Your Joy Is Not Selfish
"Joy is the most vulnerable thing we can experience. We have to practice gratitude in order to be joyful." — Brené Brown
Joy doesn't always arrive with a big entrance.
Sometimes, it shows up quietly, like sunlight through a window you forgot to open. It's a favourite song at just the right moment. A laugh you didn't see coming. A deep breath where anxiety used to live.
And when it does, you might feel something surprising.
Guilt.
You might wonder if you're allowed to feel this lightness, especially when others are struggling, especially when the world feels heavy.
Especially when you haven't "earned" it by crossing everything off the list or fixing all the parts of yourself you've been told are wrong.
Joy isn't selfish.
Joy is a return. A remembering. A resistance.
It's a way of saying that despite it all, I am still alive, and I want to feel that fully.
As Audre Lorde reminds us, "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation."
And caring for yourself includes allowing joy to move through you without apology.
We are not here to only carry pain. We are not here to earn rest, earn delight, earn the right to feel free.
You don't have to wait for everything to be better before you let yourself feel good.
Joy doesn't mean you're ignoring the world. It means you're refusing to become numb to it.
It means you're still open. Still responsive. Still connected to the part of you that remembers what's beautiful, what's worth staying for, what's worth fighting for, what's worth being soft about.
Your joy is not disrespectful to others.
It's not a betrayal of those who are suffering.
Your joy, when shared with reverence, becomes a light that gently says, 'Healing is possible.' Softness is still available. You don't have to live forever in grief.
Joy is not noise. It's nourishment.
When it's grounded in awareness, it becomes contagious in the most sacred way. It reminds people that they, too, are allowed to feel alive again.
So stop downplaying it.
Stop apologising for the things that make you smile.
Stop muting yourself to match other people's shadows.
You are allowed to laugh out loud in a quiet room.
You are allowed to rest even when the work is not yet finished.
You are allowed to feel joy in the middle of becoming.
You are allowed to choose, as Mary Oliver wrote, "to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."
Joy is not a distraction. It's a direction.
Follow it. Let it soften you. Let it fill the spaces grief once lived in. Let it remind you that your aliveness, your full, unapologetic aliveness, is both a gift and a responsibility.
Because your joy is not selfish.