The Joy Series:When Joy Goes Silent

 

Post 1 of the Joy Series

The day my husband of 37 years walked out, joy didn’t just fade. It vanished. Completely. Like someone had quietly switched off a light that I had no idea how to turn back on.

I had no idea it would take me more than a decade to find the switch again.

I want to tell you that story, because if you are reading this and joy feels like a distant memory right now, I want you to know something before we go any further: the fact that you are still looking for it means it is not gone. It is waiting. And the fight to get it back, as long and as hard as that fight may be, is absolutely worth it.

What Joy Actually Is

The Oxford Dictionary defines joy as “a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.”

But here is what I have learned from living inside the absence of it for years: that definition is incomplete.

Joy is not just a feeling. A feeling is temporary. A feeling comes and goes with your circumstances. What I discovered, through a long and painful journey, is that joy is something deeper. It is a state you can choose to cultivate, even when every emotion in your body is screaming otherwise. It is the difference between waiting for life to feel good again and deciding, in the middle of the hardest chapter, to search for something worth holding onto.

Happiness is what you feel when things go well. Joy is what sustains you when they do not.

And I had to learn that the hard way.

The Day the Joy Left

Before my ex-husband left, I was a woman who found joy in so many things. Photography was one of my greatest loves. I would go to a local garden with two cameras and spend hours photographing flowers, completely absorbed, completely at peace. I cooked. I read. I went on adventures. Life had texture and color and meaning.

And then, almost overnight, it did not.

I remember standing in my kitchen in the weeks after he left and feeling nothing. Not sadness, not anger, just a hollow, gray kind of emptiness. The things I used to love felt like strangers. Picking up a camera felt pointless. Cooking felt like a chore. Getting out of bed felt like climbing a mountain.

I had no hope. And without hope, I found that joy had no place to live.

What I did not understand then was that losing my joy was not a character flaw or a sign of weakness. It was the natural result of deep damage. When you have been hurt at that level, when the person who was supposed to be your partner walks away from 37 years of shared life, something inside you breaks. And broken things do not just heal because you want them to.

They heal because you fight for them.

The Fight I Did Not Know I Was In

I will be honest with you. In those early years, I did not recognize what I was doing as fighting. It felt more like survival. I told myself, as a way of forcing myself to keep moving, that “life is an adventure.” Looking back, I can see that I was desperately trying to locate a reason to stay curious about being alive.

One small moment stands out above all others.

About a year after he left, a quiet little voice in my head told me to go back to the garden. To charge my camera and go. I did not want to. I genuinely did not care. But I listened.

I remember that day with such clarity. I walked through those gardens as though I was in a thick fog. My feet were heavy. My heart was heavier. I could barely force myself to put the camera to my face. I took very few photos. I felt nothing I could call joy.

But I went. And I kept going.

Slowly, over months and then years, something began to shift. The fog started to thin. The colors of the flowers began to register again. A kind of quiet recognition would come over me: I love this. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a small, stubborn flicker.

That flicker was the beginning.

Why I Am Writing This Series

Joy is not the same as happiness. Happiness shifts with your circumstances. It is personal and fleeting. What brings you happiness may bring me none, and that is perfectly fine.

But joy goes deeper than that. Joy lives in the spirit. It is not dependent on what is happening around you. It is something you can cultivate, protect, and carry with you even through the hardest seasons of your life. In that way, joy is really a form of hope. And hope, I have learned, is what keeps us breathing when nothing else makes sense.

It took me more than a decade to fully understand that. I want to be honest about that timeline because I think the world does a real disservice to people in pain by suggesting that healing is quick. It is not always quick. Sometimes it is slow and nonlinear and full of setbacks. Sometimes you think you have found your joy again and then life hits you hard and it goes quiet once more.

But it always came back. Every time, it came back.

And what I have learned through that long, hard journey is that joy is something you can actively pursue, protect, and rebuild. It lives in the spirit, not in your circumstances. That means no one and nothing can permanently take it from you, not if you are willing to fight for it.

This series is my attempt to share what I have learned. Not from a textbook, but from the inside of a broken life that slowly, stubbornly became a beautiful one.

What Is Coming in This Series

Over the coming posts, we are going to explore joy together. Here is what I have planned:

 

• Post 2: Joy vs. Happiness. What is the real difference, and why does it matter for how you live your daily life?
• Post 3: Joy Around the World. How different cultures define, protect, and pursue joy, and what we can learn from them.
• Post 4: How to Reclaim Your Joy. The practical, honest, experience-tested roadmap for finding your way back.

Your First Step

Before we go any further, I want to give you something to do. Because joy does not come back by thinking about it. It comes back through action, even when the action is small, even when it does not feel like anything at first.

Your homework:

Think of one thing you used to love before life got hard. One thing. Not ten things. Just one.

And this week, do it. Even if you do not feel like it. Even if it feels hollow and pointless. Do it anyway.

You are not doing it to feel joy right away. You are doing it to open the door.

I went to the garden in a fog and took almost no photos, and it was one of the most important things I ever did.

You can take your step too.

I would love to hear from you. What is one thing you used to love that you have stopped doing? Leave it in the comments below. Let’s start this journey together.

God Bless You On Your Journey,

KathieyV
kathieyvwriter@gmail.com