Joy as Rebellion: Cultivating Radical Celebration
How joy becomes a political, spiritual, and communal act of resistance
🌬️ Before We Begin: Come Back to Joy
Find your breath. Let your shoulders drop. Place your hand over your heart.
Inhale — Joy is not naive.
Exhale — Joy is not accidental.
Inhale — Joy is my inheritance.
Exhale — And I will protect it.
Whisper:
“I will not abandon joy, even when the world asks me to.”
Now we begin.
On Monday, we talked about joy as rebellion in a world that prefers you tired.
Today, we go deeper into how we cultivate it, why joy is systemically denied to the most marginalized, and what it looks like to reclaim it as liberation work.
Because this isn’t fluff.
It isn’t bypass.
It’s the balm.
And it’s the strategy.
Joy is a spiritual inheritance.
It’s a political refusal.
And it’s a communal spell that breaks the trance of domination.
How Joy Dismantles Supremacy Culture
(And why your celebration is a threat to the empire)
The systems we are healing from weren’t just built on oppression.
They were maintained by the suppression of joy.
Supremacy culture survives through disconnection (from ourselves, land, and community), fear, and the hoarding of pleasure.
Joy interrupts that script. Celebration collapses its illusion of control.
Let’s name how joy breaks the 15 pillars apart:
Perfectionism → Joy says I am whole even in my mess.
Only One Right Way → Joy honors many ways, many truths, many lineages.
Power Hoarding → Joy shared is power multiplied.
Fear of Open Conflict → Joy creates safety to confront and release.
Individualism → Joy is communal, rhythmic, collective, inherited.
Progress is Bigger/More → Joy says enough is sacred.
Worship of the Written Word → Joy lives in the body, the rhythm, the dance.
Objectivity → Joy returns us to emotion as wisdom.
Right to Comfort → Joy asks what truth are you avoiding for peace?
Fear of Emotions → Joy invites the full range.
Quantity over Quality → Joy prizes presence over pace.
Urgency → Joy slows down the spiral.
Defensiveness → Joy lets us breathe into new truths.
Either/Or Thinking → Joy is both/and incarnate.
Paternalism → Joy says we don’t need saving—we need remembering.
To choose joy is to wage a sacred war against the systems that were never built for our thriving.
Your laughter, your rest, your dance, your altar of joy?
That is the revolution.
To learn more about the 15 pillars of Supremacy culture, please download my eBook and infographic here, it is pay-what-you-can in order to create equity.
Let’s Tell the Truth: The Grief Beneath Our Joy
Beloved, before we reach for joy, we must tell the truth about the ache that’s been sitting on our chest.
We don’t talk enough about the quiet guilt that creeps in when we feel even a flicker of joy while the world bleeds.
We’ve been trained to believe that if we smile while someone suffers, we’re somehow betraying the collective.
But that’s not community. That’s martyrdom.
Joy, real joy, doesn’t deny the suffering.
It becomes the offering we place on the altar of resistance.
Let’s start here: You don’t have to be joyless to be righteous.
If your joy rises in a world that tries to bury you, know this:
That joy is a spell your ancestors already cast.
That joy is a refusal to let empire make you small.
That joy is sacred, rebellious, and political.
Paywall Teaser
In a world so fraught and rife with malady and violence happening at the same time, we must ask ourselves…
What does it mean to celebrate while the system still stands?
How do we “justify’ joy whilst so many suffer?
What does it look like to dance at the edge of an empire and still choose joy?
Come deeper for:
The roots of joy as a decolonial practice
How supremacy culture criminalizes Black and Brown celebration
A somatic ritual to access joy even in grief
Practices across Self, Home & Work to build rituals of collective joy
Journal prompts to reclaim pleasure without apology
This week’s soundtrack to carry the rhythm into your week
If you are ready to cultivate a joy that does not ask permission, come inside.
$8/month | $80/year | $120 equity partner
Scholarships always available → Scholarships@desireebstephens.com