I Still Choose Joy

I found something I wrote in the summer of 2011, two months after I buried my second husband. I almost couldn’t read it. The grief is so fresh on the page, you can nearly feel it lifting off.

But there’s a line in it I’ve never been able to shake, because the woman who wrote it had no business knowing it yet:

Joy doesn’t blanket me without my first choosing it to be my covering.

She was right. She just didn’t know yet how many times she’d have to prove it.

Joy was never the same thing as feeling joyful

Here’s what I stayed confused about for a long time, and what I suspect a lot of us get confused about: I thought joy was a feeling that would arrive once my circumstances earned it. Once the grief lifted. Once the dust settled. Once life finally handed me a stretch of good enough to feel good about.

That version of joy never came, because it doesn’t exist. The kind I was waiting for is just happiness wearing a Sunday dress — pleasant, real, and entirely dependent on things going well.

The joy I actually needed turned out to be something sturdier and far less convenient. It doesn’t wait for the circumstances to cooperate. It’s a choice you make standing in the wreckage, before anything has improved, while you still feel nothing close to it.

I wrote back then that taking a flyover view of my life produced no joy at all — and it didn’t. From up high, all you can see is the scale of what’s gone wrong. But up close, with a microscope, I could find a hundred small things worth being grateful for that the wide shot completely missed. The choice was never about denying the wreckage. It was about deciding which view I was going to live in.

What it actually looks like now

In 2011, I chose joy on an anniversary, with the weight of the date pressing down on me — dramatic, the way grief is dramatic in the early months when everyone’s still watching to see whether you’ll be okay.

Fifteen years on, it looks nothing like that.

Now choosing joy is a thing I do on a Tuesday that means nothing to anybody. It’s deciding to laugh at something one of my kids said instead of bracing for the next hard thing on the list — and the list, I promise you, is long. It’s solo parenting four children with a stack of diagnoses between them and still, somehow, noticing that the light through the kitchen window is doing something worth stopping for.

There’s no audience for that kind of choosing. No anniversary to make it meaningful. Just the quiet, daily decision to look at my actual life through the microscope instead of the flyover, on a day that’s given me no particular reason to.

That, I’ve learned, is where joy actually lives. Not in the big declarations. In the ordinary mornings when nothing has been fixed, and you choose it anyway.

You don’t need a funeral to qualify for this

Maybe you’ve never lost a person. Your hard season might be a marriage that’s quietly coming apart, a diagnosis you’re learning to live alongside, a job that’s hollowing you out, a bank account that gave way under you, a version of your life you fully expected to be living by now that simply never arrived.

The loss doesn’t have to be the kind that comes with a casserole and a card. If you’re standing in the middle of something hard and waiting to feel better before you’ll let yourself feel anything good — this is for you too. You don’t have to wait.

The choice is available to you long before the feeling is.

Why I can choose it at all

I want to be honest about the ground I’m standing on, because pretending otherwise has never once helped me rebuild a single thing.

I can choose joy in the wreckage because I don’t believe the wreckage gets the last word. The younger version of me wrote about that with a lot of exclamation points and a lot of certainty. I’d write it more quietly now, but I’d write the same thing: that I am held by Someone who has not once let go, even in the seasons I was sure He had. The joy isn’t something I manufacture. It’s something I turn toward — a steadiness that was already there, waiting for me to choose to look at it.

I still don’t feel it most mornings before I choose it. That hasn’t changed in fifteen years, and I’ve stopped expecting it to. The feeling isn’t the point. The choosing is.

So I’ll say again what that grieving woman wrote in 2011, two months out from the worst thing she’d ever survived, not knowing the half of what was still coming:

I choose joy.

Today, on an ordinary day that’s done nothing to earn it — I still do.