Why Is Joy So Absent From My Writing?

I write a lot about struggle. About the thousand small cuts of being visibly trans in a world that has decided, mostly secondhand, that it is uncomfortable with me. About loneliness, about grief, about the particular exhaustion of being praised for surviving something I never had the option to avoid. It is advocacy, and advocacy runs in two directions at once. I am speaking for a community that is routinely spoken over. I am also, whether it appears in the piece or not, speaking myself through something.

Writing is how I process pain. Not metaphorically. Actually. I sit with something that hurts until I can find its shape, its cause, its place in a larger pattern, and by the time it has become a piece, I can carry it differently. I have done this so often, for so many years, that I have become skilled at it. Grief, I can hold. Hostility, I can turn over and examine without it undoing me. Pain has an entire architecture in my mind now, built one essay at a time.

Joy has no such architecture.

So many trans people become fluent in pain the way I have, not because we are built for it, but because we are given so much practice. Private Lives 3, Australia's largest survey of LGBTIQ health and wellbeing, found that trans and gender diverse Australians report psychological distress at rates dramatically higher than the general population. A training program none of us signed up for, run for years, without a syllabus, without an end date. You learn to metabolise hostility because you have no choice but to encounter it, over and over, in rooms you cannot leave and streets you still have to walk down. You learn to sit with grief because grief keeps arriving, whether you are ready for the lesson or not.

And that fluency becomes identity. It stops being a skill you picked up and starts being a thing you are. A 2024 meta-analysis in Trauma, Violence and Abuse, drawing on the Gender Minority Stress and Resilience framework, found that the internal stressors, the expectation of rejection, the concealment, the transphobia we absorb and turn inward, correlate more strongly with anxiety and depression than the external events that put them there. The hostility does not stay outside. It moves in, takes up residence, and starts running things. Ask a trans person how they are doing, and so many of us answer in the language of management. Coping. Getting through it. Holding on. An entire emotional vocabulary built around endurance, built so well that it has quietly become the only vocabulary some of us have left. A personality trained, cut by cut, to expect weight, and to know exactly what to do with weight, and very little else.

I do not know how to process joy.

There is a photograph of me standing on a dais in Australian colours with an international medal around my neck. I won an event competing for my country. I know this happened. I can tell you the facts of it. What I cannot do is find the feeling of it anywhere in me, and when I look at the photograph, I do not entirely recognise the person standing there. It did not imprint. One of the largest things I have ever done, and it went straight through.

The one that bothers me more is smaller. Someone reads a piece and messages me quietly, privately, not to praise the writing but to tell me it helped, that I put something into words they had been carrying without language for it, that they understood themselves better for having read it. Nothing to do with achievement. Just a person handing me something true. And I brush it off. Every time. Some deflection, some redirection, some version of it was nothing.

That is the part I cannot make peace with, because it is not only my joy I am refusing. They reached out. They gave me something that cost them a little to say. And I moved past their moment as fast as I moved past my own.

This has a name, and there are two of them. Researchers studying people who carry trauma have measured them separately. One is the inability to feel happiness even when good things are genuinely happening. The other is stranger, and closer to what I do: positive events arriving and producing numbness, or anxiety, or shame, or a sense of being unworthy of them. Frewen, Dean and Lanius named that second one in 2012, and found it shows up most strongly when the good thing comes from another person. Not disappointment. Not absence. Someone handing you something good, and the body answering with shame.

There is joy in my life. My life is not only weight. What I lack is not the moment. It is the capacity to stay inside it long enough for it to mean anything, to hold it rather than let it pass straight through me on its way to wherever the good things in my life seem to go.

We talk about what hardship takes from people in the moment it happens, the fear, the exhaustion, the grief itself. We talk less about what it leaves behind once the hardship has passed. Reviews of the trauma literature describe a global reduction in positive emotion, not just a narrowing of the trauma-related ones, a nervous system so calibrated to threat that ease itself becomes unfamiliar. I have spent so long asking what is wrong here, what do I need to survive this, that I do not have the reflex for what is right here, let this be enough.

So if you know me, and you see me brush off a moment I should be allowed to keep, do not let me get away with it so easily. Say it again. Hold the moment open a little longer than I can on my own. Lend me your certainty when mine runs out, and show me, by how you celebrate it, what holding it looks like. Stand in the gap with me while I learn it myself.

This is me building that reflex, in public, the way I have built every other reflex, on the page. I have not found the trick. The same tool that taught me to survive grief has not yet taught me to receive joy, and the teaching still has to happen, one attempt at a time, the same way everything else got learned.

Dylan Jade Rackley

Sources

Hill, A.O., Bourne, A., McNair, R., Carman, M. & Lyons, A. (2020). Private Lives 3: The Health and Wellbeing of LGBTIQ People in Australia. Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University.

Wilson, L.C., Newins, A.R., Kassing, F. & Casanova, T. (2024). 'Gender Minority Stress and Resilience Measure: A Meta-Analysis of the Associations with Mental Health in Transgender and Gender Diverse Individuals'. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse.

Frewen, P.A., Dean, J.A. & Lanius, R.A. (2012). 'Assessment of anhedonia in psychological trauma: development of the Hedonic Deficit and Interference Scale'. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 3.

Frewen, P.A., Dozois, D.J.A. & Lanius, R.A. (2012). 'Assessment of anhedonia in psychological trauma: psychometric and neuroimaging perspectives'. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 3.

Reviews on diminished positive affect following traumatic stress, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.