I’ve shared before that my mother has addressed me as “Joy-child” for as long as I can remember. I’ve also shared the embodiment that started to take place as I was growing into myself and how I felt a desire to live up to that name.

But I’ve been sitting with a different question lately. Not what the name itself meant to me… but something a little more nuanced.

What was actually happening when she said those words?

Because she wasn’t describing me. She was doing something far more consequential. She was installing something. And I was young enough, and trusting enough, that I received it without question. I just let it in.

I didn’t understand any of this at the time, of course. I only understood it later, when I started reading the new thought authors of the 1900’s.

Florence Scovel Shinn was writing in the 1920s. Self-published, which in that era meant she believed in what she was saying enough to back it herself. The neuroscience didn’t exist yet. The vocabulary we now have for things like neuroplasticity and cognitive self-talk hadn’t been invented. She was working entirely from observation and conviction.

And she was pretty spot on.

What she understood, what she articulated with clarity, is that your word is your wand. That language isn’t a passive record of what is. It’s an active force shaping what becomes. That every time you open your mouth, or let a thought complete itself in your mind, you are not describing your reality.

You are instructing it.

I said this in my first post and I’ll probably say it again. Words are not descriptions of reality, they are instructions to it. Be warned: this is one of my all-time favorite topics.

I have considered myself a writer since I was 11 years old and started writing poetry. I used to read the dictionary for fun. Not kidding. I have been gifted many a dictionary over the years—because I ADORE them. I love, love, love words. I am, indeed, fascinated by etymology, but on a more fundamental level, I love how words sound when you speak them out loud, how they feel when you roll them around in your mouth. The word yes is so fun. The chewiness of the y, the snake-hiss of the s. The energy of acceptance. It’s also three letters and I’m quite infatuated with the number 3. Yes is pretty much a perfect word. I have a long list of pet words. One I find genuinely delightful is the word spell. As in, the thing a witch casts. As in, the letters you arrange to form a word. The same word, doing double duty across two supposedly unrelated domains, because at some point in the history of language, whoever was naming things understood that these weren’t two separate activities at all. That to arrange symbols into words was already an act of power. That language was always magic. We’ve just been doing it so long we stopped noticing.

The true impact of these observations lies in their eternal nature. ‘In the beginning was the Word’—not the thought, not the intention. The word itself, treated as the generative force that called existence into being. And from Hindu tradition, Nada Brahma: the world is sound, a vibration that never actually stopped. Creation as an ongoing act, not a historical one. Every tradition that tried to explain where everything came from reached for language first. We are casting spells constantly. The question is whether we’re doing it consciously.

Think about the language you absorbed in childhood. Not just what was said to you, the nicknames, the assessments, the offhand comments that lodged themselves somewhere permanent, but what was said around you. The sentences that moved through your household like weather. The particular texture of how the adults in your life talked about money, about women, about what was possible for someone like you.

And then think about the internal monologue that started, likely without notice, somewhere in your early years. The voice that sounds so much like your own that you’ve never really questioned whether it is.

Ursula K. Le Guin built an entire magic system on this. In Earthsea, to know the true name of something is to hold power over it. And to be named wrong is to be diminished. It may be fiction, but it’s not fantasy. Toni Morrison was working with a subtler version of the same truth in her book Beloved, the way her characters had to reclaim language that had been used to unmake them. The question underneath both of those bodies of work is the one worth asking about your own reality: whose words did you inherit, and have they elevated your lived experience or undermined it?

Consider the sentences you say on repeat, things like I’m so bad at this, I’ve always been terrible with money, This always happens to me… Did you absorb them from someone else and then mistake them for facts? Have statements like these possibly even gotten tangled up in your identity, who you believe yourself to be at your core? I’m so bad at this isn’t a factual statement. It isn’t a neutral observation you’re making about the world. It’s a performative act. Every time you say it, you’re not describing a reality. You’re reinforcing one. You’re issuing an instruction.

Epictetus said it in the first century: ‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by the opinions about things.’ Ancient Stoicism was, in a very real sense, an early language audit: notice the sentence running underneath your experience, and question whether it’s actually true.

Viktor Frankl arrived at the same conclusion two thousand years later, from inside a Nazi concentration camp. Not as a philosopher with the luxury of contemplation, but as a man trying to survive the unsurvivable. What he discovered in that extremity is that the story you tell yourself about your suffering determines whether it destroys you or defines you. The instruction you give yourself about what happened to you is as consequential as the thing itself. The part of you that has been listening, faithfully, for decades? It believes you. It takes notes. It organizes your experience to confirm what you’ve told it is true.

Cognitive bias is a sneaky beasty. Next time you find yourself entertaining a phrase like I’m so bad at this, just hold it lightly. Maybe contemplate a reframe. When did I decide I was bad at this? Am I inherently bad at it or have I never really given it a solid effort? A child might declare they are bad at something simply because their parents or siblings don’t like it and then carry that with them into the rest of their lives.

Florence Scovel Shinn knew this a hundred years ago, without a single brain scan to support her.

She was writing spells. She just called them affirmations.

I want to be careful here. I am not about to hand you a list of sentences to say in the mirror every morning. That’s not really how this works, and it’s not who we are here. (Real talk: I love intentional affirmations and am not discounting them.)

However, what I’m more interested in is the noticing. The moment before the practice, where you finally hear what you’ve been saying.

Most of us have an inner monologue we’ve never actually audited. Sentences we repeat so automatically, so fluently, that they’ve become invisible. That’s just how I am. I’ve never been the kind of person who (fill in the blank). I always do this. Said so many times they’ve stopped feeling like choices and started feeling like weather. Like facts about the atmosphere.

But they’re not facts. They’re instructions. They’re spells you cast so often you forgot you were casting them.

If words are instructions, then the question worth sitting with, with grace and without urgency, is: what am I currently instructing?

What are the sentences you say most often about yourself, your capacity, your life? Not the ones you say to other people, necessarily, but the ones that run underneath. The insidious, continuous scroll.

And then, more tenderly: whose voice do those sentences originally belong to?

There’s a detail in Genesis that tends to get overlooked. After creation, God brings every living creature to Adam to see what he would call them. Not to confirm what God had already decided. To inquire about Adam’s instinct. The divine doesn’t name the world. The human does. That’s a striking delegation of power. The authority to name things, to define what they are, handed over completely.

I truly don’t think my mother understood the gift she gave me. The prayer she prayed over me. She addressed her daughter as Joy-child for a decade before that daughter had any idea what to do with the name.

Eventually, I grew into it.

Not because the word made me joyful by force. But because being spoken to that way, from the very beginning, gave me a self to grow toward. A shape to move into. An instruction I didn’t have to fight my way out of first.

That’s what the right language does. It doesn’t manufacture a feeling. It creates a direction.

You’ve been receiving instructions your whole life. Some of them belong to you. Some of them were never yours to begin with.

The assignment here, if you’re game, is just starting to tell the difference.

P.S. I wasn’t exaggerating in my first post when I said I wasn’t an inherently joyful child. My mother’s photo collection is littered with shots just like this one. Though, to be fair, my son is convinced I was just unhappy about my outfit. 😉

Not in language. Not in conscious thought. In felt experience: the emotional temperature of the room she grows up in, the quality of attention she receives, the thousand small moments that answer, without words, the two most fundamental questions a human nervous system ever asks.

Is the world safe?

Am I safe in it?

This is where identity begins. Not in the stories we later tell about ourselves, not in the achievements we accumulate or the roles we grow into, but in this pre-verbal, pre-rational, entirely felt sense of what life is and what we are within it. Developmental psychologists Erik Erikson and John Bowlby spent their careers mapping this terrain, the attachment patterns that form in infancy, the emotional baseline that gets calibrated so early and so quietly that by the time we’re old enough to examine it, it simply feels like reality.

It feels like truth. It feels like us. Why would we question it?

Something shifts around age seven.

Before this, identity was watercolor, free-flowing, impressionistic, curious. A child exists in a state of relatively unstructured experience, absorbing the world without yet needing to organize it into a coherent story about who she is.

Then, gradually, the lines start getting traced in ink.

Jean Piaget called this the Concrete Operational Stage, the period when children begin thinking more logically, more structurally, more comparatively. And alongside this cognitive shift comes something that psychologist Charles Horton Cooley called the looking-glass self, the dawning, quietly consequential realization that you exist in the eyes of other people, and that their perception of you says something about who you are.

This is where the labels begin to stick.

The quiet one. The responsible one. The creative one. The difficult one. The sensitive one. The funny one.

Not because they are objectively true, but because they are repeated. Because repetition, at this stage of development, is indistinguishable from fact. A child who is told often enough, in words or in subtler frequencies of attention and approval, that she is a particular kind of person, begins to organize her entire experience of herself around that story.

She stops just living. She becomes someone within her life.

This is not a failure of the people who raised us. Goodness knows, most of us have plenty of grief to lay at the feet of our caregivers. But this is simply how identity forms. Through repetition. Through attention. Through emotional tone. The clay gets shaped, inevitably, by the hands it encounters most often.

The question that matters is what we do with the shape once we’re old enough to hold it ourselves.

In adolescence, Erikson observed, something genuinely interesting happens. Teenagers begin trying identities on, questioning beliefs, experimenting with values and roles and aesthetics, actively testing where they end and the inherited story begins. This is developmentally healthy and often spectacularly chaotic and absolutely necessary.

But for many of us, that process of conscious identity exploration gets interrupted. By pressure to perform, to conform, to choose a path and commit to it. By the simple exhaustion of navigating a world that moves faster than genuine self-discovery tends to.

And so we arrive at adulthood carrying a personality that is, to a significant degree, a collection of patterns we absorbed rather than consciously chose. We think of it as who we are. Dr. Joe Dispenza would argue that it’s more accurately described as what we continually rehearse.

His framework for how this works is, as he says himself, almost poetic in its simplicity.

Thoughts create feelings. Feelings reinforce those same thoughts. Together they drive actions. Actions produce familiar experiences. And familiar experiences confirm the original thoughts.

A perfectly self-sealing loop.

He calls this living “in the known,” a life built from the past, predicted by the past, continually recreating the past because the nervous system has mistaken familiarity for truth. Your body, he argues, becomes so conditioned to certain emotional states that it stops being a passenger in the story and starts running the show. Stress, low-grade dissatisfaction, the particular flavor of anxiety that has always just been there. These become chemical habits. And even when the mind genuinely wants something different, the body pulls it back, reliably, like gravity.

When you recognize this in your own life you can begin to contemplate it as a design feature that has simply outlived its usefulness.

Beliefs feel like facts. That is their entire power and their entire limitation. They feel so completely, obviously, self-evidently true that it rarely occurs to us to examine whether we chose them or simply inherited them, and whether, if we had chosen consciously, we would choose the same ones again.

I was in my teens when M. Scott Peck stopped me with the idea that life is difficult, and that accepting this completely is the thing that finally frees you from it. His words felt undeniably true to me. They also led me to a realization: much of my dissatisfaction came from unmet expectations, and the person who had formed those expectations, unintentionally and without examination, was me.

That was the first time I understood that a belief is not a verdict handed down from on high. It is a story the nervous system is running because at some point, in some context, it made sense. It was useful. It was, perhaps, the only available interpretation.

And then time passed. The context changed. And the belief kept running anyway, because nobody told it to stop.

Confirmation bias makes this exquisitely, almost comically self-reinforcing. Once a belief is in place, the mind becomes a masterful curator of evidence that supports it. You will find, in any given day, dozens of pieces of data that confirm what you already believe about yourself, the world, and what’s possible for you, and you will walk straight past the evidence that contradicts it without even registering it was there.

This is not weakness. This is neuroscience. And it means that changing a belief is less about finding the right argument and more about interrupting the pattern long enough to choose a different story.

Dispenza’s core invitation is, at first glance, slightly confronting.

You cannot create a new reality with the same personality that created the old one.

Which sounds, if you’re not in the right frame of mind, like a criticism. But sit with it for a moment and it becomes something else entirely, an extraordinary permission slip.

Because if your current reality is the output of a personality that was largely assembled by accident, through repetition and absorbed belief and the emotional habits of a nervous system doing its best, then the possibility of a different reality is not dependent on external circumstances changing. It is dependent on an internal shift that you are entirely capable of initiating.

This is where neuroscience and mysticism shake hands. Science AND mysticism, you say?! SWOON!

The brain, Dispenza teaches, does not fully distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one. Which means that mentally and emotionally rehearsing a new version of yourself, treated not as wishful thinking but as a genuine embodied practice, actually lays down new neural pathways. It begins, incrementally and irrevocably, to rewrite the script.

At first it feels like wearing someone else’s shoes. Unfamiliar. Slightly wrong. Your body will resist it with the full gravitational force of its habituated patterns and it will offer you approximately one thousand convincing reasons to go back to what you know.

We might take this as proof that the new story is false, when it is really a measure of how often the old one has been rehearsed.

But what does this have to do with joy? Everything. It has everything to do with joy.

Because if joy were simply a reaction, something that happens to you when circumstances align, then it would remain forever outside your control, arriving occasionally and without warning like good weather, leaving just as unpredictably.

But if identity is wet clay, shaped by repetition and attention and emotional tone, and if beliefs are stories the nervous system runs until we consciously choose different ones, and if the body can be rewired through practice just as surely as it was wired through habit, then joy becomes something else entirely.

It becomes a practice. A daily, deliberate, sometimes awkward, gradually more natural practice of choosing a different story. Of interrupting the loop. Of deciding, in the smallest and largest moments equally, to orient toward aliveness rather than away from it.

This is the quietly radical premise at the heart of everything we do here. Not that life isn’t difficult. It is, and M. Scott Peck was right, and accepting that is its own form of liberation. But that the version of you who navigates difficulty, who moves through the world, who experiences what’s possible, that version is not fixed. She is not a verdict. She is not the sum of what was repeatedly told to you before you were old enough to question it.

She is wet clay, now in conscious hands.

She is a watercolor that hasn’t finished finding its shape.

She is, right now, being written.

And here is the thing about being written: you get to be one of the authors.

This is where things started, but there are so many places we’re going. Rebel Joy is a space that favor thresholds over destinations and truly believes the joy is in the journey, the process, the becoming. You are welcome here.

Philosophers I admire enormously. They are the cartographers of ideas, painstakingly mapping the intellectual terrain. But the mystics? The mystics walk off the map entirely and come back describing the landscape from the inside.

A philosopher asks: what is truth? A theologian asks: what is God? A mystic says: come sit. Be still. Let’s see if we can illuminate the divinity within.

Meister Eckhart said things that made the Church nervous because they sounded less like doctrine and more like direct contact with God. Rumi wrote “the drop becomes the ocean, and the ocean becomes the drop.” Emily Dickinson, not formally a mystic but absolutely flirting with the edge of it, wrote “I am nobody! Who are you?” and somehow the paradox of nobodiness contained everything.

Their authority came from inner knowing, not external validation. And the invitation was always the same: don’t take my word for it. This is something you can experience.

I was around sixteen when I first encountered M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. I reference it often because it has been a guiding light through many seasons of my life.

He opens with three little words. “Life is difficult.”

And then he writes that this is a great truth, one of the greatest truths, because once we truly see it, we transcend it. Once we truly accept that life is difficult, life is no longer difficult. Because the fact of its difficulty no longer matters.

It’s been decades since the first time I read those lines and I can still feel the echo of the original hit of truth hum in my bones.

Those words are the opposite of comfortable, yet somehow completely liberating. Someone was telling me, plainly and without apology, not to expect otherwise. And in the same breath telling me that acceptance, real acceptance, not resigned tolerance but genuine acknowledgement, was the portal through which difficulty loses its power.

I meditated on that for years to come. Into my twenties I started realizing that most of my dissatisfaction with life came from unmet expectations. And rather than look for who had failed to meet me there (in the proverbial ‘there’), I came face to face with the fact that I was the one who had formed the expectation in the first place. If I set the expectation, then I could also temper my response to the disappointment when and if that expectation wasn’t met. A massive a-ha for an early twenty-something.

It’s worth sharing that I have done most things backwards in my life. Societal constructs never managed to get their claws into me and poison me with their expectations. From a very early age I understood that my life was my own and I have fought to stay clear-eyed and intentional with my autonomy.

In my twenties and already divorced, I refused—completely and without apology—to absorb anyone’s verdict that I had failed. I tried. I relished in the trying. And when I cut my losses, I felt nothing but gratitude for what that relationship had taught me about myself. I still feel immense gratitude for my divorce.

Approaching thirty, a solo parent, I flipped the bird to what society decided a single mother should be. Namely, helpless and quietly searching for another man to give my life meaning and allow me to blend with my peers. I was not interested in that narrative. Not even slightly.

I set myself up, by most conventional measures, for an extremely challenging life. And I want to be honest about that rather than smooth it over with the benefit of hindsight. It WAS challenging. It required a particular kind of doggedness that I’m not sure I’d recommend to everyone.

But here’s the thing about walking the unconventional path; when you can’t rely on the conventional map, you learn to navigate by inner knowing. You develop, out of sheer necessity, a relationship with your own intuition that people who stayed on the prescribed route sometimes never get around to cultivating.

The mystics, it turned out, were excellent company for this kind of journey. They’d been showing the way for centuries.

Once I pondered that mystic and misfit sound similar.

As a lover of words, I found that amusing. I also realized I saw myself in both.

The mystic rebels because traditional thinking isn’t expansive enough. The misfit rebels because society’s rules are mind-numbingly limited. Both want more. Not excess, not accumulation, but possibility. The sense that the edges of the known world are not the actual edges of the world.

We once thought the earth was flat.

And believed no one could run a mile in under four minutes. Then Roger Bannister did it, and within a year, several others had too—as though the limit had existed only in the collective imagination.

Lightning was once a divine spectacle, terrifying and untouchable. Then Tesla and Edison turned it into something you flip on with a finger. Humans watched birds for millennia from the ground. Then in 1903, the Wright brothers lifted off at Kitty Hawk and everything that was impossible was suddenly a mere matter of engineering.

It was, at one time, wildly accepted that personality and intelligence were fixed. Then neuroscience uncovered neuroplasticity and the story shifted from “you are what you are” to “you are what you practice” and even “your reality is shaped largely by your beliefs about said reality”.

Every single one of these began the same way. A widely accepted limit. A few dissenters with inconvenient curiosity. A leap that looked unreasonable… until it wasn’t.

I have always been drawn to the dissenters. The ones with the inconvenient curiosity. The ones who looked at the edge of the map and thought what if we just kept walking?

All I have ever really wanted to do is talk about this stuff. The big questions. The inner landscape. The mystics and the misfits and the moments where something shifts and you feel truth reverberate in your bones. The places where philosophy meets lived experience → meets the profound.

I have spent my whole life as a listener. An observer. A shoulder for tender hearts to cry on. And I mean this with every fiber of my being—it is the privilege of a lifetime when someone trusts you with the specifics of their inner world. When I consider how vulnerable it can be to simply exist, I’m in awe that we show up and keep trying. The occasionally hilarious awkwardness of being a soul in a body is one of my favorite things and I often think I am the human experience’s biggest fan.

But I also know that it can be extremely lonely to be wired the way some of us are wired. To move in patterns that are slightly, sometimes blatantly, counter-culture. To find the mystics more compelling than the mainstream. To be quietly defiant in a world that rewards loud compliance.

I read that and I think, yes. Exactly that.

The Rebel Joy Society exists because I wanted to build a meeting place for people who feel that way. Who are curious and quietly defiant. Who are drawn to the mystics. Who have done things backwards and refused the verdict of failure. Who are, in whatever specific and imperfect way, thirsty for the marvelous.

I truly want this to be a space where you don’t have to explain yourself before you’re allowed in.

You’re already in.

You always were.

When my son was a week old we went to dinner at the Olive Garden. New mom, feeling a bit like I was existing in multiple realities simultaneously—the love, the exhaustion, the alienness of my own body… I don’t know that there is anything in my life as indescribable as those first few weeks after bringing a new life into the world. Nothing makes sense on a surface level and everything makes sooo much sense on a deeper level of being.

There are many layers to this story, and I’m sure I’ll write about them all at some point, but my pregnancy was one of the most miraculous times of my life. Not because I wanted a baby with desperate fervor and this was an answer to prayer. Not because I had always envisioned myself as a mom. Not because I got to share the insane privilege of carrying a new life inside me with a partner who helped co-create this little soul. In fact, the deep magic I felt surrounding me during that time was because none of those things were true. It was an unplanned, poorly-timed pregnancy, and my son’s father warned me that if I brought a child of his into the world he would make it his personal mission to make my life a living hell. And yet—for nine impossibly perfect months I lived inside this incredible bubble of cosmic love. I have never felt so protected and cherished by my friends, my family, and the Powers-That-Be. However, once my son was born it was like my connection to the radiance of the universe was unplugged. It was massively disorienting.

But back to the Olive Garden. My parents were there. My 85-year-old grandmother was in town. We were hungry and no one wanted to cook. It was mid-September in the Pacific Northwest and truly beautiful outside. This was the baby’s first outing after coming home from the hospital. A lady from a neighboring table came over to coo at my son and asked how old he was. When I told her, she proceeded to scold me, and my whole family, for bringing him out in public at such a tender age. Did I want him to get sick? My mom had two children, my grandmother had five, but apparently we missed the memo that this time was sacred and we should all be incubating in the safety of our home.

I don’t recall feeling properly reprimanded at the time; I was probably bemused. I do recall my soft-spoken, Norwegian grandmother saying something about judgmental busy-bodies. However, that interaction has stayed with me. And every time I am traveling down a creative path, and considering whether it’s time to share something new, I think about that woman and pause. Is it time? Is it too soon? Is this creation too fragile and does it need some time to acclimate to the world?

Isn’t that incredible? A random woman from 22 years ago is still taking up space in my head! I don’t feel like her voice gets a vote necessarily but it’s just there.

So here I am, exercising my rebellious free will, sharing something new even though it could, I suppose, be too soon.

I am a devoted champion of the human spirit. Always watching, listening, taking notes, and trying to make sense of all the mess and the enchanting mystery of this earth experience. I think it’s been established, but if this post is your entry in my world, I am more than a little infatuated with joy. Gratitude is my default emotion, my fall back. I have trained myself so extensively, I can honestly say gratitude is second nature. But joy? Joy is what I focus on remembering daily. I will occasionally refer to this as cultivating joy, but I have found it is really less of an active conjuring and more of an embodiment state—a true remembering.

Think about small children, the majority of them are innately joyful. Ever notice a blissfully unaware child playing and feel a stab of envy that they are so tapped into their joy? Young children manage to be delighted even when their home life and environment may not seem supportive of that. Society at large works overtime to train joy out of children. By age seven most of them have lost the magic they carried with them from conception into life.

My devotion to having a joy practice has led to me developing all kinds of “joy-noticing tools”. Simple ways to bring awareness to your emotions and train your perception to see more of what you want and less of what you don’t want. I love maps, compasses, guides. And that’s what I’ve been developing. I believe it has the power to alter the way you understand yourself, your energy, and the very specific shape your joy wants to take. Because here’s what I’ve come to understand after a lifetime of being enthralled by joy: studying it, chasing it, losing it, and finding it again in the most unexpected places:

Joy is not one-size-fits-all.

We often talk about joy as though it’s a single frequency, a universal feeling that everyone experiences in essentially the same way and accesses through essentially the same doors. And I think this misunderstanding is quietly responsible for a lot of unnecessary suffering and confusion. If you’re a person whose instinctual joy lives in solitude and deep feeling and you’re following advice designed for someone whose instinctual joy lives in social energy and passionate creating—you will keep doing the “right” things and wondering why they’re not working. You will keep missing yourself.

The Elemental Compass of Joy is my exploration on this issue.

Four elements. Four distinct flavors of joy. One compass to help you find your way home to yourself—whatever weather you’re navigating, whatever season you’re in.

Earth Joy — Joy in Being

Rooted. Present. Grateful for the beauty that surrounds you.

Earth Joy is the quietest of the four and possibly the most underestimated.

It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with a creative breakthrough or a rush of inspiration or a surge of passionate aliveness. It settles. It grounds. It shows up in the specific, sensory, gloriously ordinary texture of being alive in a body on a planet that is, if you stop long enough to notice, breathtakingly beautiful.

Earth Joy is the weight of good soil in your hands. The particular quality of morning light through a kitchen window. The satisfaction of a meal made from scratch and eaten slowly. The deep, uncomplicated pleasure of being exactly where you are, wanting nothing more than this.

It is the joy of presence. Not as a spiritual practice you have to work at, but as a natural homecoming. Earth Joy people don’t have to remind themselves to be here. Here is where they live. Here is where they breathe. Here is, for them, enough.

The gift of Earth Joy is an extraordinary capacity for gratitude and groundedness. Earth Joy people are the ones who make you feel safe simply by being in the room. They are anchored in a way that steadies everyone around them.

The shadow—and every element has one—is the risk of stillness becoming stagnation. Of roots becoming walls. Of acceptance moving towards anaesthetization. Of staying so beautifully present in what IS that the pull toward what could be never quite gets answered.

If Earth Joy is your dominant element, you don’t need to be fixed or activated or pushed toward more fire. You need to be honored for the profound and increasingly rare gift of your presence. And occasionally, gently, invited to let a little wind in.

Water Joy — Joy in Feeling

Emotional. Flowing. Open to love, connection, and deep ease.

Water Joy is the most intimate of the four.

It lives in connection, deep, real, unhurried connection. The kind of conversation that goes somewhere unexpected and leaves you feeling more yourself than you did before it started. The feeling of being truly seen by someone. The particular ease of being with people who don’t require you to perform or explain or make yourself smaller.

Water Joy is the lotus rising. The wave that carries you rather than crashes over you. The quiet, flowing, almost mystical quality of life when you are in full emotional openness. Not guarded, not braced, not managing how much of yourself is safe to show. Simply open. Simply feeling. Simply HERE in the full, unedited experience of being human.

Water Joy people feel everything deeply, and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order. They are the ones who cry at adverts and feel the emotions in a room before anyone has spoken and know, with a certainty that bypasses logic entirely, when something is wrong with someone they love.

The gift is extraordinary emotional intelligence, depth, and the capacity for a quality of connection most people only glimpse occasionally.

The shadow is the current. Water flows, but sometimes it flows too far, too fast, carrying you into depths that weren’t yours to carry. Water Joy can tip into emotional overwhelm, into absorbing everyone else’s experience at the expense of your own, into a kind of beautiful drowning where the feeling becomes the whole world and the shore feels very far away.

If Water Joy is your dominant element, your practice is learning to feel fully without losing yourself in the feeling. To be the wave, not the wreckage.

Fire Joy — Joy in Creating

Passionate. Alive. Expressing your light and following your inspiration.

Fire Joy is the loudest of the four and she absolutely knows it.

She is the creative surge at 11pm when you should definitely be asleep but the idea is RIGHT THERE and sleep is simply not an option. She is the passion that bypasses caution entirely. The aliveness that arrives when you are making something—anything—from the raw material of your own inspiration and watching it become real in front of you.

Fire Joy is not subtle. She does not wait to be invited. She does not ask whether this is a convenient time. She arrives and she demands expression and she will make you faintly miserable until you give it to her.

She is the red energy of pure creation. The flame that illuminates and warms and occasionally, if you’re not paying attention, burns the whole thing down and starts something entirely new from the ashes. Frequently this turns out to be exactly what was needed.

Fire Joy people are the starters, the makers, the ones with seventeen projects in various states of glorious incompletion. They are magnetic in their enthusiasm, impossible to ignore when they’re in full creative flight, and completely impossible to themselves when the fire goes quiet.

The gift is a generative, contagious, world-shifting creative energy that has the power to move people and change things.

The shadow is the burn. Fire without grounding consumes rather than creates. It chases the next spark before the current one has been fully expressed. It can mistake constant motion for aliveness and forget, somewhere in the beautiful chaos, to actually finish things.

If Fire Joy is your dominant element, your practice is learning to tend the flame rather than just feed it. Slower. Deeper. Let one fire burn all the way down before you light the next.

Air Joy — Joy in Expanding

Free. Curious. Inspired by ideas, beauty, and the endless possibilities.

Air Joy is the one most of you reading this will recognize immediately.

She is the bird soaring on golden winds. The mind that lights up in the middle of a conversation and goes somewhere nobody expected. The person who reads the footnote and then the bibliography and then three entirely unrelated books that somehow, mysteriously, all connect to each other in a way that feels like the universe is leaving breadcrumbs.

Air Joy lives in ideas. In the magnificent, intoxicating, endlessly renewable pleasure of learning something new, connecting dots that weren’t previously connected, following a thread of curiosity wherever it leads without needing to know the destination in advance.

She is the golden energy of infinite potential. The soaring feeling of a mind genuinely engaged with something interesting. The specific delight of realizing that the world is so much larger and stranger and more wonderful than you previously understood, and that you will never, not in a lifetime of devoted attention, run out of things to be fascinated by.

This is, I suspect, where many of you live. Curious, expansive, idea-rich, drawn to philosophy and meaning and the examined life. Comfortable in the abstract. At home in the intangible. The gift is a quality of mind that sees connections others miss, asks questions others don’t think to ask, and brings an infectious aliveness to every conversation and every room.

The shadow—and I say this with enormous love, as someone who lives here too— is that Air Joy can become a very beautiful way of staying slightly above your own life.

Up in the ideas, up in the possibilities, up in the golden winds of infinite potential and just a little bit removed from the actual, specific, sometimes inconvenient experience of being a human person in a body on a Thursday.

Air Joy at her best is expansive and grounding in equal measure. Air Joy at her most shadowed is using the beauty of ideas to avoid the intimacy of actually landing.

If Air Joy is your dominant element your practice is occasionally coming down from the sky. Feeling the ground under your feet. Letting the idea become an action.

I have been dancing in the shadows of Air Joy AND Earth Joy. Blissfully and wholeheartedly stagnate… without even realizing it.

You Are Not Just One Element

Here’s what the compass is not: a box.

You are not exclusively Air or entirely Water or purely Fire. You are a combination—a weather system, really—with a dominant element that colors everything and secondary elements that show up depending on the season, the circumstances, the particular chapter of life you’re navigating.

I live comfortably in Air, Earth, and Water with a reaching, longing, sometimes neglected Fire. I float in ideas and swim in feeling and occasionally forget, completely, to let my hair down and CREATE something just for the wild, crackling joy of it.

Recognizing this about yourself is not a diagnosis. It’s a map.

It tells you where you naturally thrive and where you tend to drift. It tells you which joy practices will feel like coming home and which will feel like deliberate medicine: necessary, nourishing, slightly uncomfortable in the way that growth always is.

It tells you, when you’re feeling inexplicably flat or stuck or disconnected from yourself, which element you’ve been neglecting and what she might need from you today.

A walk in the woods for your Earth. A real conversation for your Water. A creative act, however small, for your Fire. A rabbit hole, a beautiful book, a question worth chasing for your Air.

This is the compass. Use it to find your way home.

I leave you with this.

Which element are you reaching for right now?

Not which one you live in most naturally—you probably already know that. But which one is pulling at you, asking for attention, quietly suggesting that she’s been waiting?

That longing is not random. It is, as always, information.

At least I can. Tell me I’m not alone.

So today we are doing something different. Today we are putting down the philosophy, stepping away from the big ideas, and talking about something small, immediate, and slightly ridiculous.

Today we are talking about tiny rebellion.

Somewhere along the way, rebellion got rebranded as something loud.

Protest marches. Dramatic exits. Burning things down—metaphorically and, occasionally, literally—and announcing yourself to the world as someone who refuses to be contained.

I’m not against any of that. There’s a time and a place for the grand gesture, the bold declaration, the life-altering leap.

But I think we’ve collectively missed something important in our obsession with the dramatic version of rebellion.

We have overlooked the power of quiet rebellions. The tiny ones. The ones that nobody sees and nobody applauds and nobody writes a screenplay about. The ones that happen in the space of an ordinary Tuesday and leave you feeling, inexplicably, like yourself again.

These, I argue, are where the real revolution lives.

Order the thing on the menu you actually want instead of the sensible option. You know the one. The one your eyes went to first before your internal committee convened and overruled you with something more reasonable.

Leave a party when you want to leave. Not when it’s polite to leave, not when you’ve stayed long enough that your exit won’t be noted, not after one more drink you didn’t want. When YOU want to leave. Put your coat on. Map out your route to the exit, and go.

Say no to something this week with no explanation attached. Not “I can’t make it because...” Not “I’d love to but unfortunately...” Just no. Warm, complete, requiring nothing further. No is a full sentence and using it without footnotes is, in certain social contexts, practically anarchic.

Buy the flowers for yourself. Not because it’s your birthday, not because you’ve achieved something worthy of celebration, not because you need a reason. Because they’re yellow and they make you smile and you don’t need a reason.

Read the book that has nothing to do with self-improvement or professional development or becoming a better version of yourself. The delicious, pointless, completely absorbing novel that exists purely to be enjoyed. Let yourself enjoy it without the faint background hum of productivity guilt. (Sidenote: wanna talk books? I can talk books!)

Take the long way home.

Eat breakfast for dinner.

Dance in your kitchen to a song from 1987 with absolutely nobody watching. Commit to it. Elbows and everything.

Wear the good perfume on a Wednesday. Not for a special occasion. Wednesday IS the special occasion. Wednesday has always been the special occasion. We’ve just been saving the good perfume for a day that feels more deserving, and I am here to tell you that day is not coming and Wednesday is RIGHT HERE.

Alright, so you might be thinking, this is nice, Aj, but is choosing the pasta really a rebellion?

Yes. 100%, yes.

Here’s why.

Auto-pilot—read more here—doesn’t just operate at the level of career choices and relationship patterns and inherited belief systems. It operates at the level of every single micro-decision you make across the course of an ordinary day.

The sensible menu option. The polite extra hour at the party. The explanatory paragraph attached to every no. The flowers you didn’t buy yourself. The good perfume sitting on the shelf.

Each of these tiny moments is a fork in the road. A choice between the default and the deliberate. Between the script and the soul.

And here’s the thing about micro-decisions….they compound. Not dramatically, not overnight, but in that slow, undeniable way that water shapes stone. A hundred tiny moments of choosing yourself, over weeks and months and years, quietly, incrementally, reshapes your entire relationship with your own life.

This is what I mean by joy as a practice. It’s not waiting for the transcendent experience. It’s not the meditation retreat or the sabbatical or the lightning bolt of clarity that rearranges everything at once.

It’s staying up past your bedtime with a good book. Asking for a raincheck on brunch because it was a long week and a hot bath with bubbles is calling your name. Taking the scenic route because your favorite band sounds better on the open road, played through the car speakers.

It’s choosing, in the smallest possible moment, to be HERE rather than somewhere more sensible and considerably less alive.

Before this week is out, I implore you to commit to one tiny rebellion.

Genuinely tiny. Embarrassingly small. The kind of thing that takes less than five minutes and costs less than grocery store daisies.

And I want you to notice, really notice, how it feels. Not the action itself, but the moment just after. The subtle, almost imperceptible shift in your body when you chose the thing you actually wanted instead of the thing you were supposed to want.

That feeling? That tiny flicker of aliveness?

That’s JOY. And she’s been waiting for you. Random, unexpected joy is delightful. A wink from the universe. But joy you choose, name, seek out, insist upon? Life-changing.

I have done some drastic things to change my life. I got married, divorced, too. I have moved soooo many times it borders on insanity—different states, towns, sometimes just a few neighborhoods over. I have chopped my hair really short, simply because it felt bold at the time. Making the conscious decision to illuminate joy in the everyday mundanity of life has been the most gentle and lasting way I have ever enacted change. Two thumbs up, 5-stars, it has my whole-hearted stamp of approval.

Curious about being the architect of your own reality and the intentional act of choosing joy? Consider starting here.

(Alternate Title) The Unexamined Life: On auto-pilot, inherited scripts, and the danger nobody warned us about.

Can we talk about quicksand for a minute?

If you were born somewhere in the late seventies or eighties, you already know where this is going and you’re already smiling. Because for a glorious, deeply committed stretch of that decade, quicksand was basically a celebrity villain. Always lurking. Rarely booked for a full speaking role. But absolutely dedicated to swallowing someone whole at the most dramatically inconvenient possible moment.

The Princess Bride. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The NeverEnding Story. Saturday morning cartoons—Scooby-Doo, Tarzan, take your pick. Hollywood ran what I can only describe as an extraordinarily successful PR campaign on behalf of a threat that the vast majority of us will never, not once, actually encounter.

I was born in 1979. I am moderately well-traveled. I can confirm with complete certainty that I have never engaged with quicksand. The closest I’ve come was watching a friend lose a tennis shoe to the marshy edge of a lily pond. The one-shoed hike back to the cabin can’t have been easy, but it wasn’t memorable.

And yet. For years, some quiet corner of my childhood brain had quicksand filed under “legitimate things to watch out for.” A real and present danger, lurking at the edges of an otherwise navigable world.

I think about this now and I find it equal parts hilarious and genuinely instructive.

Because here’s what nobody made a blockbuster about. Here’s the villain that never got the Hollywood treatment, never had its own compelling theme music, never inspired a single Saturday morning cartoon episode despite being present in virtually every human life on the planet.

Auto-pilot.

The Villain Nobody Warned You About

I was in my mid-twenties when it hit me. New mother, doing the parenting thing alone, running on approximately no sleep and the particular kind of determination that kicks in when you don’t have the luxury of falling apart.

Somewhere in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day, I had this sudden, startling epiphany.

Quicksand isn’t even a fraction of the villain auto-pilot is.

Not because auto-pilot is flashy. It isn’t. That’s precisely the point. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t have a theme tune or a warning sign or a slow-motion cinematic moment where you realize what’s happening in time to grab a vine and swing to safety. It simply... takes over. Quietly. Gradually. So incrementally that by the time you notice you’ve been running on default, you genuinely can’t remember when you stopped driving and let the script take the wheel.

Auto-pilot is the life you’re living without having consciously chosen it. The habits you inherited without examining. The beliefs about what’s possible for you, what you deserve, who you’re allowed to be, that were handed to you by your family, your culture, your education, your religion, and installed so early and so quietly that they feel like facts rather than choices.

It’s the relationship dynamic you recreate because it’s familiar rather than because it’s good. The career path you stayed on because leaving felt too uncertain. The version of yourself you present to the world because it keeps everyone comfortable, including you.

None of this is dramatic. None of it will drive crowds to the theater on opening weekend. But it is, I would argue, the single greatest thief of joy operating in most of our lives right now.

Socrates Died for This

Here’s where I want to introduce someone who understood this problem so completely that he literally died for it.

Socrates. Athenian philosopher, deeply inconvenient person to have at a dinner party, arguably the most important thinker in Western history—built his entire life around one central conviction.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

He said this, for the record, at his own trial. In 399 BC, he had been accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and failing to acknowledge the gods the state endorsed. His actual crime, as far as I can work out, was going around asking people very uncomfortable questions about things they thought they already understood— virtue, justice, courage, piety—and revealing, through the relentless application of curiosity, that most of them didn’t understand these things nearly as well as they assumed.

Athens found him guilty. Sentenced him to death. And Socrates, given the opportunity to propose an alternative punishment, essentially said, I could stop. I could go quietly. But a life in which I stop asking questions is not a life I’m interested in living.

He chose the hemlock.

I am not suggesting you need to die for your convictions. But I find something deeply clarifying about the fact that the examined life—the life of genuine curiosity, of questioning inherited assumptions, of refusing to simply accept the script you were handed—has always been, in some way, a radical act.

It was radical in 399 BC. It is radical now. Different stakes, same resistance. Because the people and systems around us, then as now, tend to prefer that you don’t ask too many questions. Questions are destabilizing. Comfortable auto-pilot is productive, manageable, easy to predict.

Waking up is inconvenient. For everyone, including sometimes yourself.

But Socrates was right. He was irritatingly, irrefutably right. The unexamined life—the one lived entirely on auto-pilot, running inherited scripts without ever pausing to ask whether they actually belong to you—is not, in any meaningful sense, YOUR life at all.

It’s just the life that happened to you while you were busy watching for quicksand.

What Waking Up Actually Looks Like

I want to be careful here because “waking up” as a concept has acquired a lot of baggage. It can sound like a dramatic singular event, the thunderbolt moment of revelation that divides your life into before and after.

Sometimes it is that. More often, in my experience, it’s quieter and smaller and considerably less cinematic.

It’s the moment you catch yourself saying “I’m fine” and then pause just long enough to check whether that’s actually true.

It’s noticing that you’ve been dreading Sunday evenings for a decade and finally asking yourself what that dread is actually telling you.

It’s questioning, gently but honestly, whether the story you tell about what’s possible for you is something you consciously believe or something you absorbed from someone else’s fear.

It’s lying on a bed as a dreamy, restless child on a seventy-two acre farm, hating the ordinariness of it all, and instead of talking yourself out of that feeling, letting it point you somewhere. (More here.)

Waking up is not a destination. It’s a practice. A repeated, daily, sometimes uncomfortable choice to pay attention—to your life, your choices, your inner world—rather than simply running the program.

Socrates called it examination. Henry Miller called it awareness. I consider it the foundation of everything we do here.

The Question Worth Carrying

Here’s what I’d like to leave you with today.

Not an action plan. Not a five-step framework. Just a question. The kind that does its best work slowly, in the background, while you’re walking the dog or sitting in the school pick-up line.

Where in your life are you watching for quicksand—spending your energy on a threat that isn’t real, a fear that was inherited rather than earned—while auto-pilot quietly drives?

You don’t need to answer it right now. You don’t need to answer it out loud, or to me, or to anyone.

Just let it sit. Let it do its slow, patient, thoroughly un-cinematic work.

That’s how the unexamined life starts to become examined. Not with a thunderbolt. With a question you’re finally willing to let breathe.

When was the last time you felt something you immediately wished you hadn’t? Anxiety before a difficult conversation. Jealousy you couldn’t quite justify. Grief that arrived uninvited on an otherwise ordinary afternoon. Anger that flared up faster than you could manage it.

And in the moment after feeling it—before you’d even had time to properly feel it—did you notice the secondary response? Judgment. The quiet internal verdict. The I shouldn’t be feeling this. The subtle but persistent message that whatever was moving through you was somehow wrong, excessive, a problem to be solved or suppressed or apologized for as quickly as possible.

Most of us were taught, in ways both explicit and entirely unspoken, that emotions exist on a vertical scale. Gratitude and love at the top. Fear and shame and grief at the bottom. And the goal, the whole project, is to stay as high up the scale as possible and scramble back up quickly whenever you slip.

It might sound reasonable. But don’t you think it’s exhausting? It seems we weigh and quantify everything. Even our own emotions. We either take them too seriously or we don’t take them seriously enough.

The Emotional Scale framework I want to share with you today comes from the teachings of Abraham Hicks. When applied it can be lifechanging! What I’m offering here is my own lens on it—the Rebel Joy translation, if you like.

The emotional scale, as I work with it, is laid out in two columns.

On the left: the expansive emotions. Joy, love, enthusiasm, freedom, appreciation, passion, optimism, hopefulness. These are the emotions that open something in us. They widen our perspective, increase our sense of possibility, make us feel more ourselves rather than less.

On the right: the constrictive emotions. Fear, grief, shame, anger, jealousy, overwhelm, hopelessness. These are the emotions that narrow something in us. They tighten our field of vision, pull us inward, make the world feel smaller and less navigable than it did five minutes ago.

Two columns. Side by side. Equal space on the page.

Side by side, with equal weight, these two sets of emotional descriptors stop looking like success and failure or good vs bad. They start looking like what they actually are.

Two halves of a complete human experience. No more, no less.

Here’s what most of us were never taught: constrictive emotions are not malfunctions.

They are not signs that something has gone wrong with you, or that you’re failing at the project of being a well-adjusted adult, or that you need to fix yourself before you’re allowed to feel good again. They are not punishments, and they are not permanent weather systems you’re powerless to influence.

They are signals.

Every single emotion on that right-hand column is your inner world communicating something specific and important. Anxiety is telling you that something you care about feels uncertain or under threat. Anger is telling you that a boundary has been crossed, a value violated, something important dismissed. Grief is telling you that you loved something real. Shame, one of the most painful and most misunderstood, is often telling you that you’ve absorbed someone else’s verdict about your worth and quietly started to believe it.

None of these are wrong. None of them need to be silenced or ignored or spiritually bypassed with excessive gratitude journaling.

They need to be listened to.

The constrictive emotions are not the opposite of joy. They are, in many cases, the doorway to it; they are pointing directly at the things that matter most to you. You cannot feel grief about something you didn’t love. You cannot feel angry about something you don’t value. The very intensity of a constrictive emotion is a measure of how alive and engaged you actually are.

That’s not a problem. That’s information.

When we think of emotions as a vertical ladder—with joy at the top and despair at the bottom—we create a particular kind of suffering that has nothing to do with the original emotion.

We feel anxious. And then we feel bad about feeling anxious. And then we feel anxious about feeling bad about feeling anxious. And suddenly we’re not dealing with the original signal at all, we’re three layers deep in a story about what our anxiety means about us as a person.

This is the vertical scale trap. It doesn’t just ask you to feel difficult emotions. It asks you to feel shame ON TOP of difficult emotions. It turns every uncomfortable feeling into evidence of a personal failing.

What happens when you lay the scale horizontal instead: two columns, side by side, neither one above the other?

You stop climbing and start listening. It can become a game of compare and contrast. Everything is better with a touch of whimsy.

The constrictive emotion is no longer something to escape as quickly as possible. It’s something to get curious about. What is this telling me? What does the intensity of this feeling reveal about what I care about? What would the equal and opposite expansive emotion look like right now, and what would need to shift for me to access it?

This is not toxic positivity. I am not suggesting you slap a gratitude practice on top of genuine pain and call it healing. Some emotions need to be fully felt before they can move. Grief may demand your devotion for a time. Anger often needs to be honored before it can be released.

What I’m suggesting is simply this—stop making the difficult emotion wrong. Stop adding the second layer of suffering on top of the first. Feel what you feel, with curiosity rather than judgment, and trust that your inner world is communicating something worth hearing.

Joy is not the absence of the right-hand column.

A joyful life is not a life without fear, grief, anger, or shame. It is not a life lived exclusively in the left column. That’s performance and it is absolutely exhausting to maintain.

A genuinely joyful life is one in which you have developed a relationship with the full spectrum of your emotional experience. Where you can feel the constrictive emotions without being capsized by them. Where you understand that the expansive emotions are not rewards for good behavior. They are always available, always present underneath the surface, accessible the moment you stop fighting what’s actually moving through you.

Like I shared in my last post, Henry Miller wrote that the moment you give in to joy, you are free. I think this is part of what he meant. Not the bypassing of difficulty. The willingness to feel everything—drunkenly, serenely, joyously, even painfully—and trust that none of it can actually destroy you.

The full spectrum is not the obstacle to joy. It IS the joy.

Let’s look at the emotional scale image below. Really look at it. Notice, there is no positive vs negative. No good vs bad.

Find where you are today—honestly, without judgment. Left column or right, somewhere in the middle, oscillating between both depending on the hour.

Consider this: what is the constrictive emotion you’re currently feeling most trying to tell you? Not what does it mean about you. What is it pointing AT? What does it care about, on your behalf?

Sit with that for a few minutes. Write it down if you’re the writing type.

That’s the whole practice. That’s the beginning of a completely different relationship with your own inner world.

I go in-depth into the Emotional Scale in my Starter Kit. You can learn more below.

I hope your week is off to a beautiful start. ♥

We use these words interchangeably, most of us. Joy. Happiness. As though they’re simply different intensities of the same thing—happiness on a good day, joy on a great one.

I want to gently but firmly disagree with that.

Conflating them is costing us something. I think it’s worth taking ten minutes on a Tuesday to pull them apart, look at what’s underneath, and figure out which one we’re actually chasing—and whether the thing we’re chasing is even capable of being caught.

Yes, I have issues with happiness

Happiness, as most of us have been taught to pursue it, is circumstance-dependent.

It arrives when things go right. When the relationship works, when the job comes through, when the number on the scale cooperates, when the holiday actually delivers on its promise. It is, fundamentally, a response. Something that happens TO you when the conditions are favorable.

Which means the entire project of pursuing happiness is really a project of controlling circumstances. Of arranging your external world carefully enough that the feeling you’re hoping for finally shows up and stays.

But here’s the thing about that project (and process) … it doesn’t end. It can’t. Because circumstances are, by their nature, unreliable. They shift. They disappoint. They cooperate beautifully for a while and then stop cooperating entirely, usually at the most inconvenient moment.

Psychologists have a name for the particular trap this creates. They call it the arrival fallacy. This is the belief that once you reach a certain destination, once you achieve the thing or acquire the thing or become the thing, the feeling of fulfilment will finally be permanent. Except it never is. You arrive, you feel it briefly, and then the goalposts quietly move themselves and the whole pursuit begins again.

This is not a character flaw. It’s not ingratitude or restlessness or an inability to be satisfied. It’s what happens when you build your sense of wellbeing on a foundation that was never designed to hold the weight you’ve placed on it.

Happiness is real. It’s wonderful when it shows up—and also, it was never meant to be a permanent address.

My love affair with joy, explored

Joy is something different in kind, not just degree.

Henry Miller is, in my opinion, one of the most joyfully, almost recklessly alive writers who ever put pen to paper. He spent much of his life and work circling this distinction.

He wrote, “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”

Read that again slowly, let these words do their work.

He doesn’t say the aim of life is to be happy. He doesn’t mention circumstances at all. Instead, he talks about awareness. About the quality of attention you bring to your own existence. Joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely—four completely different emotional temperatures, and he’s saying joy is available across all of them.

That’s the distinction I want you to feel, not just intellectually understand.

Happiness is a response to what’s happening. Joy is a relationship with being alive. And those are not the same thing. Not even close.

Joy doesn’t require the wind to blow just right. It doesn’t wait for the relationship to be fixed or the business to take off or the difficult season to pass. It is available, right now, in this moment, in whatever shape this moment is taking, to anyone willing to turn their attention toward it.

Which brings us to another of Miller’s insights,“The moment one gives in to joy, one is free.”

Gives IN to it. Not earns it, not achieves it, not arrives at it after sufficient suffering or striving. Gives in. As though joy is already present and the only thing standing between you and it is your own resistance. Your insistence on waiting until the conditions are right. Your insidious beliefs that you haven’t quite earned it yet.

But what if you have? What if you already have?

Awareness Has the Power to Change Everything

I love simplicity. I may be habitually drawn to abstract thoughts, but I still want actionable steps to apply in my everyday life. If you are reading this and thinking, “this resonates but I have no idea what to actually DO with it”—here’s more Miller. This might be my favorite thing he ever put down on paper. I’ve written it on countless post-it notes and 3x5 cards that are strewn around my house.

“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”

A blade of grass.

Not a sunset over the Amalfi coast. Not a transcendental meditation experience. Not a pivotal life moment you’ll remember forever. A blade of grass—ordinary, unremarkable, everywhere—becomes indescribably magnificent the moment you give it your full, undivided attention.

This is not poetic hyperbole. This is a practical instruction.

Joy lives in the quality of your attention. It is not a feeling that descends on you from the outside; it is what happens when you are genuinely, fully, presently HERE. When you stop running the mental commentary about what you should be doing or what happened yesterday or what might go wrong tomorrow, and you simply notice what is actually in front of you.

The warmth of a mug in your hands. The particular quality of light on a winter afternoon. The sound of a voice you love. The satisfying weight of a book you haven’t opened yet.

These things are always there. The joy they’re capable of producing is always there. What varies is where your attention is placed.

This is why I think of joy as a practice rather than a destination. Not something you arrive at, but something you cultivate, deliberately and repeatedly, through the conscious direction of your awareness. Some days the practice comes easily. Some days it takes everything you have just to notice one blade of grass and mean it.

Both of those days count. Both of them are the practice.

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The Quietly Rebellious Part

I want to close with something I fiercely believe.

Choosing joy—really choosing it, as a practice, as a relationship with being alive rather than a response to favorable circumstances—is one of the most quietly rebellious things you can do in a world that is constantly, aggressively trying to convince you that you don’t have enough, aren’t enough, haven’t achieved enough to feel good yet.

The entire architecture of modern consumer culture is built on the premise that happiness is just one more purchase away. One more achievement. One more upgrade. It needs you to believe that the feeling you’re looking for is external, acquirable, and perpetually just out of reach.

Joy, as Miller understood it, as I’ve come to understand it, pulls the rug out from under that entire mechanism. Because if joy is available in the most mundane aspects of nature, the ones we are so quick to ignore, if it lives in the quality of your attention rather than the content of your circumstances, then no one can sell it to you. No one can withhold it from you. No one can tell you you haven’t earned it yet.

It was always yours. You just have to give in to it. And apparently, the moment you do, you’re free.

If you’re new here, The Rebel Joy Starter Kit was made as an entry point for this exploration. It’s an $11 PDF that distils everything I believe about joy as a practice. Inside you’ll find practical tips, some storytelling, a worksheet, even a wordsearch puzzle!

For the Seekers

Not during a crisis. Not at rock bottom. It shows up on an ordinary Tuesday, usually. While you’re loading the dishwasher, or sitting in traffic, or scrolling through something you don’t even care about. It arrives without fanfare and it doesn’t shout. It just... lingers.

Is this really it?

And then, almost immediately, the internal PR machine kicks in. You remind yourself of everything you have. You run the gratitude checklist. You tell yourself that other people have it so much harder, that you’re being dramatic, that you should just get on with it.

And you do. You get on with it.

But the question doesn’t leave. It just goes quiet for a while.

Can we talk about that question today? Naturally, I can’t answer it; it doesn’t have a simple answer. But we can give it some air. I think a lot of us are carrying it around in silence, vaguely ashamed of it, not quite knowing what to do with it.

Silence can make us feel isolated.

Here’s what I notice about the folks who find their way to spaces like this one.

They are not, by any external measure, failing. Most of them have built something solid: a career, a family, a life that looks (at least from the outside) entirely reasonable. Entirely fine. They followed the path. Not blindly, but earnestly. They did the things they were told would lead to the feeling of arrival — the sense that everything had finally clicked into place and they could exhale.

Yet… they’re still waiting to exhale.

The pay-off that was promised, the deep satisfaction, the sense of meaning, the feeling that this is what I’m here for hasn’t shown up. Or it showed up briefly and then quietly evaporated. Or it showed up in glimpses, in moments, but never as a permanent address.

So they keep going. Keep achieving, keep producing, keep ticking boxes. Because stopping feels dangerous and complaining feels ungrateful and admitting that something is missing feels like a betrayal of everything they’ve built.

I know this story. Maybe you do, too?

There’s a particular flavor of dissatisfaction that doesn’t have a proper name.

It’s not depression, though it can look adjacent to it from certain angles. It’s not burnout, though exhaustion is often part of it. It’s not a crisis, not really, because nothing has actually gone wrong.

It’s more like a low hum. A background frequency. A restlessness that lives just underneath the surface of an otherwise functional life.

And here’s what I want you to hear, clearly and without qualification: that restlessness is not a flaw. It is not ingratitude. It is not weakness or selfishness or a sign that something is fundamentally broken in you.

It is your inner life asking to be taken seriously.

It is the part of you that knows—has always known—that you are capable of more than surviving. That you were not put here to simply produce and consume and manage and maintain until you run out of time.

That part of you is not wrong. That part of you is, quite possibly, the wisest part of you. It deserves to be listened to.

A lot of us grew up absorbing a very specific story about what a good life looks like.

Work hard. Be responsible. Be grateful. Don’t rock the boat. Follow the steps. Arrive at the destination.

And somewhere inside that story, the question of what YOU actually want, not what you’re supposed to want, not what makes sense on paper, but what genuinely lights something up inside you, got a bit lost.

We became very good at the life we were handed and some small part of us has been quietly grieving the life we might have chosen.

That grief is real. It’s worth acknowledging and it doesn’t mean anything about your life is wrong. It means you’re aware enough to feel the gap between where you are and where something deeper is calling you.

The consumer vs creator question is one that plagues me.

So much of modern life is structured around consumption. We consume content, we consume products, we consume other people’s stories and aesthetics and versions of success. Consumption isn’t inherently bad. I am a voracious consumer of books and ideas and other people’s perspectives and it beings me an inordinate amount of joy.

But there’s a difference between consuming intentionally, as fuel for your own becoming, and consuming as a way of avoiding the more uncomfortable question of what YOU are here to create.

The rat race is, at its core, a consumption loop. You work to earn, you earn to spend, you spend to feel something, and then you work harder to feel it again. And it’s not that any individual piece of that is wrong. It’s that the loop itself doesn’t have an exit ramp built in. Nobody is going to tap you on the shoulder and say “right, you’ve done enough consuming now, what would you like to actually build with your one wild and precious life?”

You have to notice the loop yourself. Then you have to decide, intentionally and on your own terms, whether you want to keep running it.

If you’re here, I suspect some part of you has already started noticing.

Maybe you can’t quite articulate what feels off. Maybe you’ve tried to explain it to someone you love and watched their eyes gloss over slightly because from where they’re standing everything looks absolutely fine. Maybe you’ve talked yourself out of it a hundred times and keep arriving back at the same low hum anyway.

That’s okay. You don’t need to have it figured out.

This space isn’t about having answers. It’s about being willing to sit with the questions, really sit with them, without rushing to resolve the discomfort they create. It’s about choosing curiosity over certainty, and community over the particular loneliness of carrying something unarticulated.

The question is this really it is not a problem to be solved.

It’s an invitation.

If you’re brand new here, The Rebel Joy Starter Kit is your first step. It’s $11 and it’s the distillation of everything I believe about joy as a practice—the perfect place to begin.

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For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with the idea of becoming.

I didn’t have the language for it until recently, and in many ways I’m still unpacking it. But the feeling has always been there—this sense that who I was becoming mattered far more than where I currently was.

I grew up in a very small town. Seventy-two acres, horses, chickens, pigs. And I hated it, viscerally, in the way only a head-in-the-clouds, wired-for-adventure child can hate something ordinary.

I can still feel myself lying on my bed, wondering how this was the life I was born into.

I dreamt of cities. Of a nomadic existence. I indulged in a fantasy where I’d been adopted and my real parents were off jet-setting somewhere, simply unbothered by the responsibility of a child. For the record, I admired their (fictional) choice entirely. No self-pity involved. It soothed me to imagine I’d come from a lineage of adventurers and seekers.

What I had instead of adventure was interiority. A rich, sprawling, endlessly interesting inner world I retreated into as often as possible. I wrote about it in my journal once. I must have been eleven or twelve:

“My world is painted in soft yellows and dreamy shades of grey and blue. I live inside my head as often as I can. it’s such a lovely place to be.”

I turned daydreaming into an intentional practice.
An artform, even.

As a child I felt ‘other’. It wasn’t in an I don’t belong sort of way, but a touch of outside-looking-in. Even that language and the emotion it arouses isn’t quite right. I was never made to feel like an outsider. My childhood was perfectly average in all the best ways. But I was an observer. Always watching. Always cataloging. Always writing stories in my head about who I would be and how I would show up in the world (laser focused on becoming). I observed other people’s behavior like a buffet, internalizing the flavors I resonated with, steering clear of the ones I didn’t. I could witness a petty argument between friends and immediately clock how both of them were right. Choosing sides was genuinely impossible for me because I could FEEL the reality of both perspectives simultaneously. Bone-deep empathy on one side, genuine puzzlement at their inability to see outside themselves on the other.

The moment someone called me an old soul, something clicked into place.

I now think most of us are old souls.
The remembering is just stronger in some.

My grandmother had a gorgeous curio cabinet she used as a bookshelf. Dante. Shakespeare. Epictetus. Robert Frost. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Lewis Carroll. All behind glass, like cherished treasures. I was completely enamored. All these lives lived, distilled into ink-stained faded pages. These were my people. I had finally found some kindred souls. I started writing poetry around eleven. I was reading Plato and Anaïs Nin not long after.

In my late teens, I stumbled across Joseph Campbell. One line in particular stole my breath:

“Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”

Something in me recognized those words as gospel truth. I have never really looked back.

Joy, as it turns out, is also my middle name.

My mother, long before I had a framework for any of this, used to call me her joy-child. Not as a statement. As an address. The way you’d use a full name. “Well hello, Joy-child.” I’ve spent a lot of time sitting with how that shaped my identity and how I perceived myself.

Words, I’ve come to believe, are not descriptions of reality. They are instructions to it. Language isn’t passive, it’s participatory. And being addressed, from my very earliest memories, as someone whose nature is joy? That landed somewhere deep. It became something I grew into. Something, somewhere along the line, I felt drawn towards embodying.

I wasn’t a particularly joyful child, to be clear. I was the full spectrum—stubborn, curious, sullen, determined, rebellious, creative—on a loop, like most children. I didn’t truly identify as joy-filled until I was nearing twenty, when I was old enough to understand that joy isn’t a feeling that happens to you. It’s a choice you make. Repeatedly. Even when, especially when, circumstances aren’t cooperating.

Three decades on and I am still completely, unreservedly in love with life. Unimpressed by society’s version of it, absolutely. But navigating contentedly on the outskirts, still painting my world in hues of yellow, blue and grey.

So what IS The Rebel Joy Society, and why does any of this matter?

This is a space for women (and maybe some introspective fellas) who are awake enough to notice something is missing, and honest enough to stop pretending otherwise. Those who have followed the conventional path and found the pay-off conspicuously absent. Folks who are spiritually curious but organized religion doesn’t quite fit. Kindred souls who lie awake at 2 am wondering if the rat race is really all there is.

We’re not broken. We’re not ungrateful. We’re restless in way that deserves to be investigated and handled with care, rather than medicated or managed away.

I won’t be handing you a five-step system for a meaningful life or waving a magic wand to install a blueprint for purpose. What I would like to do is create a space where your questions get to breathe. Where curiosity is more welcome than certainty. Where the examined life, the one Socrates literally died defending, becomes something we practice together, intentionally yet without pressure.

This is a community fueled by contemplation. And you are so welcome here.

Each week, I’ll land in your inbox with something worth sitting with. Maybe Sundays or Wednesdays. I’m still learning the rhythm of this space. I want to be consistent, but I’ve never been an over-achiever. Towards the end of the week, I plan to drop something shorter in your Substack Notes: a thought, a provocation, a question to carry into your weekend.

Please find a comfortable seat. We’re just getting started.