Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Wild (2012)

  Afterwards, we walked back to our camp and stood around in a circle near our tents talking half drunk in the dark until it started to rain again and we had no choice but to disperse and say goodnight. When I got into my tent, I saw a puddle had formed at the far end. By morning it was a small lake; my sleeping bag was soaked. I shook it out and looked around the campsite for a place to drape it, but it was useless. It would only get wetter as the rain continued to pour down. I carried it with me when the Three Young Bucks and I walked to the store, holding it near the woodstove as we drank our coffee. “So we came up with a trail name for you,” said Josh. “What is it?” I asked reluctantly from behind the scrim of my drenched blue sleeping bag, as if it could protect me from whatever they might say. “The Queen of the PCT,” said Richie. “Because people always want to give you things and do things for you,” added Rick. “They never give us anything. They don’t do a damn thing for us, in fact.” I lowered my sleeping bag and looked at them, and we all laughed. All the time that I’d been fielding questions about whether I was afraid to be a woman alone—the assumption that a woman alone would be preyed upon—I’d been the recipient of one kindness after another. Aside from the creepy experience with the sandy-haired guy who’d jammed my water purifier and the couple who’d booted me from the campground in California, I had nothing but generosity to report. The world and its people had opened their arms to me at every turn. As if on cue, the old man leaned over the cash register. “Young lady, I wanted to tell you that if you want to stay another night and dry out, we’d let you have one of these cabins for next to nothing.” I turned to the Three Young Bucks with a question in my eyes. Within fifteen minutes, we’d moved into our cabin, hanging our sopped sleeping bags over the dusty rafters. The cabin was one wood-paneled room taken up almost entirely by two double beds that sat on antediluvian metal frames that squeaked if you so much as leaned on the bed. Once we’d settled in, I walked back to the store in the rain to buy snacks. When I stepped inside, Lisa was standing there by the woodstove. Lisa, who lived in Portland. Lisa, who’d been mailing my boxes all summer long. Lisa, whom I’d be moving in with in a week.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Madame du Barry lacked her predecessor’s intelligence but boasted greater beauty. One young officer went to petition the new favorite and was so overwhelmed by her loveliness that he nearly forgot what he had come for. “I can still see her carelessly seated or rather reclining in a large easy chair,” he recalled, “wearing a white dress with wreaths of roses. She was one of the prettiest women at a Court which boasted so many, and the very perfection of her loveliness made her the most fascinating. Her hair, which she often left unpowdered, was of a beautiful golden color and she had so much that she scarcely knew what to do with it all. Her wide blue eyes looked at one with an engaging frankness. She had a straight little nose and a complexion of a dazzling purity. In a word, I like everyone else fell immediately under her charm.”9 Madame du Barry’s “dazzling” complexion was indeed a rarity in an age when most women’s skin was marred by smallpox scars. And while many young women were missing teeth—sometimes all their teeth—Madame du Barry had a wide white grin. Her meticulous grooming habits were highly unusual for the eighteenth century. Most courtiers covered the crusty filth and overpowering stench of their bodies with velvets, laces, and a hearty dose of cologne. Women inserted head scratchers into their elaborate coiffures to ease the itch of flea bites on greasy scalps. But there would be no filth, stench, or head fleas for Madame du Barry, who simmered in rose-scented bathwater several times a week. Madame du Barry augmented her substantial natural beauty with stunning clothes. Some of her gowns were deceiving in their simplicity—the cost of a diaphanous white robe, tied carelessly with a few exquisite ribbons, would have allowed a Paris family to live in comfort for a year. Other gowns were grander—of gold or silver tissue, embroidered with gold and silver thread and thousands of seed pearls. Her sleeves, skirts, and petticoats were flounced with the finest lace. At the wedding of the king’s grandson in 1773, Madame du Barry appeared “shining like the sun in a dress of cloth of gold covered in jewels worth over five million livres,” according to one eyewitness.10 She owned one bodice encrusted with thousands of fine diamonds sewn in the shape of interlacing bows, costing millions of dollars in today’s money. Each of her gowns had a matching pair of slippers with jeweled buckles—diamonds, amethysts, or sapphires. But Madame du Barry had far more to offer Louis than her radiant beauty. Her sexual talents bound him to her, and her gaiety plucked him out of his frequent depressions. She was all women to him—a delightful child, a talented whore, a comforting mother. And, like Madame de Pompadour, she was always willing to forgive the malicious courtiers who made trouble for her.

• From Wild (2012)

  “We’re headed up there to do some fishing. We’d give you a ride, but we’re packed,” he said, pointing to the back of the truck, which was covered by a camper. “That’s okay. I like to walk.” “Well, we’re having Hawaiian screwdrivers tonight, so stop on by.” “Thanks,” I said, and watched them drive off. I hiked the rest of the afternoon thinking about Hawaiian screwdrivers. I didn’t know exactly what they were but they didn’t sound all that different from Snapple lemonade to me. When I reached the top of the road, the red pickup and the men’s camp came into view, perched above the westernmost of the Three Lakes. The PCT was just beyond it. I followed a scant trail east along the lake’s shore, finding a secluded spot among the boulders that were scattered around the lake. I set up my tent and ducked into the woods to squeeze out my sponge and put it in again. I walked down to the lake to filter water and wash my hands and face. I thought about diving in to bathe, but the water was ice-cold and I was already chilled in the mountain air. Before coming on the PCT, I’d imagined countless baths in lakes and rivers and streams, but in reality, only rarely did I plunge in. By the end of the day, I often ached with fatigue and shook with what felt like a fever but was only exhaustion and the chill of my drying sweat. The best I could do most days was splash my face and strip off my sweat-drenched T-shirt and shorts before swaddling myself in my fleece anorak and leggings for the night. I removed my boots and pulled the duct tape and 2nd Skin off my feet and soaked them in the icy water. When I rubbed them, another blackened toenail came off in my hand, the second I’d lost so far. The lake was calm and clear, rimmed by towering trees and leafy bushes among the boulders. I saw a bright green lizard in the mud; it froze in place for a moment before scampering away at lightning speed. The men’s camp was not far beyond me along the lakeshore, but they hadn’t yet detected my presence. Before going to see them, I brushed my teeth, put on lip balm, and pulled a comb through my hair. “There she is,” shouted the man who’d been in the passenger seat when I ambled up. “And just in time too.” He handed me a red plastic cup full of a yellow liquid that I could only assume was a Hawaiian screwdriver. It had ice cubes. It had vodka. It had pineapple juice. When I sipped it I thought I would faint. Not from the alcohol hitting me, but from the sheer fabulousness of the combination of liquid sugar and booze.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  As the practice becomes more familiar and comfortable, you can experiment with longer meditation times, aiming for twenty to twenty-five minutes of daily practice whenever possible. I’m not suggesting that you become a monk. Keep in mind that randomized controlled trials from my lab and others have revealed a wide array of benefits after just a few months of practicing LKM for an average of sixty minutes a week, which translates into three to four times a week for just fifteen to twenty minutes each. LKM is a bit like guided imagery, although the practice targets loving feelings more than visual images per se. You encourage those warm feelings to rise up by repeating a set of phrases—silently, to yourself—each of which is a wish for another’s well-being. To some, LKM may at first blush seem fake, like saccharin, or unrealistic. Or it may feel forced, like your smile when you’re getting your passport picture taken. These are understandable misimpressions of the practice. Although it may seem as though your goal in LKM is to fabricate positivity, the truth is, that’s not even possible. You can no more conjure up an emotion directly out of thin air than you could right now, sitting as you are, conjure up pain in your left shin. What you can do, however, is set the stage for positivity. You do this by contemplating certain thoughts and wishes and then being open to the positive sentiments that may arise out of those thoughts and wishes. You set your intentions and then see what follows from that. Some people, when they first learn of the science of positive emotions, think they should make their motto “Be positive.” I advise against this, strongly. When you enact this motto, even with good intentions, you can inadvertently create a toxic insincerity that is harmful to both you and others. It’s like papering over the messy reality of being human with a simple yellow smiley face. Indeed, studies show that striving too hard for happiness backfires. Better than making your motto “Be positive” is to lightly adopt the mind-set of positivity. I find “Be open” to be a better motto. It can serve as a touchstone for attitude adjustment in most every circumstance. Openness is especially important to the practice of LKM. Although you might begin a session of LKM intending to create warm and tender feelings of care, it’s important not to cling to this goal too tightly. The idea is, instead, to be open to whatever arises. Sometimes it may actually feel as though your heart is expanding within your chest, overflowing with tenderness and concern for others. Other times you might feel next to nothing. Both responses are normal. The best way to avoid the damaging effects of insincere positivity, or an oppressively saccharin LKM session, is to accept whatever feelings authentically arise within you.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  After that fight, her parents gave up. They named their baby Rachel. In the Bible, Rachel was the love of Jacob’s life, and Rachel’s parents knew she would be the love of theirs . Rachel’s grandparents died when she was young. Years later, when her mother suggested the name Ruth for their newborn, Rachel and Marc immediately loved it. “I want my baby to be connected to our family history. I want her to know who we are,” Rachel tells me. “I researched and found that Ruth was a popular name in Hungary in the 1930s. I’m sure my grandparents didn’t want to be reminded of that, but as the next generation, I want not only to face the past but also to cherish it.” Her face lightens as she looks at Ruth, who is sound asleep. At this point Rachel and Marc begin exploring the possibility of moving with Ruth to Israel. “I’m going to fulfill my childhood dream,” Rachel tells me with a smile. “I feel so lucky that Marc can get a job there. Did I tell you that he has family there? I grew up with very few relatives around. My grandmother was an only child; she had an aunt who she was not in touch with. And there was no one on my father’s side. But in Jerusalem we had one family friend, a man who had survived the Holocaust with my grandfather and who was like a brother to him. After the war my grandfather immigrated to America, and his friend went to Israel. We used to visit him during the summers, and I remember his daughter and his granddaughter, who was more or less my age. I’m sure he has died by now, but I wonder if his family is still in Jerusalem. ” Rachel opens her phone and swipes through her pictures. She finds one from her childhood album and hands me the phone. It is a photograph of Rachel at the age of eight with another girl; they are holding hands and smiling for the camera. “This is in the old city market of Jerusalem,” she explains. “I don’t even remember the girl’s name. We are planning to visit this spring, to work out the details of moving there. Maybe I should look for this family. It would be really special if I could find the granddaughter, don’t you think?” A few months before their planned visit, Rachel wakes up covered with sweat. From that night forward, she starts having sleep terrors.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  They are rather rough streets, that you must cross...’The trip from Bethnal Green to Cable Street did indeed take us through some of the roughest, poorest, squalidest districts in the city, and could never, ordinarily, be very cheerful. I knew the route, for I had walked it often with Florence: I knew which courts were grimmest, which factories sweated their workers hardest, which tenements housed the saddest and most hopeless families. But we were out that night together - as Florence herself had admitted - for pleasure’s sake; and though it might seem strange to say it, our journey was indeed a pleasant one, and seemed to take us over a rather different landscape to the one we normally trod. We passed gin-palaces and penny-gaffs, coffee-shops and public-houses: they were not the grim and dreary places that they sometimes were, tonight, but luminous with warmth and light and colour, thick with laughter and shouts, and with the reeking odours of beer and soup and gravy. We saw spooning couples; and girls with cherries on their hats, and lips to match them; and children bent over hot, steaming packets of tripe, and trotters, and baked potatoes. Who knew to what sad homes they might be returning, in an hour or two? For now, however, there was a queer kind of glamour to them, and to the very streets - Diss Street, Sclater Street, Hare Street, Fashion Street, Plumbers Row, Coke Street, Pinckin Street, Little Pearl Street - in which they walked.‘How gay the city seems tonight!’ said Florence wonderingly.It is for you, I wanted to reply: for you and your new costume. But I only smiled at her and took her arm; then, ‘Look at that coat!’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At last, after a second’s pressure, she had her hand in me up to the wrist. I think I called out - I think I shivered and panted and called out, to feel the subtle twisting of her fist, the curling and uncurling of her sweet fingers, beneath my womb...When I reached my crisis I felt a gush, and found that I had wet her arm, with my spendings, from fingertip to elbow - and that she had come, out of a kind of sympathy, and lay weak and heavy against me, with her own skirts damp. She drew her hand free - making me shiver anew - and I seized it and held it, and pulled her face to me and kissed her; and then we lay very quietly with our limbs pressed hard together until, like cooling engines, we ceased our pulsings and grew still.When she rose at last, she cracked her head upon the supper-table: we had jerked the truckle-bed from one side of the parlour to the other, and not noticed. She laughed. We shuffled off our clothes, and she turned down the lamp, and we lay beneath the blankets in our damp petticoats. When she fell asleep I put my hands to her cheeks, and kissed her brow where she had bruised it. I woke to find it still the night, but a little lighter. I didn’t know what had disturbed me; when I looked about me, however, I saw that Florence had raised herself a little on the pillow, and was gazing at me, apparently quite wide awake. I reached for her hand again, and kissed it, and felt my insides give a kind of lurch. She smiled; but there was a darkness to the smile, that made me feel chill.‘What’s up?’ I murmured. She stroked my hair.‘I was only thinking...’‘What?’ She wouldn’t answer. I propped myself up beside her, quite wide awake myself, now. ‘What, Florence?’‘I was looking at you in the darkness: I have never seen you sleep before. You looked like quite a stranger to me. And then I thought, you are a stranger to me ...’‘A stranger? How can you say that? You have lived with me, for more than a year!’‘And last night,’ she answered, ‘for the first time, I discovered you were once a music-hall star! How can you keep a thing like that a secret? Why would you want to? What else have you done that I don’t know about? You might have been in prison, for all I know. You might have been mad. You might have been gay!’I bit my lip; but then, remembering how kind she had been about the gay girls at the Boy, I said quickly, ‘Flo, I did go on the streets one time.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  You mix with actors and ballet-girls, and make friends with them. Your dressing-room is large and private and warm - for you are really expected to change and make-up in it, not arrive, breathless, at the stage door, having buttoned on your costume in your brougham. You are handed lines to speak, and you speak them, steps to take, and you take them, costumes to wear - the most wonderful costumes you ever saw in your life, costumes of fur and satin and velvet - and you wear them, then pass them back to the wardrobe-mistress and let her worry about mending them and keeping them neat. The crowds you have to play before are the kindest, gayest crowds there ever were: you will hurl all manner of nonsense at them and they will shriek with laughter, merely because it is Christmas and they are determined to be jolly. It is like a holiday from real life - except that you are paid twenty pounds a week, if you are as lucky as we were then, to enjoy it. The Cinderella in which we played that year was a particularly splendid one. The title role was taken by Dolly Arnold - a lovely girl with a voice like a linnet’s, and a waist so slim her trademark was to wear a necklace as a belt. It was rather odd to see Kitty spooning with her upon the stage, kissing her while the clock showed a minute-to-midnight - though it was odder still, perhaps, to think that no one in the audience called out Toms! now, or even appeared to think it: they only cheered when the Prince and Cinderella were united at the end, and drawn on stage, by half-a-dozen pygmy horses, in their wedding-car. Aside from Dolly Arnold, there were other stars - artistes whose turns I had once paid to watch and clap at, at the Canterbury Palace of Varieties. It made me feel very green, to have to work with them and talk to them as equals. I had only ever sung and danced, before, at Kitty’s side; now, of course, I had to act - to walk on stage with a hunting retinue and say, ‘My lords, where is Prince Casimir, our master?’; to slap my thigh and make terrible puns; to kneel before Cinderella with a velvet cushion, and place the slipper of glass upon her tiny foot - then lead the crowd in three rousing cheers when it was found to fit it. If you have ever seen a panto at the Brit, you will know how marvellous they are.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Have you no family to go to?’ ‘They - they’ve all thrown me over, because of this business.’ She shook her head at that; then grew thoughtful again, and glanced quickly at my waist. ‘You ain’t - you ain’t in trouble, are you?’ she asked quietly. ‘In trouble? I -’ I couldn’t help it: it was as if she was handing me the play text, for me to read it back to her. ‘I was in trouble,’ I said, with my eyes on my lap, ‘but the gent fixed that when he beat me. It was on account of it, I think, that I was so poorly, earlier on ...’ At that, there came a very queer and kind expression to her face; and she nodded, and swallowed - and I saw I had convinced her. ‘If you truly have nowhere, it will not hurt, I suppose, for you to stay a night - just one night - here with us. And tomorrow I shall give you the names of some places where you might find abed...’ ‘Oh!’ I felt ready to swoon all over again, in sheer relief. ‘And Mr Banner,’ I said, ‘won’t mind it?’ Mr Banner, it turned out, had no objection to my staying there at all; indeed, as before, he proved pleasanter than his wife, and willing to go to all sorts of trouble for the sake of my comfort. When they ate - for I had interrupted them as they were about to take their tea - it was he who set a plate before me and filled it with stew. He brought me a shawl when I shivered; and, when he saw me limping into the room after a visit to the privy, he made me pull off my boots, and fetched a bowl of salty water for me to soak my blistered feet in. Finally - and most wonderfully of all - he took down a tin of tobacco from the shelf of a bookcase, rolled two neat cigarettes, and offered me one to smoke. Florence, meanwhile, sat all night a little apart from us, at the supper-table, working through a pile of papers - lists, I fondly supposed them to be, of friendless girls; account-sheets, perhaps, from Freemantle House. When we lit our cigarettes she looked up and sniffed, but made no complaint; occasionally she would sigh or yawn, or rub her neck as if it ached, and then her husband would address her with some word of encouragement or affection. Once the baby cried: she tilted her head, but didn’t stir; it was Ralph who, all ungrudgingly, rose to see to it. She simple worked on: writing, reading, comparing pages, addressing envelopes... She worked while Ralph yawned, and finally stood and stretched and touched his lips to her cheek and bade us both a polite good-night; she worked while I yawned, and began to doze.

• From Less (2017)

  Arthur Less visited Mexico nearly thirty years ago, in a beat-up white BMW fitted with an eight-track tape player and only two tapes, two suitcases of hurriedly packed clothes, a bag of marijuana and mescaline taped under the spare tire, and a driver who sped down the length of California as if he were running from the law. That driver: the poet Robert Brownburn. He awakened young Arthur Less with a call early that morning, telling him to pack for three days, then showed up an hour later, motioning him quickly into the car. What caper was this? Nothing more than a fancy of Robert’s. Less would grow used to these, but at the time he had known Robert for only a month; their encounters for drinks had turned into rented hotel rooms, and now, suddenly, this. Being whisked away to Mexico: it was the thrill of his young life. Robert shouting above the noise of the motor as they sped between the almond groves of Central California, then long stretches of quiet while they switched the tapes around again, and the rest stops where Robert would take young Arthur Less off behind the oak trees and kiss him until there were tears in his eyes. It all startled Less. Looking back, he understood that surely Robert was on something; probably some amphetamine one of his artist friends had given him up in Russian River. Robert was excited and happy and funny. He never offered whatever he was on to Less; he only handed him a joint. But he kept driving, with hardly a stop, for twelve hours, until they reached the Mexican border at San Ysidro, then another two hours through Tijuana and down toward Rosarito, where, at last, they drove along an ocean set on fire by a sunset that cooled to a line of neon pink, and finally arrived in Ensenada, at a seaside hotel where Robert was slapped on the back in welcome and given two shots of tequila. They smoked and made love all weekend, barely escaping the hot room except for food and a mescaline walk on the beach. From below, a mariachi band endlessly played a song that only constant repetition had allowed Less to memorize, and he sang along to the llorar s as Robert smoked and laughed: Yo se bien que estoy afuera Pero el día que yo me muera Se que tendras que llorar (Llorar y llorar, llorar y llorar) I know I’m out of your life But the day that I die I know you are going to cry (Cry and cry, cry and cry)

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Only now—ninety-seven ass fucks later—is the enormity of the power that lies in this area dawning on me. It is emotional and physical therapy on the deepest level: revisiting and literally learning to trust enough to open the forbidden exit and enter the forbidden zone. As a baby, the first big resounding NO from the world as we know it is the NO perpetrated upon a loose and unconscious external anal sphincter. Getting ass-fucked is the most extreme form of rebellion against one’s parents in which one could possibly indulge—returning not to adolescent transgressions, but rather to the original injury. I experience a regression to a very young age when he’s in my ass. I goo and gaa and giggle and feel the joy that must have existed before anxiety took over. As if all I ever wanted was to be loved while not gripping my ass, but allowing it to be as it is. And what is released along with my anal sphincter? A love that is enormous, a love waiting decades to be released, a love that flows freely, a love that is infinite at the moment of its conception. Okay, I understand. You’re thinking: Infinite love is good, but what if I bleed en route? To be on the safe side I have never not used a condom, but I have also never, ever bled. This can be a question of the skill of one’s lover but it also may be that some assholes, like mine, are just more able, more resilient, than others—a genetic blessing. If you bleed, don’t do it. I wouldn’t. Period. I also know that when some of you hear anal sex you see nothing but shit—shit, shit everywhere. Shit on the bed, shit on his cock, shit on your ass. I am here to tell you it just isn’t like that. Hardly a trace, ever. All you have to do is include in your regular bathing a nice little finger-in-the-ass bath prior to an anal visitation. What woman doesn’t wash her pussy before sex? Same thing, just rinse out your ass, too. Shit is not my thing, either—don’t want to see it, smell it, or clean it up. Ass-fucking is not about shit. It’s about not being afraid of your shit, going past your shit—to find the shit that matters. #98 He fucked me in the ass at 11:20 last night so long, so hard, so smooth, so hilariously, so slowly, so fast, so very, very deep. After forty-five minutes of this he says, “Now I’m gonna fuck your pussy.” And he fucked my pussy 360 degrees around. Then he says, “I’m gonna get me some sacred spot.” And he does, anointing my sacred place—the grave of my past—with his blasphemous baptismal juice. “I think it’s your greatest gift,” he says after. “What is?” “Submission.” PROFILE OF AN ASS-FUCKER Ass-fucking a woman is clearly about authority. The man’s authority; the woman’s complete acceptance of it.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Love is also deeply personal. It unfurls within and throughout your mind and body like a wave, cresting with each new micro-moment of connection— that smile, that laugh, or that knowing and appreciative glance that you share with another. Yet even as these micro-moments are deeply personal and fleeting, they’ve also been targets of increasing scientific scrutiny. So now, for the first time, you can know and appreciate love not only through a personal, subjective lens but also through a scientific, objective lens. Through this scientific lens, you can better see and appreciate how your body and brain were made for love, and made to benefit from loving. Learn to seek love out more frequently and it can elevate you, your community, and our world far beyond what you and I can today envision. Opportunities for love abound. It’s up to you to nourish yourself with them. Acknowledgments The ideas about love that you’ll encounter here have been gestating in my mind and heart for years. Fittingly, they first arose through my connections with others. Some of these connections have been fleeting, others long-standing. Some have been mutual connections, with ideas forged through rich conversations and collaborations, others have been more one-sided, as I’ve privately mulled over and expanded on the words of other scholars. For the foundational idea that love is best seen as any positive emotion shared within a safe, interpersonal connection, I thank Carroll Izard. His 1977 book described love as moments of shared joy and shared interest, and convinced me that any accounting of the positive emotions should not omit love. What little I wrote about love in my first presentation of the broaden-and-build theory owed a great deal to Izard’s influence on my thinking. A deeper shaping of my views on love comes from the pioneering work on high-quality connections by my friend and University of Michigan colleague, Jane Dutton. I’ve long been inspired by her ways of seeing and describing the connective tissue that binds and energizes people in long-standing relationships and one-time encounters alike. Apart from her inspiring theoretical work, Jane is also an inspiring person, and I am thankful that our friendship has withstood the strain of my move from Ann Arbor. Other scholars whose work has deeply influenced my thinking about love and related ideas include Lisa Feldman Barrett, Kent Berridge, John Cacioppo, Laura Carstensen, Sy-Miin Chow, Steve Cole, Michael D. Cohen, Mike Csikszentmihalyi, Richie Davidson, Paul Ekman, Ruth Feldman, Shelly Gable, Eric Garland, Karen Grewen, Melissa Gross, Uri Hasson, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, David Johnson, Danny Kahneman, Dacher Keltner, Corey Keyes, Ann Kring, Bob Levenson, Kathleen Light, Marcial Losada, Batja Mesquita, Paula Niedenthal, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Keith Payne, David Penn, Chris Peterson, Bob Quinn, Cliff Saron, Oliver Schultheiss, Leslie Sekerka, Marty Seligman, Erika Rosenberg, Robert Vallerand, George Vaillant, and David Sloan Wilson.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Speaking of making other people more comfortable, as you learn about social anxiety you’ll start to see it everywhere. For example, watch someone stand alone at a party for a moment and it’s almost guaranteed they’ll pull out their phone to quell their internal awkwardness. So kill two birds with one stone by taking on the role of The One Who Puts Others at Ease. Indeed, the vast majority of people prefer that someone else strike up conversation and will be profoundly grateful if you initiate, even if they don’t admit their relief to you. So in the service of making others more comfortable, assign yourself the task of finding someone standing alone at an event and saying hello. Internally, they’ll thank you for it, but what’s more, you’ll come away feeling happier and stronger. A creative 2014 study out of the University of Chicago found that even in the culturally expected silence of the weekday mass transit commute, people who take the initiative to say hello not only brighten someone else’s day but also reap rewards for themselves. The study assigned commuters the task of striking up a conversation with a stranger on their train—the longer, the better. To give them some structure, they were told, “Find out something interesting about him or her and tell them something about you.… Your goal is to try to get to know your community neighbor this morning.” Alternatively, those randomly assigned to the solitude condition were told, “Please keep to yourself and enjoy your solitude on the train today. Take this time to sit alone with your thoughts. Your goal is to focus on yourself and the day ahead of you.” Predictably, participants who were assigned to strike up a conversation were initially reluctant. They expected the experience would be awkward, unpleasant, and unproductive, but the results were exactly the opposite. Surprisingly, commuters who connected with a stranger had a significantly more positive commute than those instructed to sit in solitude. What’s more, the productivity of the trip wasn’t compromised—the group assigned to connect with a stranger reported a level of productivity that was nearly identical to those who kept to themselves. Indeed, assigning yourself the task of saying good morning and making a remark about the weather may end there, which is fine, but it could also lead to pleasant conversation, boosted mood, invigorated productivity, and—most important—another brick added firmly to your building. The only word of caution: don’t choose a structure that allows you to avoid. Helping with the dishes after a dinner party is generous, but if it keeps you in the kitchen while everyone else is chatting over coffee on the stoop your building goes neglected. Volunteering on the fundraising committee for your tai chi group is great structure, but not if the committee communicates only by text.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  George Gervin 9. Mugsy Bogues I kept making list after list of the things that made me feel joy. And I kept drawing cartoons of the things that made me angry. I keep writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing, and rethinking and revising and reediting. It became my grieving ceremony. In Like a Lion I’d never guessed I’d be a good basketball player. I mean, I’d always loved ball, mostly because my father loved it so much, and because Rowdy loved it even more, but I figured I’d always be one of those players who sat on the bench and cheered his bigger, faster, more talented teammates to victory and/or defeat. But somehow or another, as the season went on, I became a freshman starter on a varsity basketball team. And, sure, all of my teammates were bigger and faster, but none of them could shoot like me. I was the hired gunfighter. Back on the rez, I was a decent player, I guess. A rebounder and a guy who could run up and down the floor without tripping. But something magical happened to me when I went to Reardan. Overnight, I became a good player. I suppose it had something to do with confidence. I mean, I’d always been the lowest Indian on the reservation totem pole—I wasn’t expected to be good so I wasn’t. But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. They expected me to be good. And so I became good. I wanted to live up to expectations. I guess that’s what it comes down to. The power of expectations. And as they expected more of me, I expected more of myself, and it just grew and grew until I was scoring twelve points a game. AS A FRESHMAN! Coach was thinking I would be an all-state player in a few years. He was thinking maybe I’d play some small-college ball. It was crazy. How often does a reservation Indian kid hear that? How often do you hear the words “Indian” and “college” in the same sentence? Especially in my family. Especially in my tribe. But don’t think I’m getting stuck up or anything. It’s still absolutely scary to play ball, to compete, to try to win. I throw up before every game. Coach said he used to throw up before games. “Kid,” he said, “some people need to clear the pipes before they can play. I used to be a yucker. You’re a yucker Ain’t nothing wrong with being a yucker.” So I asked Dad if he used to be a yucker. “What’s a yucker?” he asked. “Somebody who throws up before basketball games,” I said. “Why would you throw up?” “Because I’m nervous.” “You mean, because you’re scared?” “Nervous, scared, same kind of things, aren’t they?” “Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don’t want to play.”

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Of course, Rowdy would have thrown the book at the teacher and then punched her. Gordy showed a lot of courage in standing up to a teacher like that. And his courage inspired the others. Penelope stood and dropped her textbook. And then Roger stood and dropped his textbook. Whomp! Then the other basketball players did the same. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! And Mrs. Jeremy flinched each and every time, as if she’d been kicked in the crotch. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Then all of my classmates walked out of the room. A spontaneous demonstration. Of course, I probably should have walked out with them. It would have been more poetic. It would have made more sense. Or perhaps my friends should have realized that they shouldn’t have left behind the FRICKING REASON FOR THEIR PROTEST! And that thought just cracked me up. It was like my friends had walked over the backs of baby seals in order to get to the beach where they could protest against the slaughter of baby seals. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that bad. But it was sure funny. “What are you laughing at?” Mrs. Jeremy asked me. “I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,” I said. “By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.” I walked out of the classroom and felt like dancing and singing. It all gave me hope. It gave me a little bit of joy. And I kept trying to find the little pieces of joy in my life. That’s the only way I managed to make it through all of that death and change. I made a list of the people who had given me the most joy in my life: 1. Rowdy 2. My mother 3. My father 4. My grandmother 5. Eugene 6. Coach 7. Roger 8. Gordy 9. Penelope, even if she only partially loves me I made a list of the musicians who had played the most joyous music: 1. Patsy Cline, my mother’s favorite 2. Hank Williams, my father’s favorite 3. Jimi Hendrix, my grandmother’s favorite 4. Guns N’ Roses, my big sister’s favorite 5. White Stripes, my favorite I made a list of my favorite foods: 1. pizza 2. chocolate pudding 3. peanut butter and jelly sandwiches 4. banana cream pie 5. fried chicken 6. mac & cheese 7. hamburgers 8. french fries 9. grapes I made a list of my favorite books: 1. The Grapes of Wrath 2. Catcher in the Rye 3. Fat Kid Rules the World 4. Tangerine 5. Feed 6. Catalyst 7. Invisible Man 8. Fools Crow 9. Jar of Fools I made a list of my favorite basketball players: 1. Dwayne Wade 2. Shane Battier 3. Steve Nash 4. Ray Allen 5. Adam Morrison 6. Julius Erving 7. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 8.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Then I popped it. And then it looked even more like you.” “This one time, I ate, like, three hot dogs and a bowl of clam chowder, and then I got diarrhea all over the floor, and it looked like you.” “And then you ate it,” Rowdy said. We laughed ourselves silly. We laughed ourselves sweaty. “Don’t make me laugh,” I said. “It’s too hot to laugh.” “It’s too hot to sit in this house. Let’s go swimming.” “Where?” “Turtle Lake.” “Okay,” I said. But I was scared of Turtle Lake. It was a small body of water, maybe only a mile around. Maybe less. But it was deep, crazy deep. Nobody has ever been to the bottom. I’m not a very good swimmer; so I was always afraid I’d sink and drown, and they’d never, ever find my body. One year, these scientists came with a mini-submarine and tried to find the bottom, but the lake was so silty and muddy that they couldn’t see. And the nearby uranium mine made their radar/sonar machines go nuts, so they couldn’t see that way, either, so they never made it to the bottom. The lake is round. Perfectly round. So the scientists said it was probably an ancient and dormant volcano crater. Yeah, a volcano on the rez! The lake was so deep because the volcano crater and tunnels and lava chutes and all that plumbing went all the way down to the center of the earth. That lake was, like, forever deep. There were all sorts of myths and legends surrounding the lake. I mean, we’re Indians, and we like to make up shit about lakes, you know? Some people said the lake is named Turtle because it’s round and green like a turtle’s shell. Some people said it’s named Turtle because it used to be filled with regular turtles. Some people said it’s named Turtle because it used to be home to this giant snapping turtle that ate Indians. A Jurassic turtle. A Steven Spielberg turtle. A King Kong versus the Giant Reservation Turtle turtle. I didn’t exactly believe in the giant turtle myth. I was too old and smart for that. But I’m still an Indian, and we like to be scared. I don’t know what it is about us. But we love ghosts. We love monsters. But I was really scared of this other story about Turtle Lake. My dad told me the story. When he was a kid he watched a horse drown in Turtle Lake and disappear. “Some of the others say it was a giant turtle that grabbed the horse,” Dad said. “But they’re lying. They were just being silly. That horse was just stupid. It was so stupid we named it Stupid Horse.” Well, Stupid Horse sank into the endless depths of Turtle Lake and everybody figured that was the end of that story.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  One day, during a particularly fierce battle, a column of Austrian soldiers appeared, causing the French troops to flee in disorder. Oblivious of the cannonballs crashing around her, Gabrielle cried at the top of her voice for the French troops to stay and fight. The Austrians came within five hundred paces of the king’s mistress as she continued exhorting her countrymen to bravery. Alarmed, Henri rode to her side and ordered her to be slung over a horse and taken to the rear of the camp. Out of fifty-six known mistresses in his lifetime, Henri was faithful only to Gabrielle. So smitten was the king with his brave and beautiful mistress that he vowed to marry Gabrielle and make her queen of France. In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the king raised his mistress to his lofty level and ensconced her in apartments at the palace. Most likely she did not complain about the bitter cold that froze the ink in her inkwell and coated the wash water in her basin with a crust of ice. She understood that the distance of outhouses from the palace required bowls overflowing with human waste in almost every room, concealed behind elegant cabinets of inlaid rosewood until they could be removed. She did not expect her food to be warm; the distance of the palace kitchens from the royal suites precluded that. She knew that behind its thin wash of gilding, the court was a “tissue of malice,” as Madame de Pompadour said, a place of vicious backbiting and petulant self-aggrandizement.12 By the nineteenth century, the monarch, instead of raising his mistress to his exalted if uncomfortable level, gratefully descended to hers. He escaped his golden prison by fleeing to her tidy bourgeois home, which offered the warmth, comfort, and privacy his court could not. Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef (1830–1916), a sad, weary little man bowed down by the weight of a crumbling empire, found joy over coffee and croissants with his mistress Katharina Schratt. A thirty-three-year-old comic actress at the Imperial Theater when their love affair began in 1886, Katharina was the only woman ever reported to make the emperor laugh out loud. Over a period of thirty years, Franz Josef found in her quaint home an oasis of entertainment and relaxation, far from the cold etiquette of the palace. Katharina did not weary him with politics but told him jokes and pleasant chatty gossip. Katharina was one of those women whose aura of beauty quickly disintegrates when one analyzes her features. She had a face like a potato dumpling, a stubborn chin, thick, quizzical black eyebrows framing laughing eyes, a pointed little nose, and thin lips struggling to suppress a smile. Her curvaceous figure ran to plumpness in middle age. It was the joy she embodied, her warmth and kindness, that made her seem truly beautiful.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  With a referral from a trusted friend, I started therapy with a Jungian psychotherapist. After four months of intense work, my therapist suggested that I might want to go and get Ganga someday. My reply was total surprise, "You mean I can?" From that moment on, Harry and I worked to get our daughter back. We assembled a team of lawyers, cult specialists, therapists, and private investigators. Four months later, I went to Kashi Ranch with my father, a private investigator, and the local SWAT team, and demanded my daughter back. With the cooperation of the local criminal justice system, I had secured the necessary court order. Our daughter was reluctantly released to the police, and had to wait in a foster home until the judge awarded us custody. Two weeks later, Ganga was on the airplane with her true family, flying to her new home in Colorado. This is what she wrote at the age of nine: A cult is a person that uses mind control and can make you gullible and you don't even know it. But you start to love her because she makes you feel special. A cult can hurt you very bad. She can even make you think she's god! A cult is bad. Even though it is easier to express what is wrong with Kashi Ranch, we do our best to keep it in perspective and let Ganga express what was good about her cult experience. There were some positive things, and these helped mold her to become the wonderful person she is today. I feel quite lucky. I got a second chance, a chance to be whole and live a full life with all of my children. Having my daughter back is a dream come true. Yet I struggle not only with the loss of those precious six years but also with the pain of the wound I inflicted on my daughter. Every day I search for forgiveness; the healthier Ganga gets, the easier it becomes. (In Chapter 15, Rosanne describes the challenges faced by Ganga and her family as she learned to adjust to life away from the cult.) Troubles Overcome Are Good to Tellby Alexandra Stein Alexandra Stein spent ten years in a political cult in the Midwest. She documented her experiences in her book, Inside Out: A Memoir of Entering and Breaking Out of a Minneapolis Political Cult (North Star Press of St. Cloud). Currently, she is completing a Ph.D. in sociology, specializing in the social psychology of political extremism. She also writes creative nonfiction on a variety of less heady topics. I was in a left-wing political cult called the "0" for about ten years, from the age of twenty-six to thirty-six. I wrote this eight years after I left the group, and another six years have passed since then. Even though I have come along even further in my recovery, these earlier insights will, I hope, be beneficial to others.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At Quilter Street we all rose early, and bathed and washed our hair and dressed - it was like getting ready for a wedding. I very gallantly decided not to risk my trousers on the crowd - socialists having such a poor name already; instead, I wore a suit of navy-blue, with scarlet frogging on the coat, and a matching necktie, and a billycock hat. As ladies’ outfits went, it was a smart one; even so, I found myself twitching irritably at my skirts as I paced the parlour waiting for Flo - and was soon joined by Ralph, who was dressed up stiff as a clerk, and kept pulling at his collar where it chafed against his throat.Florence herself wore the damson-coloured suit I so admired: I bought a flower for her, on the walk from Bethnal Green, and pinned it to her jacket. It was a daisy, big as a fist, and shone when the sun struck it, like a lamp. ‘You shall certainly,’ she said to me, ‘not lose me in that.’Victoria Park itself we found transformed. Workmen had been busy raising tents and platforms and stalls all through the weekend, and there were strings of flags and banners at every tree, and stall-holders already setting up their tables and displays. Florence had about a dozen lists of duties upon her, and now produced them, then went off to find Mrs Macey of the Guild. Ralph and I picked our way through all the drooping bunting, to find the tent he was to speak in. It turned out to be the biggest of the lot: ‘There’ll be room for seven hundred people in here, at the least!’ the workmen told us cheerfully, as they filled it with chairs. That made it greater than some of the halls I had used to play at; and when Ralph heard it, he turned very pale, and retired to a bench for another reading of his speech.After that, I took Cyril and wandered about, gazing at whatever caught my eye and stopping to chat with girls I recognised, lending a hand with fluttering tablecloths, splitting boxes, awkward rosettes. There were speakers and exhibitions there, it seemed to me, for every queer or philanthropic society and cause you could imagine - trade unionists and suffragists, Christian Scientists, Christian Socialists, Jewish Socialists, Irish Socialists, anarchists, vegetarians ... ‘Ain’t this marvellous?’ I heard as I walked, from friends and strangers alike. ‘Did you ever see a sight like this?’ One woman gave me a sash of satin to pin about my hat; I fastened it to Cyril’s frock instead, and when people saw him in the colours of the SDF, they smiled and shook his hand: ‘Hallo, comrade!’‘Won’t he remember this day, when he’s grown!’ said a man, as he touched Cyril’s head and gave him a penny.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At the last moment, as I leaned from the carriage to embrace him, he drew a little chamois bag from his pocket and placed it in my hand, and closed my fingers over it. It held coins - sovereigns - six of them, and more, I knew, than he could afford to part with; but by the time I had drawn open the neck of the bag and seen the gleam of the gold inside it, the train had begun to move, and it was too late to thrust them back. Instead, I could only shout my thanks, and kiss my fingers to him, and watch as he raised his hat and waved it; then place my cheek against the window-glass when he was gone from sight, and wonder when I should see him next.I did not wonder for long, I am afraid to say, for the thrill of being with Kitty - of hearing her talk again of the rooms we were to share, and the kind of life we were to have together in the city, where she was to make her fortune - soon overcame my grief. My family would have thought me cruel, I know, to see me laugh while they were sad at home without me; but oh! I could no more not have smiled, that afternoon, than not drawn breath, or sweated.And soon, too, I had London to gaze at and marvel over; for in an hour we had arrived at Charing Cross. Here Kitty found a porter to help us with our bags and boxes, and while he loaded them on to a trolley we looked round anxiously for Mr Bliss. At last, ‘There he is!’ cried Kitty, and her pointing finger showed him striding up the platform, his whiskers and his coat-tails flying and his face very red.‘Miss Butler!’ he cried when he reached us. ‘What a pleasure! What a pleasure! I feared I would be late; but here you are exactly as we planned, and even more charming than before.’ He turned to me, then removed his hat - the silk, again - and made me a low, theatrical bow. ‘“Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wrench!’” he said, rather loudly. ‘Miss Astley - late of Whitstable, I believe?’ He took my hand and gripped it briefly. Then he snapped his fingers at the porter, and offered us each an arm.He had left a carriage waiting for us on the Strand; the driver touched his whip to his cap when we approached, and jumped from his seat to place our luggage on the roof.