I’m Just Having Fun, Please Relax

I laughed so hard I had to leave the room. Not because someone told some good joke, or because something clever had happened on the screen, but because I had just discovered, entirely by accident, that proboscis monkeys were real.(I know, I know) I remember the day well. It happened inside some PC game about the amazon rainforest I picked up from a thrift shop, because it was cheap. I clicked into an exhibit expecting something like frogs and big cats, but instead I was met with a creature so surreal it hit some part of my brain I didn’t even know was wired for joy. The nose. The damn face. The sheer posture of the guy. I completely lost it.

There was no buildup, or explanation. Just a moment that blindsided me, bypassed language, and short-circuited something in me with what I can only describe as unfiltered noise. And the strange thing is that laugh stayed. Not the sound of the dude, or even the memory of the game itself, but the reaction. I can’t unfeel that kind of joy. I don’t want to. Because I didn’t seek it. It just kinda happened to me, and that’s what made it real.

I’ve returned to that kind of joy in different forms ever since. Not consciously, and not as part of some personal philosophy, but through little behaviours that make no sense when explained. I loop cursed videos until they stick to my soul. I build characters in video games that have no business existing. I’ll give them backstories that make me laugh at the worst damn times. I do voices that spiral into one person performances. It all starts as a joke, but at some point, it becomes something more.

What I’ve learned, slowly and without quite meaning to, is that not all joy is meant to evolve. Some joy is deeply personal, completely unexplainable, and utterly disconnected from the usual expectations of taste, healing, or self-improvement. And that’s exactly what makes it so powerful. It’s unfettered joy without justification. Joy that shows up uninvited and doesn’t need to clean up after itself, y’know?

I don’t think we get enough space for that kind of feeling. Especially not now, when every damned emotion is expected to tell a story, teach a lesson, or become part of some kind of journey. But this wasn’t a journey. It was a reminder that I could still laugh like that for absolutely no reason. And maybe that’s the version of joy I trust the most.

He changed me actually.

At some point, having fun starts to come with rules. Nobody tells you outright that it’s happening, but the change is gradual and unmistakable. Your laughter becomes something you’re supposed to bring down, spontaneity is treated as childish or immature, and silliness begins to look like a sign that you’re not taking things seriously enough. Play, once instinctive and free, becomes a privilege. It becomes something solely reserved for children, or for adults who can afford to schedule it in as self-care. The rest of us are expected to grow out of it. Or at least be doing it respectably.

For those of us who don’t quite fit because of how we think, move, and how we express gender or relate to society's inherent structure- this shift tends to come earlier and harder. The fun that once was allowed to flow naturally begins to attract scrutiny. We’re too loud, too weird, too unserious. We’re told to change ourselves, mature faster, and to stop drawing attention for all the wrong reasons. And when you’re already being watched, and being read through layers of race, gender, neurotype or social difference you didn’t ask to wear, joy becomes risky. So you adjust, and you hide away that part of yourself. You learn to be funny without being disruptive, creative without being inconvenient, and expressive without being a bit too much.

What often gets lost in that translation is the right to play without performance. Not for growth, or healing. Not to prove you’ve done the work. Just to feel something vivid and unruly and fucking silly again.

Later on in life, if you’re lucky, you find your way back to it. Not in some grand, cinematic reclaiming of childhood, but slowly. You name your RPG character something so stupid it ruins the mood of the game in the best of ways. You build yourself into a game that doesn’t offer the tools, just because you want to see someone like you on your screen, even if it’s crude. You bring an old bit back from the dead just to keep yourself company. Nobody claps. Nobody shares it. But you laugh, and that’s enough.

This kind of feeling doesn’t ask to be productive in any way, shape or form. It exists on the outskirts of coherence, and that’s what makes it feel like yours. There is no growth arc, nor journey to reflect on. Just a kindle of absurd delight, burning bright in the background while the rest of life demands rigid structure.

When fun becomes something you have to earn, reclaiming your joy becomes an kind of rebellion toward the norms of this world.

Somewhere along the way, a joke stops being funny and starts becoming some kind of infrastructure. You won’t notice the shift until it’s already happened. One day, it’s just something you said in passing- a silly drawing, a dumb character name, a one-off voice that cracked the room. The next, it’s a thing you’re still doing weeks later, long after anyone else remembers where it even came from. And by that point, it doesn’t matter whether it still makes sense, or whether it’s even a joke anymore. It’s alive now. It has lore. It has emotional weight... and it belongs to you.

I’ve lost track of how many jokes I’ve extended past their expiration date, on purpose. I’ve made drawings that should’ve been deleted, turned them into icons, given them names, backstories, family trees, and romantic arcs. I’ve kept characters alive not because they’re good, or clever, or relevant, but because they anchor me to something silly and specific that felt good once and continues to feel good in a way I no longer have to explain.

This kind of play isn’t just indulgent. It’s structural. It creates emotional continuity in a life that otherwise asks you to discard, update, and rebrand yourself constantly. In a culture that loves closure and clean arcs, there’s something kinda radical about refusing to let a bit die. When you let the joke keep running, even when no one’s laughing anymore, actually especially when no one’s watching anymore, you’re not only being silly. You’re saying, this still brings me joy, and that’s more than a reason enough to keep going.

For neurodivergent people, and queer people, for anyone who’s ever lived outside the expected path, these rituals aren’t just entertainment for us. They become the scaffolding. They’re how you slowly return to yourself. They’re how you hold onto something in a world that wants you to constantly shed your weird tendencies and come back all polished. A dumb drawing becomes a fixed point. A voice becomes a compass.

What starts as play becomes place.

And no one else needs to get it.

Joy, like everything else in this system, is always expected to do something. If it doesn’t lead to a product, a transformation, or at least a well-framed insight, it’s usually treated as a waste. Play has to be purposeful. Rest must be restorative. Even your damned pleasure is often measured by how much it helps you recover for the next round of labour. Leisure, in this framework, isn’t freedom. It’s their fuel supply. You’re allowed to have your fun, as long as you come back sharper, better, and stronger. As long as that sweet joy is earned.

This pressure to optimize our happiness is subtle, but everywhere. It shows up in the way hobbies are repackaged as side hustles, in the tracked metrics layered into our playlists, diaries and mood apps, in this branding of “self-care” as something clean, aesthetic, and ultimately marketable. Even play, perhaps the most instinctive human impulse, is rebranded as a tool. It’s not enough to enjoy something for it’s sake alone. You’re supposed to be getting something out of it.

But not all joy even can be optimized. Some joy lives in the act of returning to the same moment over and over again, not because it changes you, but because it doesn’t. It stays still. It repeats. It makes no promises.

That feeling is often seen as childish, wasteful, or strange. Because it doesn’t help you grow, nor does it doesn’t fit into a narrative. And that’s exactly why it matters.

There’s power in choosing not to evolve every single damn version of yourself. In resisting the pressure to turn every moment of sheer delight into a life lesson. In letting a game be just that, a game, a ritual be completely useless and still completely sacred. Staying in one place, when done consciously and deliberately, isn’t stagnation. It’s a form of stability. A refusal to be moved by systems that only value forward momentum.

Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is remember a moment that made you feel good, without asking it to grow with you. Not because you’re stuck, but because you’ve already arrived somewhere better, and you’d like to stay a little longer.

My old character in Gaia Online, ironically one of the bases for what I'd look like coming out.

There’s a kind of joy that doesn’t translate, because it was never built for translation in the first place. It lives in the slow pause between actions, in that memory you remember fondly, and in the goofy sound effects that loop in your mind like background ambience. The moment doesn’t hold still long enough to be screenshot. And more importantly, it doesn’t care to be understood.

I’ve carried moments like this for years, little rituals so minor they seem invisible until I try to describe them. Like imagining I’m being rotated in a character customization menu when I’m taking my morning runs. Like assigning dialogue boxes to the things around me and hearing them play out internally, like the dork I am. Like hearing the Windows XP startup sound whenever I sit down to begin something, not because I’m nostalgic about the OS, but because it just feels like a loading screen. These moments don’t make sense out if I speak them out loud. Hell, they barely make sense in my head. But they give me a kind of grounding I can’t find anywhere else.

This isn’t some performance art. I’m not curating my strangeness. It’s something closer to self maintenance, running emotional scripts in the background just to keep the day upright.

The mistake is in assuming that because something doesn’t read well to others, it must not be real, or right. But joy doesn’t require an audience. It doesn’t require design. It doesn’t require a visible arc. The giddy joy that happens in your own head, without prompting or reward, might be the most honest kind there is.

What these kinds of moments offer is something rarely afforded by systems that demand constant documentation. You don’t need to understand these rituals to know they’re working. And no one else ever has to know they exist.

Some of the best feelings in my life haven’t been shared. They’ve been lived. And that’s more than enough.

There’s a particular kind of freedom in refusing to explain yourself. It simply.. just different. It’s choosing joy without prompting, pleasure without payoff, returning to the same tiny comforts because they still feel good, and that is reason enough. It doesn’t fit into a brand, a journey, or a caption. And that refusal to be useful is clarity.

We are surrounded by systems that train us to convert every single feeling we have into something meaningful. We learn to manage our emotions as resources, to frame our fun as recovery, and to justify even the smallest bursts of happiness through productivity or personal growth. But when we do that, when we over explain our happiness, or require it to serve some kind of larger purpose, we lose something fundamental. We forget that pleasure, at its best, does not need to be productive to be valuable.

The kind of joy I’ve been trying to name throughout this piece, the laugh that interrupts you mid-thought, the jokes that never die, a ritual that only makes sense inside your own mind, is not some lesser form of happiness. It is not a precursor to something deeper. It is not some tool for healing or clarity or change. It is a complete experience in and of itself. It may not teach you anything. It may not last. But that doesn’t make it frivolous. I mean, heck, it’s one of the only feelings that makes you feel utterly, and truly alive.

In this culture obsessed with your outcome, it’s radical to stay in the moment where you already feel good. About refusing to make that joy useful to anyone but yourself. About insisting that the version of you who plays, who repeats, who indulges in dumb nonsense, who deep dives into lore and stays there... that version is enough.

This is not an argument for regression, or detachment, or disengagement. It’s not an escape. It’s a realignment. A slow, deliberate return to something that never needed to be explained in the first place.

You do not need to earn your joy. You don’t need to create a narrative for it. You don’t need to be seen having it for it to count.

You just need to feel it, fully and without apology.

You need to be free.