01The Line That Became a Life
It was Alfred Lord Tennyson who wrote it. I came across the line years ago, half-awake in a season of my life that felt grey and a little groundless — a stretch between things, between the woman I had been and whoever I was becoming. The words stopped me cold: what joy is mine. Not a question. A declaration. A quiet, almost surprised claiming of something good.
I sat with that for a long time.
Because joy — real joy, not the kind you post — had started to feel like something that happened to other people. It arrived in my feed in the form of other women's highlight reels: their kitchens, their relationships, their bodies and babies and beautiful mornings. I kept scanning their images for proof that I was doing something wrong. I wasn't doing anything wrong. I just hadn't looked at my own life honestly enough to see what was already there.
This blog is where I started looking.
I'm Joy — and this is the strange, ordinary, tender record of a real woman's life in California. I write about the fights that opened something good in us, about the long road back to loving a body that has carried so much, about the unglamorous truth of early motherhood and the almost unbearable sweetness of it. About heartbreak. About getting dressed in the morning as an act of quiet faith. About the small rituals that hold a life together when nothing else seems to.
I'm not an expert in any of it. I'm not a therapist, not a coach, not a doctor. I am a woman who has sat on the bathroom floor more than once and had to find her way back to herself — and who learned, slowly, that the finding was the whole point.
I’ll tell the truth, which feels more valuable than right.
When I named this space What Joy Is Mine, I wanted to hold that same energy Tennyson had — that slightly astonished sense of: wait, this is good. This moment, this person, this body, this life. Even the hard parts. Especially the hard parts, because they are the ones that finally taught me how to pay attention.
I won't always get things right here. But I'll tell the truth, which feels more valuable than right.
If you're somewhere in a grey stretch of your own — between the woman you were and whoever you're becoming — I hope you find something in these pages that makes you stop and look at your own life. Really look.
You might be surprised by what you see.