On Joy

Joy is not what I was taught it would be.

It is not loud or guaranteed. It does not appear at the end of a story like a ribbon or a moral. It is not the resolution of pain. It is not waiting for me on the other side of hardship. It does not arrive because I deserve it.

The joy I know is quieter. More precise. It lives in details. It lives in fragments.

A bite of food that tastes like memory. My son’s laugh in the next room. The first time I stand without help after surgery. A full breath. A sky turning pink and gold for no reason at all.

Joy, for me, is not the absence of suffering. It is what is left in the margins of suffering. It is what remains.

1. Joy is not innocent

There is a version of joy that is unearned. The joy of those who have not yet encountered collapse. It lives in assumed futures, in the unquestioned belief that tomorrow will come and will resemble today. I used to live there. I remember it like a former country.

In that version of joy, there was no urgency. Time felt limitless. I could waste it, stretch it, ignore it. I didn’t yet understand that every hour I didn’t pay attention to was still an hour lost.

That kind of joy is not available to me anymore.

The joy I know now has sharp edges. It exists because I understand time as finite. Because I know the pain of loss. Because I have lived inside hospital beds and waiting rooms and recovery timelines. Because I have had to measure life in scans and incisions.

Joy is not innocent anymore. It is made of knowing. It is made of choosing to see beauty while holding grief in the other hand.

2. Joy is urgent

When you’ve lived inside a body that breaks, you understand urgency differently.

I used to think urgency was a problem. Something to calm down. Something to breathe through. I thought peace was the goal. Stillness.

But peace can be mistaken for detachment. And urgency, when rooted in presence, is not panic—it’s clarity. It’s knowing that this might be the last time you feel the sun on your face like this, so you feel it. You really feel it.

It’s knowing that this walk, this laugh, this conversation, this breath—this moment—might not happen again in this exact way. And so you hold it closer.

There is a version of carpe diem that is performative. But that’s not what I mean. I don’t mean spending every second chasing meaning. I mean letting each second matter, even if it’s small. Especially if it’s small.

I have cried in hospital bathrooms. I have panicked in grocery store aisles. I have stared at test results and surgical notes that fractured time into before and after. And still - somewhere between the breaking - I have also laughed.

Sometimes joy is absurd. Sometimes it is resistance. Sometimes it is survival.

3. Joy lives in the body

After my first mastectomy, I remember the first time I walked to the mailbox by myself. The air was cold. My arms ached. My balance was off. It took five minutes. I cried the whole way. Not from pain. From joy.

Because I could walk. Because I could feel the cold. Because my body, after everything, still moved.

Joy is not always a feeling. Sometimes it is physical. It is the sensation of movement. Of sensation returning to a place you thought you might never feel again.

I have felt joy in pain. Not because the pain was good, but because it reminded me I was still here. Still in this body. Still alive.

There is a myth that healing is linear, that you get better and then you are done. But healing is recursive. You break and rebuild over and over.

Joy is part of that rebuilding. It sneaks in between the fractures. It does not wait for healing to be complete. It interrupts.

4. Joy is contextual

Joy without context is marketing.

The version of joy we are sold is polished and predictable. The Instagram joy. The Hallmark joy. It flattens. It erases.

But real joy is contextual. It lives inside contradiction. It sits beside grief and does not cancel it out.

I have felt joy in grief. I have felt it while watching someone I love die. I have felt it while holding their hand, watching their face soften, feeling the weight of presence even in the last moments.

It is not comforting, and it is not redemptive. It just is.

Joy is not the opposite of sadness. It is not a cure for despair. It is a parallel track.

There are days when I am undone by fear. And still, I smile when my son tells me a joke, when he texts me a meme that makes me laugh. There are days when I am swallowed by medical paperwork and still feel grateful for a warm meal.

Joy is not naïve. It is not avoidance. It is what happens when we see the full picture and choose to hold both the darkness and the light.

5. Joy is cumulative

There is a difference between momentary pleasure and sustained joy.

Pleasure is easy to come by. It is the dopamine hit, the sugar rush, the escape. But it is not what sustains me.

Joy, for me, is cumulative. It’s like my son when he was born - Ive heard some parents say that they fell in love right away when seeing their newborn babies for the first time. Not me. I knew I would love him, but it took the time of knowing him. For me, it was like when he was born the space to love him was created in my heart. The space was new. And day after day, moment after moment, I loved more and more until even that space has overfilled. It is the cumulative effect of having seen him through it all - holding all of the days every time I look at him. Love, like joy, is built over time. It is built in trust, in meaning, in presence. It grows through rituals - morning coffee, Sunday walks, quiet dinners, reading next to someone you love.

It is made of attention.

I know now that joy is something I have to practice. Not in a performative sense, but as a discipline of noticing. I write it down when I feel it. I mark it. I try to remember.

The days blur without that effort. But when I notice joy, I begin to see more of it. I build a life around it.

And when I can’t feel it - because there are days when I can’t - I remind myself that it is still possible. That I have felt it before. That I will again.

6. Joy is a kind of defiance

There is nothing apolitical about joy.

To experience joy inside a system designed to dehumanize is an act of resistance. To hold joy while inside chronic illness, grief, caregiving, capitalism—it is radical.

Joy says: you do not get to take everything from me.

Joy says: even here, there is something beautiful. Even now, there is something worth loving.

Joy is not complacency. It does not ignore what is broken. It exists in spite of it. It insists.

Joy says: I am still here.

7. Joy is not linear

There are days I wake up with gratitude in my chest and days I wake up angry. There are days when the smallest things feel luminous and days when the same things feel unbearably heavy.

Joy does not follow rules. It does not reward effort. It does not care if I am worthy.

Sometimes it vanishes. Sometimes it floods.

Sometimes I only recognize it in retrospect.

I am learning to stop trying to control it. I am learning to let it come and go without making it mean something about me.

I am learning that joy is not a state to reach but a moment to witness.

8. Joy is now

Maybe this is what joy teaches me: that now is all I have. That the future is not promised. That the past does not change. That this - this breath, this body, this sky, this moment - is what’s real.

I used to believe I had to earn joy. That I had to deserve it. Now I know: joy is not a prize. It is not a finish line.

It is a moment.

It is the ordinary held close.

It is what makes the unbearable bearable.

It is the warmth in the room when someone loves you.

It is the sound of your own laugh after weeks of not laughing.

It is the thing that says: keep going.

It is what remains.