The Joy Series: How to Reclaim Your Joy – The Battle Worth Fighting
Post 4 of the Joy Series
We have been on quite a journey together.
In Post 1, I told you my story. The day my husband of 37 years walked out and joy disappeared completely. The decade-long fight to find it again. The garden and the fog and the small, stubborn flicker that refused to go out.
In Post 2, we explored what joy actually is. Not an emotion like happiness, but something deeper. A part of your being. The garden, not just the flower.
In Post 3, we traveled the world and discovered that the cultures with the deepest relationship with joy are the ones that root it in something constant. Nature. Community. Simplicity. Presence. And now we are here. Post 4. The one I have been building toward from the very beginning.
This is the practical roadmap. This is what I actually did, step by painful step, to reclaim my joy. And this is my promise to you: if I could do it, after everything I lost and everything I survived, you can too.
First, the Truth Nobody Tells You
Joy does not come back quickly. I want to say that clearly and without apology before we go any further, because I think one of the cruelest things we do to people in pain is suggest that healing has a tidy timeline. It does not.
For me, reclaiming joy was not a matter of weeks or even months. It was years. It was a slow, nonlinear, exhausting process of accepting the pain, reshaping my mindset, and choosing, over and over again, to keep searching even when I could not see anything worth finding. And it was worth every single hard day.
The Foundation: Accept the Pain Before You Fight It
The first step in reclaiming your joy is perhaps the hardest one. You have to accept the pain. Not push it away. Not perform happiness before you feel it. Not rush past the grief to get to the good part. Accept it.
I had to sit with the reality of what had happened to me. The end of a 37-year marriage. The loss of a life I had built and loved and believed in. The confusion and the devastation and the very real possibility, in those darkest moments, that joy might never come back.
Accepting the pain does not mean surrendering to it. It means acknowledging it honestly so that you can begin the work of moving through it rather than being trapped by it. You cannot reclaim something you have not first acknowledged losing.
Step 1: Just Get Out of Bed
I mean this literally.
In the early days after my husband left, getting out of bed in the morning was genuinely one of the hardest things I did. Everything in me wanted to stay hidden. To pull the covers over my head and disappear from a life that no longer made sense.
But I got up. Not because I wanted to. Not because I felt hopeful or motivated or ready. I got up because somewhere deep inside, beneath all the pain and confusion, something small and stubborn refused to give up entirely.
If you are in that place right now, I want to give you the smallest, most honest piece of advice I have: just get up. That is enough for today. You do not have to feel joy. You do not have to feel anything. Just put your feet on the floor. That is where the road back begins.
Step 2: Search for Beauty in the Pain
This one changed everything for me.
I made a decision, somewhere in the middle of the hardest season of my life, to actively search for beauty every single day. Not grand, dramatic beauty. Not happiness. Just small, quiet moments of loveliness that existed even inside the pain.
A butterfly that landed on my knee. A smile from a stranger. The way the light looked through the window on a quiet morning.
These things were always there. But if I had not been searching for them, I would never have seen them. Pain has a way of narrowing your vision until all you can see is the darkness. Searching for beauty is how you widen it again, just a little, just enough to let some light in.
Start small. One beautiful thing per day. Write it down if you have to. Train your eyes to look for it. Because joy lives in the small and the simple, and it will not announce itself. You have to go looking.
Step 3: Force Yourself to Do What You Used to Love
This is the step that I believe saved me more than any other.
Before my ex-husband left, I loved photography. I loved cooking. I loved going on adventures and reading and exploring new places. When he left, I lost all of it. Not just the activities. The love for them. The desire. The care. It all went quiet.
And so I forced myself to go back to them anyway. Not because I wanted to. Not because it felt good. Because I refused to let pain take everything from me.
I remember charging my camera and driving to the garden in a fog of grief so thick I could barely see through it. I walked every path. I took almost no photos. I felt nothing I could call joy. But I went. And I kept going.
And here is the miracle of it. Slowly, over months and then years, the love came back. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just a quiet flicker here and there. A moment of genuine pleasure in a photo. A recipe that made me smile. An adventure that reminded me life was still worth living.
Forcing yourself to do what you used to love does not bring joy back in an hour or a week. But it opens the door. And once the door is open, joy finds its way back in.
Step 4: Speak Life Into Yourself Every Day
In the years when I was fighting my way back, words became one of my most powerful tools. I repeated mantras. I read Scripture. I wrote lists of things I was grateful for. I told myself, even when I did not fully believe it: life is an adventure. You can do this. You are going to be okay.
It felt hollow at first. Like talking to an empty room. But I kept going. And eventually, the words began to take root. The mindset began to shift. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I began to believe what I was saying.
Your mind is a garden too. What you plant in it grows. Plant words of hope and courage and beauty, even before you feel them, and in time they will bloom.
Step 5: Reshape Your Normal
One of the most disorienting things about a major life upheaval is that the life you knew no longer exists. The routines, the rhythms, the shared moments that made up your daily world are gone. And in their absence is a silence that can feel unbearable.
The work of reclaiming joy involves, in part, the work of building a new normal. Not a replacement for what you lost. Something new. Something that belongs entirely to you.
For me, this meant learning to take care of myself in ways I had never had to before. Making lists. Keeping routines. Cooking for one and deciding that the meal still mattered. Going on adventures alone and discovering that solo travel had its own kind of freedom and joy.
It is uncomfortable at first. But building your new normal is one of the most powerful acts of self-reclamation there is.
Step 6: Do Not Give Up
I want to end with this, because it is the most important thing I can say.
There will be days when the joy feels completely gone again. When you have done everything right and still wake up in the dark with nothing but pain for company. When you wonder if all the fighting is worth it. It is worth it.
Do not stay in bed all day even when every single part of you is begging to. Do not give up on the garden even when nothing seems to be growing. Do not stop searching for the butterfly, the stranger’s smile, the light through the window.
Fight for yourself. Fight for your life. Fight for your joy. Because it is still there, buried under the pain, waiting for you to uncover it.
I know it is there because I found mine. After more than a decade of fighting, through grief and betrayal trauma and more dark mornings than I can count, I found my way back.
And what I found on the other side was not just the joy I had lost. It was a better, deeper, more intentional joy than I had ever known before. A joy I had earned. A joy I had chosen. A joy rooted in hope and faith and the quiet, stubborn beauty of a life fully lived. That is waiting for you too.
Your Roadmap: A Simple Summary
If you are in the middle of the fight right now, here is what I want you to hold onto:
- Accept the pain. You cannot move through what you will not acknowledge.
- Just get out of bed. One small step is enough for today.
- Search for beauty every day. One small, quiet thing. Write it down.
- Force yourself back to the things you used to love. Even when you do not feel like it. Especially then.
- Speak life into yourself. Mantras, Scripture, gratitude lists. Plant good things in your mind.
- Build your new normal. Piece by piece, day by day.
- Do not give up. Your joy is still there. It is waiting for you.
If this series has touched your heart, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment below and tell me where you are on your own journey back to joy. You are not alone, and your story matters.
God Bless You On Your Journey,
KathieyV
kathieyvwriter@gmail.com