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Not a single person in my life will be surprised to see that I chose the spice girls’ ‘Wannabe’ as my song for joy. But I think they would be surprised to find out how hard this piece was to write, and why it took several weeks.

Joy isn’t an easy emotion. It should be, because it’s the greatest feeling, but it’s challenging. As I’ve been drowning in reading lists and assignments over the past few weeks, I realised that joy is the emotion I have to make a conscious essay to feel. Anger, sadness and fear come from nowhere, but you have to make joy. Trying to find this has been such a challenge. How do I create this feeling? For me, that recipe requires a little spice (and no, I will not apologise for that rubbish pun!).

Something about putting on ‘Wannabe’ and singing along, out of tune, at the top of my lungs brings me so much joy. No matter how difficult life may feel, this 90s classic makes me smile. I remember every party where this has been played and I would dance along. I remember every stupid conversation with my girls about “which spice girl are you?” (As the red head of the group I think you’ll guess who I was). In sixth form, I reached a point where my friendship group had to stage an intervention and limit how many times I put this song on our house party and road trip playlist. Apparently there’s only so much people wanted to spice up their life before they switched over to “literally anything else”.

I know this may seem like such a trivial blog post I’m writing, but I can’t stop smiling as I’m typing this. For me, a song for joy should be a song that makes you smile no matter what. And ‘Wannabe’, for me, is the song. Maybe because I love the band’s friendship. Maybe because I love the message of girl power. Maybe because of the memories of childhood this song brings. Or maybe because after all these years I still do not know what “zig- a- zig- ahh” means.

Most of all, it’s a song for joy just because. It is joy. Every chord, every line brings joy. I may never figure out exactly why but I don’t need to. The joy in music is more important.

I wannabe singing along to this song for many years to come.