On Origin Stories and Becoming
Welcome to the Rebel Joy Society
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.
