessarily have the blueprint for all Black joy. But what I think I'm able to do is to sort of take my experience

in the intersection of the collective experience and draw some conclusions. And so all 36 essays are different iterations, different movements of my own life. That's awesome. So stories of your life and how you've gone through it and dealt with it. I know we've all been having a tough time racially getting along. And of course, there was the George Floyd thing a couple of years ago. Was it last year? It was 2020, right?

COVID has turned my brain into mush. and it's been a hard time. We're still going through those hard times. So do you feel like this is a book that can appeal to everyone and maybe help them identify trauma and joy and resolution? I certainly do. I mean, I think, of course, I think that Black people will probably identify with a lot of the stories here. But the one thing that the story that I like to share when I've asked, like, is this book for everyone is a little bit of a side. My husband and I, when we were living right outside of Philadelphia, there was this Greek festival that they'd have every year.

And we loved this Greek festival. We'd go every year. We'd bring our daughter. We'd eat the food and we'd watch all the music and we'd do all the things. We didn't try to get on the stage. We didn't try to dance. We didn't try to center ourselves in that experience. But we were able to sit back and really take it in and see this particular culture of how

they express themselves. And so that's why I think anybody can read this book and really kind of take in what the experience of black people have been over the course of this 400 year liberation project that we've been on. Yeah. I mean, definitely understanding empathy about each other's experience and what, what happens.

I usually want to go to the Greek festival. I'm usually the one who eats all the baklava and sits in the corner going, what crime have I committed against myself? So there's that. It's like the same. Yeah. That's the cooking at the Greek festivals. My gosh.

It's so wonderful. I'm getting hungry now. So do you want to share maybe a story or example, one of your favorite stories out of the book? Maybe just a teaser. There's actually one that's very interesting. My husband is from South Jersey. And this really kind of speaks to what I was saying about Black people not being a monolithic group, right? He's from South Jersey. He's a Jersey boy. And I'm from Louisville,

Kentucky. Oh, wow. Big city. Yeah. So we had a little bit of an encounter around chili. And so I'm going to share a piece. There's a lot of food going on in this conversation. There's a lot of food, yes, for sure. I'm going to try and make it to the end of this. Okay, and I'll just read a little piece of this. Why is there spaghetti in my chili? He had the audacity to look appalled.

We'd only been dating a few months and I cooked for him a few times. Each time he seemed pleased with my skills, but this time he stared into the bowl of dark red beans, ground meat, onions, and spices with a look of utter confusion. Oh, so this is what we're doing? I said, chuckling. I mean, I just never seen this before. I rolled my eyes. You've got to get out more then. It was his turn to roll his eyes. I'd grown up eating chili with spaghetti in it. In fact, before moving to Chicago after undergrad, I didn't know there was any other way to make it the same way I thought everybody put butter and sugar in their grits. And I'm sure when I had my first bowl of pasta-less chili, I said something similar

to my then boyfriend, now husband. Why isn't there spaghetti in my chili? Exposure is something, right? Black folks do things a certain way. At least that's what I've been taught until I ran into Black folks who did those things differently. Pop was always pop until I found out it was also soda or cold drink. Sugar always belonged on grits until I learned that there were Black folks who'd burn your house down if you put anything other than salt, pepper, and butter on them. And I'm the first one to announce to anyone who will listen the ways in which Blackness isn't monolithic. There isn't one way to be Black.

Yet at the same time, I'm incredibly curious about the thread that binds these collective differences together, the thing that makes Blackness so identifiable no matter where you are in this country or the world. And Lord knows it can't just be struggle. Our struggle cannot be the sole thing cementing our identity and linking me to other black folks across the diaspora it must be our creativity our capacity for reinvention our resilience yeah yeah i mean i boy in texas you'd have real problem putting probably spaghetti and chili wouldn't you very much so is it the meat you're not supposed to be in chile in te in Texas or is it the beans? I think it's the beans, right?

I think it's just meat in Texas, right? Yeah. That would be accurate. Like you can start a whole world war down there doing certain things that way or vice versa. Like I've, I've seen people just go into fistfights over beans or meat in Chile and, and, and I'm just like, Hey man, I'm just here to eat stuff. Like if it tastes good, I'll put it in my mouth. That's how I work. I mean, look at me. I'm just like, hey, man, I'm just here to eat stuff. Like if it tastes good, I'll put it in my mouth. That's how I work. I mean, look at me. I'm wearing most of it.

But no. And so it sounds like it's a really big introspection on your life, your experience, but also, like you mentioned, a way of how black people develop, been resilient and formatted their lives. And of course, the beauty of the variations of your culture. Absolutely. And the thing is that a lot of times when there's conversation about the black experience, there is a lot of conversation around the hardships, the trials, right? The generational things that have kind of negative things that I've carried on. And so what I wanted to do was sort of right-size that and have a conversation about the generational joy and the generational strength and the resilience and the way that innovation and creativity was born from this experience. I think that Black folks are some of

the most significant alchemists, right, in this world. They're able to transform whatever pain, whatever hardship, whatever brutality we're experiencing into something really beautiful, right? If you're willing to see it, if you're willing to really take interest in it. And so that's what I was hoping to do was to, yes, I talk about trauma and I talk about hard things. I talk about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the present day and the past, but also I want to kind of shift our thinking and focusing on the joy itself. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you guys make some great food. Roscoe's chicken and waffles. There's no place on the earth that makes better chicken. Of course, I don't know. I haven't been fully to the South. So I used to go into the LA chicken and waffles and like everybody would look

at me and like, who let him in here? What does he want? What is he doing in here? And I'm like, I really like your guys' Chicken and Waffles. I mean, I don't know what they put in it. It's like crack is in there and I don't know what's in the Chicken and Waffles. Like I've been everywhere and like it haunts me how good it is. So do you find a lot of the stories, do you find a lot of the stories, are they really focused around that circumference of joy and finding joy even in some of the most darkest experiences and stuff?

Yeah. I mean, one of the points that I make in the book is that we don't have to find joy, right? I think that's the thing that I think even universally, I think people think it's like, I work hard, I do my thing, right? But, and then I go out and I find joy. But the reality is that we all have the capacity for joy already lives in our bodies. It's we, this container has all of these things. The challenge is that when you could take the, even the pandemic, right? Like when there's so much grief and so much sorrow and so much rage that those emotions that live in the same container as joy and love and peace become bigger and they outsize the space. Right. And so you feel like you can't feel anything else other book talking about that the key to joy and black joy in particular is empathy and self-compassion.

And the reality is that those two things expand us so that our joy can become bigger, so that those other emotions which aren't going anywhere, that are very real human things, don't try to take us out. They don't become so take us out, right? They don't become so all-consuming. Every story is an example of me going even to the brink of myself and experiencing those things, but then being able to access that joy as a way to right-size myself. Yeah, and deal with some of the resistance, resilience, restoration. You talk about Black church, or I'm sorry, Baptist church mothers, Stacey Adams, Stacey Abrams. I'm really on one. My apologies, Tracy. I just, I can't read today. Megan Thee Stallion and Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris. You talk about them in the book. Tell us a little bit about that.

Well, one of the essays speaks to the relationship between Black women, right? And the way that relationship, a lot of times when we talk about, you see hashtag Black love or relationship goals or that kind of thing on Twitter or whatever. It's all about our romantic relationships. And one of the things that I wanted to point out were the ways that Black women hold space for each other, right? And the way that we hold that space for each other. And the way that a lot of the things that I'm talking about, that we're able to access joy is something that our ancestors have been doing, right? Like those Black Baptist church mothers rocking back and forth or crying out. That was a way to move that trauma of the week through their bodies. So whether it was

Sunday morning, the rocking, the movement, the emotion as a way to move trauma and make room for joy, or whether it was Saturday night at the juke joint with the blues or the R&B or whatever it was allowing, it was offering us space to make room for more joy in our lives. And so I just talk about, I just referenced those women in terms of how we are able to hold space for each other. Yeah. I was about my twenties, 23. I grew up Mormon and hated every moment of it. I wanted out of that thing as soon as I could get out of it. And I pretty much skipped it most of my life and then left it when i was 16 but when i was in my early 20s i visited dr france his church his first i think his first calvary or first baptist church here in utah and i think he marched with martin luther king or was part of the thing and he let

me go see the church pews and everything that they do on Sunday. And I was like, man, black people have way more fun. This is fun. They sing, they dance, they're having a good time. Like, geez, Mormon churches or most churches, you go to like a funeral, man. You're sitting there going, oh my God, I'm going to go to sleep. You can't do that. So I was like, I wish I would have grown up.

That comes from someplace, right? So like that joy and that activity and that emotion and that movement was because of what the weak held, right? Like this was the one space. This was the safe space to be able to allow that freedom and that liberation of movement, right? In places where we weren't allowed to show that kind of feeling without some type of detrimental thing happening to us or our family. So there's a, there's like a context for why that is right within the black church specifically. Yeah. It was a lot of fun.

I was like, I wish I would have grown up here. The Mormon thing is like, you just sit there and just go, Oh my God, you just, you can't, you're like, I can't feel my legs. So anyway, you talk about when joy evades us and what to do when joy evades us.

Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. You know, like I said, like there's so much going on in the world, right? Like there's so, I mean, we're in that 24 hour news cycle where we're getting hit constantly. Right. And so I think it's hard. Some of us feel, I think guilt, like I had a really hard year in 2020 in terms of like the things that I saw and experienced as someone who writes about race and, and, and racism and all that. It was a challenging year, but I also had a really good year in terms of my career. right? And there were parts, there were times when I felt guilt because how can I celebrate? How can I show my joy in the midst of 5,000 or 3,000 people dying every day of this

virus or people are hitting the streets and they're marching and they're protesting and they're trying to get policy change and Voting rights act and all of this kind of thing. So I think sometimes joy can feel like it's not present. It can feel like it's away from us. And so the work for me was again, and it's so funny, I was sitting in front of a popular nighttime drama. I don't know if I can say it. I was sitting watching this. I was very emotional, right? And excited. And I'm a writer and I'm a storyteller. So what I was excited about was really like the way they were weaving these stories together. It was so fascinating to me. And my husband walks in and he said, I was sitting there like this, like,

but like this look on my face of excitement. And he's like, okay, I'm gonna leave you alone. I think you need to be alone. I'm not sure what's going on. And what in that moment, this was not too long after my therapist had asked me, what does joy feel like? And I, in that moment, it was just like an aha moment where I was like, oh, my stomach is warm and I have like this tingling and I was able to feel it. And so when I went back to my therapist and I said, hey, you know, I was like, oh, my stomach is warm and I have like this tingling and I was able to feel it. And so when I went back there, but then I said, hey, you know, I was sitting watching This Is Us

and I actually write about this in the book and I had this feeling. And so I know what joy feels like in my body. She's like, okay, take a snapshot of that, like a screenshot of it, hold on to it. So the next time when you feel that rage bubbling up because the verdict has come down in your cousin's, you know, murder case or another unarmed Black man is shot and killed, like all of these incidents come up. Grab a little, grab that snapshot of joy, what it feels like, and you can call it up. So when joy, quote, evades us, if we know what it feels like, we know we can access it. We can call it up so that that other stuff doesn't take us out, like I said, or overwhelm us. I think that is the key for any of us, right? To just be able to be that self-aware and that self-possessed where we can understand what's happening in our bodies. Because here's the thing.

Seriously, if I told you right now, what does anger feel like? And to ask you to call up, you could probably do it. Like you really go to an emotion, right? That would make you angry. I just thought of an orange guy. Exactly. Like you would think you would access. Or if I said, what is sorrow or despair feel like? You probably can think of something that could trigger that emotion in you.

But for some reason, many of us can't do the same thing with joy. And so I'm just saying, can we do that with joy and then be very intentional about calling it up when we need it. I like that. I guess either we don't spend enough time in joy or maybe we don't make it that powerful emotion because we don't spend that much time in it. I don't know. And so it's easier to call back those bad emotions than it is the good emotions. Probably why I'm never happy or something.

But no, that makes sense. That makes sense. You're talking in here about how to be present. And that was something I had to learn to do. And thank God I had reached a point. I lost one of my dog kids after a year and a half of hospice care and cancer with her. It was really hard on me. It was really hard.

And I was at my bottom and someone suggested I read the book, The Power of Now, I think it is, and Getting Present Again. And I just wasn't present. I was like locked in this sort of this depression thing. So you talk about that and how to find presence. Do you want to touch on that at all? Yeah. I mean, it is so key. I'm glad you shared that because I think it's so key that when we experience trauma or grief or it's easy for us to just keep going, right? Like to numb out, right? Because if we, if what presence requires of us is to sometimes sit in those feelings. And a lot of times we don't have time for it. We don't want it. And sometimes even as a, I think as a safety mechanism, right?

Like I'm not a psychologist, but we all know like fight, flight, freeze, these reactions that our bodies have to these traumatic events that says, okay, I got to keep you safe now because this emotion is becoming too much. So I want you to shut down or I want you to yell and scream at everyone, right? Like fight, or I want you to just walk away or not deal with stuff when things get hard. And so we all have our version of those reactions. And I think being present helps us to get to the other side so that we can access joy. But presence is hard. I mean, I don't deny it. It requires us to get still. And for me, what that looked like was in 2019, I had a severe health crisis and I was pretty much on my back

for eight months. I had to take absence from teaching. I was sitting there on Netflix, watching standup comedy, you know, specials, couldn't do much of anything. Right. But in that stillness, in that presence, I had to face myself. Right. I had to sit in those feelings and realize what happens when you're present is you realize that there is another

side. We don't want to touch that stuff because we think we're just going to be stuck there forever. It's going to hurt too much. It's too painful. I have to think about this person that I lost and it's just, it's so hard, but there is another side. And then the other side is not great. It just means that it's another step in your healing. And so I try to like touch on that throughout some of the essays in the book. So sometimes when you find yourself in, in different variations of depressive sort of moods, you need to try and find joy. Yeah. And that looks different for everybody. Like it might mean me taking a walk out here to the park with my daughter and getting on the swings with her. One of the things that I did in this book was I had to go and talk to eight-year-old Tracy.

I had to have a conversation with 10-year-old and 15-year-old. There's a story in the book about me and my first love, right? And I was like from 14 to 24. I had this infatuation with this guy and I had to go and talk to 14 year old Tracy because 40, 46 year old Tracy has a different lens. Right. A different perspective. I've lived. I have a half century of memories that I can tap into. But 14 year old Tracy and eight year old Tracy didn't have access to that. And so I needed to go, and it's almost like a visualization. I'm not saying I actually like time traveled. I'm saying like I actually, but I needed to like figure out what was going on with me at that time and tell eight-year-old Tracy and 14-year-old Tracy, I got this. I don't have to react in the same ways that today that eight-year-old Tracy would react because I got

us. I got all the versions of myself. And so I think, yeah, it really, for me in writing these pieces was finding all the moments of joy that I maybe did not see in the moment. I went through this cathartic experience in dealing with my childhood trauma where I went back and somewhere I went through one of the things, and I'm sure you maybe talked about this in the book or have some thoughts on this. One of the things that children have from that have childhood trauma is they don't deal with being gaslit well, which was made the last five years for me very hard, especially four of them. And I don't respond to it well or didn't respond to it well. And so I had to learn probably to find some sort of especially four of them. And I don't respond to it well, or didn't respond to it well. And so I had to learn probably to find some sort of way out of it. But one of the things I did was I found a picture of me and realized that all the gas, all the fighting and arguing and

hate posts I was putting up about the certain president and all the crap that was going on, I wasn't, I'd always been trying to save the world all my life. And I came to this conclusion that I wasn't really trying to save the world this whole time. I was trying to save that little boy. That's really what I've been trying to do, but I've been ignoring that this whole time. I'd been running around being a man on a monster or whatever, chasing windmills.

And really the problem was at home and I needed to save that boy. And so I went back and just like you mentioned, had conversations with them. I keep a photo of them on my desk to remind me that that's the person I need to save first. So. Absolutely. I did the exact same thing. I had a picture of 10 year old Tracy and I had to go back. I literally the same thing. And like you said, more about the wrongs that we didn't feel like we had the power at 10 or eight or whatever to write. And so we spend our lives outwardly trying to save the world, as you said, when we're really what we're doing is trying to save ourselves. So that is the work. That is so, so powerful, Chris, because that is the work for all of us, I think, is whether you've had a major

traumatic thing in your life, I think it's really helpful to go back and talk to all these versions of yourself. My therapist talks about internal family systems a lot, and she calls it the people on your bus. So there are people on your bus, which are all the different versions of yourself. And each one has a mechanism, right? Like, so if something happens, eight-year-old Tracy is on that bus, right? And she'll try to get in the driver's seat because she's like, no, I know this, right? I've been here and I know how to respond. And she'll try, if I let her, she will try to drive the bus. And that essentially means that I revert back to behaviors and responses to things that the eight-year-old would have done out of her innocence, out of her ability up me and we're all on this bus. And every, the work for me has always been about letting them all know, thank you for your service. I appreciate your service. At the time, what you did was so helpful for me, but at 46 now I got us, I can drive this bus.

You can go to the back of the bus there. Have a seat. Have a seat. Exactly. Sounds like a bus driver. So for me, can I keep all my personalities on the bus too, or is that a different bus? I think that's a little different. That might be a different bus. That might be the short bus.

There's always that one personality that's like, kill, kill. The judge says they can't ever let him drive anymore. Oh, no, don't let him drive. Yeah, not the parole agent. So this has been a brilliant discussion on some of this. And we touched on something that you mentioned, that taking your power back. Is that what a lot of maybe these things are really a discussion about when we feel empowered because we've been attacked

or we're trying to find a resiliency and we're trying to get back to restoring ourselves. Is that maybe really what a lot of it is? Giving our power back, taking our power back and going, you don't get to take this from me. This is mine. It is a reclamation. It really is a reclaiming of yourself, your joy, your power. And it is something, and the reason why I put it kind of in the context of my culture is because that is exactly what Black joy is. I get the question, why Black joy, right? Why do you have to put your race on it? Why do you have to

identify it as that? Why do you have to be so happy, y'all? Right. But the truth of the matter is that we all have this universal experience of joy. It's that adrenaline, it's that dopamine, it's all the things that responds to pleasure. And Black joy is simply all of that within the context and the historical situation of this melanin, right to use that, right, as a way to be defiant, as you said, to reclaim our power, to say that no matter what you do, whether it's redlining or police brutality or enslavement or Jim Crow or not being able to get a business loan or whatever it is, no matter what you do, the one thing you will not be able to steal is our joy and the creativity and the innovation that comes out of that joy. There's a challenge though, because we can't just stay with resistance. It has to be restoration. It has to be healing on the other

side. Whether we solve the issue of race and racism in this country, we have to heal, right? And so Black Joy is very specific in that that realm but we all have access to this universal experience of joy the only thing is that the black piece was taken out 400 years ago right so we have to name it so we can put it back into the universal experience that we all have access to yeah that's really powerful it made me think of something that like after my dog passed away my dog child passed away, it took me about three years before I could look at her photos. And I have a, I'm a photographer, so I have like whole piles of photos and I couldn't even go edit them or anything. And now

I can go back and see them and, and be happy about them and I can see the joy in it. So that was kind of a catharsis of my journey. And so I see how this applies and makes sense from a psychological basis. You made it to the other side. Yeah. And so now I can look at her and I can smile and I can be happy and go, what a great experience that was and stuff, but getting through that cathartic moment. So I'm glad you wrote this book so people can deal with this. And we learn so much from each other and our empathies and also our stories. Absolutely. Anything more you want to tease out on the book before we go?

I don't have anything else except to say that one of the things that I hope people really get from the book is that they are able to, if you get nothing else, begin your own joy journey, right? And maybe you know what joy feels like. You're very clear about that. The next step I would argue is that, okay, so how are you being intentional on a day-to-day basis and recreating that joy, recreating that feeling? So is it, for me, it's not watching This Is Us every night, but it's whatever those things

that I've identified as joyful and finding ways to schedule them so that we make sure that our lives are filled with these moments of joy. And sometimes they're tiny, teeny, teeny moments, right? Like you might realize that you get a kick out of taking a walk around the neighborhood. Like that really like does something for you or whatever it is. Like it could be something big, but it doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to be, let's go to Six Flags and let's ride the roller coaster. It could be something so small, but if we're giving ourselves that every single day and we're intentional about it, meaning that we're trying to do it, then I just will be amazed. I think some of the collective challenges that we

have in this country, as a people, politically, socially, if more of us were doing that kind of work, I think that the empathy would grow, right? Our capacity for self-compassion would grow. And collectively, we'd be able to have different kinds of conversations. The kind of the tenor of the conversation would be different, right? Because we would be entering it filled up. Yeah, I think you're right. There's so much victimhood in this world, especially if you go on Fox News. It's clearly misguided in the wrong place. I'm speaking from the country club. I'm

just like, seriously, what are you guys complaining? And if we instead operated for more joy and stuff, maybe that would make things a lot better. I need to go around the house. You give me this idea, I go around the house and put little joy stickers everywhere. Like find joy. I love that. Yeah. Maybe you could make like little magnetic stickers. It could be part of your merch program for your book or something. Great idea. Very cool. Because we need to focus on that because a lot of times we just don't. Bad things happen. You get the bad email, like you mentioned earlier, and the bad news. And you're just like, oh boy. I saw someone write something the other day

on twitter that made me realize what i was doing and they said are you because of the ukraine war they go are you doom scrolling right now through social media i'm like oh crap i am but i mean there's some validity in staring at the face of it understanding what's going on and trying to come up with ways to to stop suffering. But sometimes it can get all deep. Yeah. Sometimes it can consume you and you're just, you're like, where did that day go? And you know what? Maybe joy looks like, you know what? I'm going to doom scroll for 30 minutes and that's it. Like putting controls on the things that could cause us to spiral. Because I do think as much as we love social media, it's also entirely possible

that it's kind of making those other big emotions bigger, right? The rage and the sorrow and despair gets bigger and bigger. The grief gets bigger and it's edging out joy and peace and love and all those other things. Yeah. I know a lot of my friends found, I guess a lot of people have done this, have been sending money, have been ordering BNBs in Ukraine to help people. And they've been finding some joy in that from the doom scrolling. So that's pretty good. So give us your plugs one more time so we can find you on the interwebs, please. So on my webpage, it's TracyMLewis.com.

You can find me on Instagram at TMLGwriter and on Twitter at TMLewis. Thank you very much, Tracy, for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Are you going to flunk me in English? I am not going to flunk you. I am on leave this semester. I'm not teaching anything. Thank you very much for coming on and sharing your wonderful story with us.

I think a lot of people are really excited to hear it and once we put this on the podcast people will really enjoy it black joy stories of resistance resilience and restoration just came out february 1st 2022 going to order up wherever fine books are sold remember we're only going to those fine bookstores because those alleyway bookstores you might might get robbed or stabbed. You never know. Or both. Really. I mean, that's a Friday for me. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in.

Go to YouTube.com. Forrest S. Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Good reads. Forrest S. Chris Voss. All those groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different crazy places we are. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.