Choose Joy

Fun fact, this letter was supposed to be titled "We're not okay."

I was going to write something very different today.

The title has been in my notes and drafts for a while: We are not okay, and I’m not sure we have ever been. Full disclosure, a part of me still lowkey believes that.

The world is heavy right now. People are tired in ways that sleep doesn’t fix. We are working ourselves to the bone, pouring everything into systems that were never really built for us to thrive in, just to survive in.

And most of us have just made peace with that, in one way or the other. With the exhaustion. With the weight. With a life that feels more like endurance than actual living.

I’ve written about this before. The capitalism, the rat race, the way we are all just running and running, and nobody really stops to ask where we are even running to. This letter was going to be another version of that conversation.

And then I went to church three Sundays ago.

And my pastor said, “You have been sad for too long; choose joy.” Just like that. Simple and direct. And it hit me so differently because I realized he was talking about me. Specifically me.

I tried to think of the last time I felt genuinely joyful. Not the relief of something ending. Not the temporary high of something going right. Just joy. Joy that isn’t attached to anything. Joy that just lives in you, joy that stays.

I couldn’t find it. Not in recent memory.

And what really got me is that I am someone who talks about this. About finding pockets of joy. About romanticizing your life. About protecting your whimsy from a world that will absolutely take it if you let it. I say these things and I mean them.

But somewhere in the last while, I stopped actually doing them. I got so deep into surviving that I forgot I was supposed to be living too.

So as I write this, I am making a decision. I’m choosing joy. Not because everything is fine, because it isn’t. Not because the world has gotten lighter, because it hasn’t. But because I deserve to feel the life I’m building, and waiting for perfect conditions to be happy is just another way of being sad with extra steps.

If you’re in the same place, here’s how I’m thinking about it practically:

Find one thing every day that is just for you. No, Patricia, it doesn’t have to be productive. It does not have to be useful to anyone else. It just needs to be something that makes you feel like yourself. A walk. A song you play on repeat. Rereading a chapter of a book you love. It just has to be yours.

I’m starting with my mornings. Before the work and the noise, I want at least fifteen minutes that belong only to me. I want to read again and find joy in it without bothering about the tag I got at midnight.

Stop waiting for joy to arrive and start creating the conditions for it. Joy doesn’t usually show up on its own when you’re running on empty. You have to make small (and big) rooms for it. Cook a meal you actually enjoy. Call the friend who always makes you laugh. Light the candle. See a movie. Wear the thing. Do the little things you keep saving for some unnamed later. Later is now.

Let yourself have good moments without immediately bracing for what comes next. This one is the hardest for me. Something good happens and instead of basking in it, I’m already waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Choosing joy means letting the good thing just be good.

Breathing it in. Not rushing past it to the next worry.

None of this is about pretending life isn’t hard. It is. It is so much harder than it is supposed to be, sometimes it makes me laugh. But hard and joyful are not opposites, and I think I forgot that for a while.

I’m choosing joy. I hope you’ll choose it with me.

Sadly, I don’t have a weekly R.E.P.O.R.T today because I haven’t been up to much (well asides trying to maintain my sanity, lol. But I have been listening to a lot of Olivia Dean, so much that Joy has taken the speaker away from me, lol.)

I hope that when next I write, this section of my letter is fuller.

I’m rooting for you, as always.

With all my love,

Grace