Finding room for joy

This week, I wanted to write about something the lovely K said on Instagram earlier this week, which I’ve been thinking about ever since. 

‘Today I felt intense joy, an emotion I rarely feel. I could identify it in my hands, the backs of my legs and my eyes. Embodied emotions are incredibly hard when my very diagnosis is about feeling like an empty hole most of the time. Having tackled some tough interactions lately, I was wondering if that’s why there’s now room for joy. Is that a thing? Can it be? Honestly, joy is pretty cool. There’s room to expand in joy.”

Since reading K’s post, I’ve been really noticing the things that make me happy, like when you take a towel off the radiator in the bathroom and wrap yourself in a warm hug after a shower. Like the daylights, the sunsets, the midnights, the cups of coffee… (with thanks to Jonathan Larson)

But it wasn’t until I typed their words out into my Google Doc that I noticed the phrase embodied emotions. I’m really used to thinking about the intersection between my brain and my body: when I feel especially anxious or scared that goes straight to my stomach, and in the other direction I know that working out makes my brain much better-behaved.

What I hadn’t given much consideration to was the positive side. About how the feeling of deep contentment when I’m sitting with a friend who knows my whole story warms me up from my centre to the ends of my fingers, or the way a good laugh is carried around my body like oxygen. The way that cutting slowly through the water when I go swimming makes me feel at once powerful and peaceful.

Are ‘joy’ and ‘contentment’ the same thing, though? I couldn’t think about joy without thinking about Joy, a character in the 2015 film Inside Out.

In the film (spoilers, sorry!), the protagonist, Riley, learns that joy is strongest when teamed up with a little sadness (with a wonderful Amy Poehler - Mindy Kaling double-act). I think, for me, that might be the thing that takes me from simple warm contentment to full-on joy: taking that extra half-step to remember that things aren’t always that good, and making the decision to lean into the joy. One of the moments I have felt the most joy this year was on the dancefloor one evening at Camp Wildfire, where I burst into tears with anticipatory sadness about the weekend being over and having to leave my friends. 

So for me, joy is an active decision, borne of the determination to get past contentment and to take a snapshot of the moment for my memory. 

Beyond that though, as K said, ‘There’s room to expand in joy.’ I recently read Georgie, All Along by Kate Clayborn (ad - affiliate link), in which the word ‘expansive’ is a running theme. It’s an idea of openness and honesty, which I loved - the whole book was a delight, and I highly recommend pre-ordering it. Expanding in joy, to me, means recognising it in the moment and then making the decision to seek more of it out, to prioritise the situations that bring, well, “..that sanguine expectation of happiness which is happiness itself,” to quote Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in honour of her birthday this week. And, magically, the more we expand into joy, the more space there is for it.

Finding joy is, I know, easier said than done, especially at this time of year when it’s freezing cold and pitch dark, when we’re all worried about cash but want to go and see friends… I hope that each and every one of you finds a moment of joy and a spell of peace over the coming festive season. Here’s to a bright start to 2023. 

Lily