Joy will find you.
It will find you when you least anticipate it. It will find you when you have all but given up hope that it still exists. It will find you despite every unwavering sense that there is no more goodness left for you in this life.
Joy will sneak up from behind you — through the darkness, and despite every reason you have to believe you are not worthy of feeling so alright within this world, so at ease within your own soul.
Joy will fill you up like well-water, it will rise like the sprouting of a flower whose seed you did not know you planted.
Your tears nourished your dreams. Your losses weeded your garden. Your doubts fueled the birth of your convictions. Everything that felt as though it was a weight asking you to release every ounce of hope you ever held was actually just asking you to clear your conscience. It was asking you to release back into the nothingness every bit of hurt that had been anchoring you to a ghost life, a memory, an experience long gone.
We do not have to seek joy, as it is a light always radiates from deep within. What we must do instead is to clear the fog, the debris, the beliefs that block us from allowing it to come into its fullest and purest fruition.
Our joy is never lost.
It is simply resting beneath all that we have yet to work through, to clear. All the things that so adamantly require our attention — our inner children, our own unconscious wounds, the ways our bodies are asking us to help them feel safe again. When we take care of ourselves in these simplest ways, we find something extraordinary begins to occur — when we reach toward the light, the light reaches back. Our job was never to create joy within ourselves, but to remove what was preventing us from feeling it in the first place.
Joy will find you, even if you don’t believe it will.
All you have to do is be willing to keep showing up. To stay with yourself through each and every dark and quiet hour. To feel what it is you need to feel, to learn what it is you need to learn, to pursue what it is you need to pursue. More than anything, it is just having the willingness to continue that will get you to where you’re ultimately meant to be. It is not abandoning yourself when you need yourself most. It is letting yourself breathe even when it feels most unbearable, most impossible to go on.
If you stay this course, I promise you, joy will return one day.
It will return because that is the natural ebb and flow of existence. It will return because no storm can last forever, even if yours has carried on for years and years.
Joy will find you when you least expect it, because joy will find you when you find yourself.
