For as long as I can remember I’ve had a genuine lust for life, an unabashed enthusiasm for the littlest things.

“For as long as I can remember I’ve had a genuine lust for life, an unabashed enthusiasm for the littlest things.”

I am marked by the intense joy I felt while riding in the car with the windows down, music up, and singing at the top of my lungs with my girlfriends on a warm night in college.

If I close my eyes, I can recall the potency of my own emotion as I sat so fully present in a coffee house in Ohio that I forgot anyone was around me and I let tears stream down my face, unashamed.

I recall throwing my head back in delight after the first sip of the perfect cardamom latte after we drove across the Oregon border on our first family road trip with our 18-month-old baby girl. 

I have never been accused of being half-hearted in anything. I truly loved life, loved people, and when I felt it, I expressed it. I later learned there was a word for what I was: earnest.

What is earnestness?

As a kid, I remember thinking that crying felt good and I kinda liked that. Once I told my friends in junior high that I loved precise language, as evidenced by our increasingly lengthy handwritten notes we’d pass to each other in between classes. 

I’ve been writing in a journal for as long as I can remember. In college, I’d process everything by writing it down, and quickly learned that this was an essential step of actually experiencing and integrating my life experiences into my psyche. 

What do all of these things have in common? All of this was my way of paying attention, naming what was happening, and feeling it deeply. It was my way of practicing vulnerability.

“All of this was my way of paying attention, naming what was happening, and feeling it deeply. It was my way of practicing vulnerability.”

The first time it occurred to me that my enthusiasm might be a little cringe and to tamp it down a bit was in elementary school when I’d heard that one of my peers didn’t like me because she thought I was “too nice.” It was true — my fervor was intense and full-on. I realize now that I may have come on a bit strong, and that could be misconstrued for insincerity or toxic positivity.

I get it. Earnestness can get a bad rap because it is often associated with being dishonest or naïve. For example, one can be earnest in their belief for a better world while simultaneously being ignorant of and even complicit in the historic evils of one’s country, family, or faith tradition, and I acknowledge the importance of being informed and sensitive to one’s historical and cultural contexts.

“I’m advocating for earnestness in the truest sense: experiencing goodness with sincere and intense conviction.”

But earnestness can also be a brave act of vulnerability. Dare I delight in something while so many things are burning around us? How brazen to allow ourselves joy and sincerity in an age of critics, hot takes, and relentless bad news? For our purposes, I’m advocating for earnestness in the truest sense: experiencing goodness with sincere and intense conviction. 

This is not a call for the aforementioned toxic positivity. This delight and lust for life comes from a deep gratitude for all of the true and good things in life. Not because we’re trying to push away the bad, but precisely because we’re living embodied lives that take a long, hard look at the world and we’ve decided to bravely believe in goodness anyway.

Losing touch with my earnestness

When I graduated from college in 2016, I was 22 and thrust into the volatile political landscape of our country along with a very casual unraveling of my entire worldview. I couldn’t get a job despite incessantly applying, and was years deep in an ongoing journey of confronting my childhood trauma and trying to navigate my mental health. All my life, no matter how hard things were or how hurt I was, I always had me. I always knew how to delight in little things, believe in goodness, and hope for healing. But something deep within me had shifted, and I felt like I’d fallen into an endless abyss and disappeared.

During those days, I’d walk. It was really all I could do. It was the dead of winter, and for the first time in my life I didn’t feel like me (and would later learn I was officially and diagnosably depressed) and so I’d walk.

“For the first time, I saw the appeal of becoming guarded, jaded, and numb. I didn’t want to be naïve and I didn’t want to be caught off guard.”

I was scared and heartbroken. For the first time, I saw the appeal of becoming guarded, jaded, and numb. I didn’t want to be naïve and I didn’t want to be caught off guard. Who could enjoy anything as delicate as a daisy when people in my own country were dying at the hands of the people who were meant to protect them? How could I have believed in healing, hope, and wholeness when I could barely get out of bed? It all felt so stupid as I watched what was unfolding around me and as I experienced what was unfolding within me.

None of this makes me special — all of us have had our seasons that have left us scarred. But I do know this was the beginning of me really reckoning with this earnestness, becoming much more guarded, and trying to find my way back to myself.

Finding my way back

A textbook Minnesota winter, the air was cold and the landscape was stark. Nights were long and daylight was brief. It was all frozen ground and bare trees and lakes with ice so thick you could drive your car out onto them. I’d bundle up, head outside, brace for the icy air to hit my face and enter my lungs, and only then could I actually feel something. 

“One weekend in early April the earth began to thaw and the tiny buds evidenced that — unbelievably — spring was on her way.”

One weekend in early April the earth began to thaw and the tiny buds evidenced that — unbelievably — spring was on her way. I noticed the bulbs in the front flower bed beginning to push up through the dirt. Over the next couple of weeks, their green leaves and stems grew and signaled life amidst the dreary backdrop of late winter. Then one day and what felt like all of a sudden, their bright red tulip heads stood tall and at attention, like a tiny little army. A whole bed of them. They were so beautiful they took my breath away.

How extravagant, I thought. How extreme it seemed for them to be standing there declaring their brightness and vibrancy, even after all of the darkness and drudgery.

Life. Startling color. Delicate beauty right in front of me, in spite of it all.

Why I’m continuing to embrace earnestness

One of my anchors in life has been my core belief in the goodness of others. I have seen it in the wild and felt it in my own soul — a connective love that I believe binds us all and is the essence of life itself, in spite of the hardships I’ve experienced personally and the evils we continue to watch unfold culturally, socioeconomically, politically.

This belief subjects me to disappointment and heartache daily. But I refuse to let it go, and I think that’s important. This is the vulnerability of joy, belief, and earnestness.

Earnestness, for me, is an act of self-care. It is honoring what brings me pleasure and affirming that, no matter how small, my needs, hopes, and desires matter. I am part of this world that I love and so desperately want to help and heal. Embracing earnest delight in the little things is one of the ways I practice healing. By doing so I am determined to honor myself by tending to my natural proclivity to feel every bit of this life.

“Earnestness, for me, is an act of self-care. It is honoring what brings me pleasure and affirming that, no matter how small, my needs, hopes, and desires matter.”

Most of all, it’s an act of resistance, as the Black community has been teaching us for decades. Earnest self-care plays a key role in our pursuit of justice. We are earnest in our zest for life, our conviction that people are good and divine. Earnest in our belief that goodness is not in vain, that this is how we connect with others and how we find our way back to ourselves. If no one has told you lately — we need you and we need your joy.

“Risk being a little cringe. Being earnest is being alive.”

So make your art. Drink your comfort beverage and enjoy every sip. Deliver your eulogies while your loved ones are still living. Notice the bright red tulips and let them teach you what they will. Breathe in the cool morning air and think your deep thoughts and share them if you want to. Risk being a little cringe. Being earnest is being alive. It says look at us — we won’t be snuffed out. We will laugh and we will cry. We will make art and make love and make the most of what we have in spite of it all. It says I am joy, I exist, and no one and nothing can take that away from me.

Kate Arceo is the Community Manager at The Good Trade. She has a Bachelor of Science from Evangel University and has over 5 years of experience reviewing sustainable home and lifestyle brands, as well as organic kids’ apparel and nontoxic cosmetics. When she’s not hosting dinner parties with her husband at their home in Southern California, you can find her sipping a latte at their local coffee house or shopping for strawberries with her kids at the farmers market. Say hi on Instagram!