On the Necessity of Griefwork and Joyseeking.

Thokozani Mbwana shares how creating space for grief (and joy) can sustain us through tough times.

Dear Reader, 

This article invites you to explore what cradling grief and joy simultaneously looks like to you, through my own anecdotes. My hope with this offering for you is that hope is found, somewhere between these words.

Thokozani xxx

One summer’s day towards the end of 2024, I looked around my tiny, city apartment, suffocated by the pressure of grief that I hadn’t yet acknowledged. I sold everything I owned that day, took a flight back to my home city and crashed with my parents before my “next” adventure.

A few months later, I was on a plane, arriving in Tokyo. I took a job, on a whim because that’s what I do when I’m sad. My life could start again, but different this time. I know Japan hates to see a plane with me coming, because 10 years ago I made the same pilgrimage to ease my sad little heart then. The thing with time is that 10 years is enough time to forget the lessons of grief. Especially, when your mission in the first place is to never experience that kind of grief again. 

The unfortunate thing about all my dreams and delusions of leaving every painful memory of the last few years back home in South Africa was just that, dreams and delusions. My griefs packed their bags too and unbeknownst to me, took the same flight. The grief of ending my PhD pursuit after losing my supervisor and mentor to cancer, the grief of ending a long-term relationship that I thought would be forever, the grief of countless professional self-esteem hits I faced in difficult work environments, the grief of losing friends in the process of finding myself again. It felt like the last 5 years of my life was a long, drawn out battle, of which I lost at every phase of attack. Those battle wounds didn’t heal enroute, they only deepened in a different part of the world.

I am a firm believer of the old adage “the only way out is through”. After running away from my griefs, and meeting them again on my first night in Tokyo, I can unequivocally say, with 100% certainty, that you need to face your grief before it faces you. 

For the last year I have been formulating my own understanding regarding what griefwork means to me and more specifically what tangible actions I can take to walk through life with my grief, because I understand now that the grief really doesn't go away. We learn to live with it, live through it and around it. Some days we have ample space to accommodate it. Some days it annoys us and we snap at it. Some days we sit silently together and watch a movie. But it’s there. Sometimes big, sometimes small, but always there. 

Before this journey, I definitely imagined grief to be an inconvenient guest in life’s big things. Loss of loved ones, loss of various forms of love, loss of financial security. Big things. My silly little life, with its silly little problems, didn't really read to me as requiring griefwork- despite the roots being glaringly obvious. Maybe I needed to be more consistent with my journaling, sure.  Maybe I needed to go back to therapy, definitely. But griefwork? I rationalised not seeking out or acknowledging the grief because life is joyous and vast and who wants to spend the short glimmers of hope we have in our day to day to make space for grief? 

But that’s the thing about grief, it is ever present, whether we acknowledge it or not. It might be an unwelcome guest but it requires eventual participation from those it encounters. Simply by living, we consent to grief. 

In working through my own grief I realised something: I was completely ill equipped. I was terrified to own my own grief because then I’d have to move through it and how do I do something I’ve spent most of my adult life running away from? 

After what felt like endless back and forth with myself I decided the only way I could navigate this was to open myself up to my small daily griefs and to learn how to hold them, love them and nurture them until they are ready to roam around on their own. Essentially microdosing the small grief to prepare me for the big grief in general.

For example, think of a time you were excited at the sun shining. It finally feels like the seasons are changing. You open the front door to feel the air and realise that thick coat season is officially over. You decided to walk to the corner store and get an ice cream, that vanilla flavored one that reminds you of your childhood. You haven’t had it in years but you recognise the wrapping. You buy it, walk out the store and rip open the packet as you find your bearings to the nearest park. Alas, the flavour isn’t quite what you imagined. They must have changed the recipe. so you chuck it in the bin and go home to continue your day.

Did you grieve the joy and nostalgia you would have experienced had the ice cream been the flavour you imagined? Did you grieve the extra 15 minutes you would have spent outside, enjoying the sun had you been able to finish the ice cream?

This to me, is the necessity of griefwork. Grieving the small, insignificant stuff too. This is not to say we need to critically assess every hope we have for every moment we’ll experience and the grief that might come from that. In the above scenario it’s very easy to imagine that the sunny day was still a good day albeit with the minor inconvenience of the not-quite-vanilla ice cream. But in the same way we champion exercising the joy muscles (more on this later), I believe that exercising the small-grief muscles equips us to face the big grief in general when it comes knocking. 

I think we have gotten really good as a collective at recognising that uncomfortable and challenging feelings need to be felt, especially in the context of anger/rage and sadness. But what about your daily grief? Do you make the same space for it as you do your frustrations? Your anxieties? Your sorrows? 

My ask for the griefwork is to accept it in your daily practice of accepting things. We accept the weather for the day. We accept that we burnt the toast. We accept we’re running a little late for work. In all those moments, we might sigh or cuss, we might take a deep breath, we might recenter ourselves but we keep going anyway. Add grief to the rotation of things you accept in your daily life. Take a moment to express it, to feel it, to acknowledge it, to breathe through it and then keep going.

I also believe that in order to effectively do the griefwork we must create space for joyseeking. Not in a way that is superficial or feels counterintuitive to the state of it all (world politics, the economy, the environment, our own personal life worries and stresses) but in a way that gives space to remember our humanity, both in the mundane and the beyond.

I’d define my own journey with joyseeking as doing things that are good for me against my will and specifically when I want it the least. I don’t want to take a walk outside and enjoy a crisp breeze for the sake of my mental health when I’m stressed about work deadlines, and family matters that I can’t effectively engage in because I’m thousands of kilometres away from home. Yet here I am, taking that walk outside anyway and enjoying that crisp breeze instead of staring at the family group chat knowing that everyone is still asleep and can’t report back. The birds are chirping on my side of the world so, I’ll take the walk and see the moon still in the sky as the sun is rising. I’ll greet my elderly neighbours who have long since known the secret to maintaining some semblance of sense is a 5am walk every day for the rest of your life. I’ll look at the colour of the sky that’s different than it was yesterday and take a picture to send to my sister later. I’ll take pictures of the plum blossoms that are finally blooming to send to my friend who loves anything and everything ume in the same way I do. I’ll see the murder of crows I’m convinced recognise and claim me, perched in their favourite tree and wave as they caw. 

By the end of my morning walk, the knot in my chest has loosened slightly. I’m holding onto little treasures in the form of pictures to share throughout the day as my loved ones wake up in their various timezones. I eat my breakfast with fervor as I think of the old man who greets me with his cute elderly dog in its pink jacket and how I was able to maintain our conversation in Japanese for a little longer than last time. The knot might gradually loosen as I go on about my day, but it might tighten back up too. After all, the deadlines will be found when I get into the office and the group chat will relay the stressful news by the end of my day. 

But honestly, I think all the joy I sought along my walk enables me to fortify myself, to prepare myself a little more, or a little better for when the hard stuff comes. So yes, if it means I need to give my day a rating out of 10 and it can’t be below 7 if at least 3 good things have happened then that’s what I’ll do to stop myself from the catastrophising spiral. If it means I am excited by a new seasonal flavour of my favourite treat getting released in my local corner store, so be it. If it’s the silly goose memes I spent 3 hours making to send to my sister whilst she slept, so be it. 

So, my offering to you is this; if you feel the inclination to explore griefwork/joyseeking newly or differently (to what you’re doing or have done), I invite you to start with asking yourself these questions and feel your way around what kind of answers would best suit your life and capacity as it exists now.

• What if I microdosed my grief by letting the mundane “hurts” of the day linger just a little longer? What would that look like and feel like to me?

• What if I thought of the things I am grateful for at the end of the day and I just so happened to place the small griefs beside them? Would that lighten my worries?

• What if I allowed myself to be affected by it all, yet still committed to continue to seek joy because the time will pass, regardless? What would that look like in my day to day life?

I say all of this to say, I think in the times we live in right now it’s okay to be scared. It’s okay to be frozen in fear. It’s okay to feel held stiff by what our collective and individual futures may be. But the future will come regardless. Griefwork and joyseeking to me, are necessary tools to prepare us for the other side of “the only way is through”. We need to remember that it is essential to our individual and collective futures that we are sufficiently replenished to the best of our abilities and capabilities. I believe accessing the grief and exercising the joy are necessary tools for us to use as we live through this chapter in our current history, and in our own personal lives.

Thokozani Mbwana (he/they) is a nosey researcher by day and an Ancestor-summoning poet by night. His work explores existing and becoming and the murky confusion that lies between. As a facilitator, cultural worker and writer, Thokozani chooses to navigate his work from a place of healing. He is the author of The Sunflower Faces East At Dawn (2022), Agender Daydreams (2022) and A Modest Mahogany Table (2024).

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