Recently, I’ve been watching my momma do new things. Last year, she acted in a play. She recently started a garden and has been growing all types of fun stuff.. She’s been taking trips and even has a sister-girl circle that meets up regularly. While these things might seems simple, I’m inspired and in awe of her.. My mother had us young and didn’t get to be a kid long enough before becoming a parent. She is also both a breast cancer survivor and a domestic abuse survivor. Those changes effect your brain chemistry, as they say. So in my understanding, my momma has been battling a long time to get to a version of herself that was free enough to play, garden, and be a sister-girl!

I’m am about to endure my own battle. If you’ve been following me a while, you know that my life ain’t been no crystal stair and has just as much grief as it does triumph. But now, as I embark on a separation from my spouse and readjust my life, I’ve decided to keep one thing constant… joy.

It took me a while to learn the difference between joy and happiness. I always knew happiness was temporary; a result of moments and events that brought about a feeling of euphoria and contentment. But what was joy? In confusion, I attached it to moments and events too; it needed people, stuff, and fulfillment to exist. That is to say, I thought joy was the result of continued and ongoing happiness. But chile, that’s wrong.

Now I ain’t looked this up in the dictionary, but this is what I know to be true. Joy is an intentional and voluntary choice to exist above and beyond the mess. I’m gathering this intel from myself. The last couple of weeks, I’ve been so apathetic about a lot of things and I thought it was a lack of care. I thought maybe I was going numb from all the emotional overloading, constant stimulation, and the roller coaster that has been my relationship. But as I sit with myself, dissecting what I feel and where my happiness thrives, I find myself choosing joy.

Remember years ago when I did that Vow of Silence, I feel one of those coming back on. (And I’m having to actively remind myself that this ain’t the same, I’m not back where I started. But I’m taking the same lesson. It’s more than being unbothered, not caring, or ignoring my feelings, cause trust me, my nervous system is evidence that I feel it. But I don’t want to be destroyed by a lack of happiness. Can you have joy without happiness, I think so? Because this… am I happy my marriage is ending? Absolutely not. But am I without joy? No, I still have it. How? Because my joy is a choice. Despite how things might feel, my identity is not rooted in my circumstance. I’ve spent the last two years really working on myself and that progress is something I am damn proud of! I have joy because I choose to be a person who experiences life from the bright side, head up and high.

Just now, I paused to go kick it with my son a bit. We didn’t do anything more than sit on the bed while I ate some trail mix and he pretended my bed was the ocean. He dived in and giggled uncontrollably as he splashed in the fake water and escaped a shark. An old friend would often remind me of the importance of watching children and mimicking what they do. She said we had to go back to our childlike ways to escape some of the pressures of this big grown up world. It helps to remind us to choose joy. So I put down my trail mix and dived in too. I flopped around the bed beside him, the two of us hollering about the shark and laughing like we were the same age.

As I consider my future and try hard not to focus on the past, I am excited about moving forward with joy as a pillar of my existence. Just like my momma, finding pleasure in simply being alive to do new things and have new experiences, joy is my own responsibility. In the midst of all this, I won’t be burdened when I can choose to be lighter. No one is gonna give you joy, cultivate it for you, or make it their priority they way you can. So yeah, that’s what’s next for me.