Category: War Stories and Wisdom

By Rebekah DeAnn Mason

In a Time of Grief and Fear, Joy Comes Through the Work We Do To Connect With Our Voices. We Share Our Stories. And We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest Until It Comes.

Justice Through Joy was never just a name for a passion project. It’s always been a commitment. An intentional plan to create community, a space for women of color and gender queer people of color who engage in the U.S. legal system to connect authentically. A space where celebrating our joy is just as welcome as recognizing the world in which we are othered.

This Justice Through Joy project, which stirred inside of me for years, has always been a call to action in solidarity. This call to action acknowledges the weight of the work which remains to be done. I created Justice Through Joy, a justice and joy focused community and storytelling project even though no one asked me to.

It was born of my desire to be of service and in community outside of the church walls that no longer held me in. By the time I took steps to bring it to life, it felt urgent. Because it is.

Because there is just so much work to be done. And if we do this work, we may be left weary, weighed down, tired and unsure. But we must continue. Because it is our ticket to freedom. As long as we take care of ourselves and our loved ones, we who believe in freedom, we cannot rest just yet. Not until freedom for all of us comes.

Most folks I talked to about this work wished me well and agreed it sounded like an important endeavor. But I was never able to find someone with the bandwidth or capacity to co-build this project with me.

And my Desire to Co-Build the project with gender queer people of color and women of color, met up with my old friends Self-Doubt and Insecurity. And in their shared space deep inside of me, together they managed to keep me quietly dreaming about the work for longer than I would have liked to.

I dreamt of what Justice Through Joy could do for us who navigate broken systems for clients. Or in policy, advocacy, academic, community, volunteer or spiritual work. We who have been minoritized despite being the global majority, we find ourselves facing down and working through this flawed U.S. legal system while holding the disappointments the system has shown us and our families since its beginning.

I was motivated to build this project. Even when I questioned everything. I often wondered if my desire to build this was simply rooted in ego. Because amid the national and global chaos of 2025, for some reason I still had the audacity to keep trying to inch it forward. I kept calling, texting, emailing, messaging, posting, and taking up space talking about this project while our very lives and livelihoods and broken systems crumbled around us. And despite the lack of enrollment numbers leading up to the very first conversation I scheduled for June, I still felt the need to press forward.

But my constant partners (Self-Doubt and Insecurity) kept me company along the way, whispering and taunting, again and again, all while I was trying to build something that (apparently) no one likely wanted or needed.

And it was lonely.

Even with these Self-Doubt and Insecurity companions slithering around my neck, my arms, my back, threatening to swallow me whole, I managed to set myself free from their tentacles; I stopped waiting, hoping, and overthinking. And I did the thing.

Because all along, at every turn, buried inside of me, deep in my bones, I knew this couldn’t wait. I needed to create the thing that I had never known I was missing. That thing I needed when I practiced law. That thing I am still missing as I review legislation and regulations.

I look back on my time as an overworked and exhausted legal advocate wholly unaware of my own mental health diagnoses of depression, anxiety, binge eating disorder, and ADHD, with compassion and empathy. I needed to be around other women of color and gender queer people of color, in intentional ways, not just collaborating or co-working, but to thoughtfully process how we navigate the broken U.S. legal system which has failed our people for so long.

Our people who have survived in all their battered and tattered glory, they (we) still keep going. Resilient. While we survive, we often find ourselves relying heavily on our Trusted Friends, the Friends that those who came before us relied upon and taught us to rely upon.

Back then, before the global pandemic forced me to be still, to be quiet, I had no idea what was going on inside me. I did not know or understand that it was not just my clients and their loved ones who had disabilities. It was Me, too. I had no idea that like many of my veteran clients, I had also survived trauma. I could never have fathomed that it was not just the people I was serving in front of me, across my desk, who deserved more, it was Me, it was my parents, it was their parents. It wasn’t just the ones I fought so fiercely for in hearings and on paper. I also deserved access to quality healthcare and medical treatment.

Before COVID, I was an amazing advocate, and lawyer; and I was also running from generational trauma, my own queer identity, and my greatest chance at a life. A life that I could never have imagined for myself. I had no idea what I was missing. I needed Justice Through Joy; I just didn’t know it yet. Because before Covid-19 threw our entire world into a tailspin and I was forced into meaningful silence, quiet and alone, before I hit my mental health rock bottom sometime near the end of that first year of the pandemic, something like Justice Through Joy could have been my lifeline.
In a world that has always taught us to survive by becoming small, invisible, or silent, eventually I began to think, what if we could create a space to tell stories of triumphs through tragedy, and laughter during heartache, dancing in the rain and living, and loving, through it all?

Our stories deserve to exist in spaces that see us as worthy, as whole—not just as survivors of injustice, but as living testaments of joy, cultural memory, and resilience. Earlier this year I held my first Justice Through Joy Community Conversation. And it was an act of collective healing. And I was ready for more.

So, I kept planning. I kept outreaching and modifying and developing how this project could build and support community. I kept re-thinking and reimagining and retooling how the project could empower us to recognize the strength of our own voices and could prepare us to tell our own story.

And folks showed up. We gathered for connection through a series of Justice Through Joy Stories Community Conversations over a five week period. Each conversation was distinct, but the goal was always to build authentic support and community care opportunities by fostering moments to share joy and reconnect with our voices. We used memory work, journaling, mindfulness, breathwork and reflective music, and silly games all rooted in my theater, creative, and personal healing journey. Deep down, I must have always known that I was creating this for Me. The Me now and the Me from back then. Not just for Me. But I understand now just what this could have been for the Me back then.

The Me who felt I always needed to work a little harder to earn my place. The me who felt that I was always playing a little bit of catch up to others around me.

The Me who random doctors advised to urgently cut my body open (through bariatric surgery) more than fifteen times over just a few years–but who was never asked if I was experiencing depression.

Or whether I was eating until I felt sick, to fill some other void.

That Me who was told, advised, urged to lose weight, through a major surgical intervention by a strange man in a white coat even though I was at urgent care because of a sinus infection; that Me could have benefited from a doctor and a system that saw Me. She needed someone who understood Her humanity.

That Me could have benefitted from this type of community. The Me placed on diet pills as a teen rather than evaluated for and diagnosed with Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) rather than being fully seen—that girl could have benefited from Justice Through Joy.

When we gathered for Justice Through Joy Stories Community Conversations these past weeks, we didn’t gather in large numbers. But we gathered with open hearts.
These conversations were dedicated to uncovering and discovering our truths, remembering our power, and refusing to make ourselves and our stories small.

And it wasn’t just about storytelling — it was about returning to ourselves. Each time we gathered was a quiet act of rebellion against the white supremacist legal systems that we have had to survive, work within, or push against.

Yes, we gathered for us, to reclaim our own stories, we were not in denial about the ongoing violence around the world, or around the corner. But we gathered with intention and the desire to stay and fight against the loss of self, to work against our own erasure. And so, each week we gathered. We built small and sacred community; we lifted each other up. What emerged was something tender and transformative.

We paused with, looked at, uncovered, and held our truths. We talked about the values we were raised to uphold and the power it takes to walk away from responsibilities we always believed were not optional.

We connected over warm tortillas, and images of dilapidated homes. We wrote pieces of our own stories to remind ourselves we are alive; we exist. We meditated to reclaim peace as our birthright. We shared memories because silence has never protected us. We reflected on what it means to grow up without nurture, to carry memories that ache, and to begin the work of taking back our own stories. We reflected on who we are and where we come from. We danced in memory and story, music and joy.

We listened to Solange, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Selena, Resistance Revival Chorus, India Arie, William Gutierrez, and Ibeyi. We sat with our younger selves. We cried. We laughed. We let our stories be messy, fragmented, and true. We shared stories of coming into our queer identities and the joys of parenting. We found that parts of our stories—once hidden or neglected—were ripe for telling. And when the right space exists, we can begin to share our stories.

Some of our stories were ugly, others overwhelming, some filled with warm memories of family bar-b-ques, the sweet smell of our grandmother’s roses, some described the glory we experience when our daughter shows up bravely. Some stories were filled with the anguish that comes with the realization that we have not been cared for in the ways we deserved. These pieces of ourselves, revealed to us through this work, before we shared them, gifted them to each other, were sacred, unedited, and enough.

And our stories will not die in the margins. Not now. Because we’re not done. Because this is the holy, gritty, complicated work of remembering who we are. And this emotional and physical labor of uncovering and telling our stories, amid the crashing down of everything else, is hard and critical work. And it is exhausting.

But it is the only way I know how to stay human in a world trying to forget us.
Resistance in the courtroom, healing in the community. Justice Through Joy will keep going and growing because it’s what I can offer in a country that denies my body, my people, and my love.

This work is personal and political. It bursts forth from the trauma etched in my body and the bodies of my family, my ancestors, and generations of Black and brown people before me — pain that I now put to particularly good use. And it is precisely because of this that Justice Through Joy to life. Their trauma fuels me. Feeds me.
Pushes me through sorrow, pain, and anguish to keep going.

This is my offering to my friends, neighbors, to my partner, and my family, my community and beyond, my passion and my pride, my honor, and my burden.

When I advocate for long-term care transformation, health equity, disability justice, and systemic reform, I bring all of who I am. Law and storytelling. Grief and joy. They are pieces of the same puzzle I am putting together; both part of a vision where the whole person is seen, where the whole person’s story matters.

My policy work reimagines what care can look like—on paper and in practice. It’s where I advocate for integrated, community-connected, person-centered, person-driven care. Care that does not contain people living with disabilities, dementia or mental illness, but liberates them to live fully, with autonomy and joy.

Right now, I am filled with anger, rage, and hurt. And Fear. And RIGHTEOUS resolve. I am also balancing joy, connection, growth, and possibility. So I will put my rage, our collective rage, and this grief that we share together, to good use.

I will harness it all to push through the sorrow and the heartache toward the music and the joy, the dancing and the laughter. We will see what tomorrow can offer us. This work is all held together through the ritual of storytelling, connection, and community. And we are not done.

Still, it is hard. It is hard to read about elders dying in a fire in the assisted living they called home — knowing it didn’t have to happen. It is hard to witness Black and Brown elders chemically restrained in facilities or locked away in so-called “memory care” units under the illusion of safety, simply because the systems refuse to build anything better. The segregation of elders with cognitive impairments — into locked units and forgotten corners — without meaningful, person-centered, and person-directed care is not about safety. It’s dehumanization. And society has grown numb to it.

It is hard to watch neighbors and loved ones succumb to devastating floods and to see government resources and benefits stripped — medicine, food, housing — from the very people who built this country, by decision-makers whose greed and cruelty are boundless.

And all of this is particularly gutting, holding this grief and fear, while planning my upcoming wedding to the love of my life, at a time when our very identities are under attack, our bodies policed, our care denied, and our communities dehumanized. While I dream of a future built on love, my people are being rounded up.

While I write this people are being disappeared, denied insulin, our government is wreaking greater havoc across the globe and in our own streets, our backyards, in our bodies. We are being made disposable. We are told to be quiet, to sit down, to take what we can get. We are told to get over it, but we cannot. And honestly, we shouldn’t. All of this because white supremacy insists on stealing the very breath we breathe into every movement toward liberation. This is the world we live in. But I still believe another world is possible.

The so-called leaders of this nation have continued the Tradition of gutting the hard-won progress that exists while destroying the very infrastructure that keeps our society afloat. And they are not done. But neither are we.

Because we owe each other and ourselves more than thoughts and prayers. We owe each other transformation. The framework upon which we move forward is rooted in the recognition of the dignity of all of humanity. Because we who believe in freedom, we cannot rest until it comes.

Because I still believe in joy. I still believe in community. I still believe in us. We are gonna have to get into some good, good trouble. And maybe we will do this together, maybe in Justice Through Joy; it’s what I can offer. And I will write toward it. I will fight for it. I will claim it. I will call it into being — one story, one well-made point, one breath, one sigh at a time.

For me it’s Justice Through Joy; because it was born from a question that refused to be quiet: How do we keep going in these systems that were designed against us? We will gather not just to grieve — but to build. We will tell our stories not just to remember — but to demand to be seen, to take up space. We will write not just to survive — but to reclaim, to reimagine, to resurrect.

I am tired. I know you are too. We are all tired. But we are not done. Yes, we have our work cut out for us. I will do my best to keep going. I see you. I know you see me. You are not alone. We are not alone. We will keep going even though it is hard. We will continue taking care of ourselves. Our joy will be our resistance. Because we who believe in freedom? We will not rest until it comes. Because your story matters. And so does mine.