A Dangerous Declaration

‘My energy is joy’ sounds like the sort of thing someone might say while trying to sell you both a crystal and an essential oil subscription. And yet, here we are. I’m saying it. Without sandals. Without shame. It’s not a mantra. It’s a mutiny.

You see, joy has become suspicious. Smug. Irritating. The sort of guest who doesn’t bring wine but insists on rearranging your spice rack. We’re taught to treat joy like dessert—only after you’ve choked down your vegetables, paid your mortgage, and apologised for the things you liked as a child.

But here’s the heresy:

I don’t think joy should be earned. I think it should be the default setting.

Plugged in at the wall. Not a bonus round. Not conditional. In a world that rewards stress and hands out medals for burnout, joy is the most radical energy source we’ve got. And frankly, I’m done apologising for running on it.

The Joy in Ordinary Things

Joy isn’t the glittering confetti explosion it’s been marketed as. It’s more of a slow leak. A silent giggle. A perfectly timed cup of tea.

There’s joy in the loo that flushes properly, in the charger that works first go, in finding a parking spot near the entrance and pretending it was skill, not dumb luck. There’s joy in the child who finally pronounces ‘spaghetti’ right—and joy in the three years before that when they called it ‘baskhetti’ and insisted it was a fruit.

Joy sneaks in when the Wi-Fi reconnects after a power cut. When your phone survives a fall face-down. When you sit down and realise—just in time—that the toilet paper hasn’t run out. We keep waiting for joy to announce itself with a fanfare. But most days, it just hums in the background, like a boiler with opinions. If you’re not careful, you’ll miss it.

We’re told to chase big joy—promotion joy, proposal joy, dream-holiday joy. But those are exceptions. Outliers. Like seeing a flamingo in Yorkshire. Most joy, the good kind, is found in the loyal repetition of the everyday. It’s subtle. It’s stubborn. And it’s right there. Usually—next to the bin.

The Comedy of Togetherness

Love, they said, would be enough. They forgot to mention bin night, shared passwords, and the petty tyrannies of thermostat control. No one tells you that intimacy sounds like:

‘Have you seen my left sock?’

‘That’s not how the dishwasher works.’

That romance will one day involve one of you trimming the other’s eyebrows without comment. Or that the true test of devotion is letting them choose the film even though you know it’ll be a three-hour documentary about fishing in the Baltics.

Children, if you have them, don’t so much arrive as erupt. They turn your life into a game show where the rules change hourly, and the prize is uninterrupted sleep. Still, they invent words. They cry with their whole bodies. They dance like the laws of physics are merely suggestions. You can’t help but love them, even while calculating how long until bedtime.

And families—whether chosen or inherited—are less about harmony and more about surviving each other’s musical tastes, politics, and opinions on gravy. Joy isn’t what happens when people behave. It’s what happens when they don’t. When someone farts during grace. When your mum says ‘arse’ in church. When love forgets itself and just starts laughing.

The Secret Laughter of Grownups

The best friends are the ones who’ve seen you drunk, sobbing, unshaven—or all three at once—and still ask if you fancy a curry. They know the names of your exes, your insecurities, and which song will make you ugly cry. They remember who you were before you got managerial, cautious, or tired. You return the favour by deleting photos that should never see daylight.

At work, joy is rarely in the job description. But sometimes it slips in through the cracks—like sunlight through broken blinds. A colleague who swears creatively. The collective sigh when someone finally says what everyone else is thinking. Birthday cake that tastes like carpet but still gets eaten.

You don’t need a job with purpose so much as people with pulse. Someone who’ll pass you a biscuit during a budget meeting and raise one eyebrow when the PowerPoint freezes again. This is joy, dressed in office wear. Quiet. Enduring. Surreptitiously glorious.

The Glorious Art of Being Human

Some errors are private—like waving back at someone who wasn’t waving at you or confidently calling someone by the wrong name for seven months. Others are public—like applying for a job you weren’t qualified for, getting it, and then promptly discovering why you weren’t. Still, you survive.

We are not, on the whole, tidy creatures. We spill things. We forget birthdays. We say things we shouldn’t and fail to say the things we should. And yet—somehow—people still invite us to dinner. Still pick up the phone. Joy, it turns out, isn’t reserved for the flawless. If anything, it has a fondness for the flawed. It shows up like a bad influence at a hen do, whispering,

‘You’re ridiculous—but still entirely loveable.’

There are regrets I keep like pressed flowers: not because they’re beautiful, but because they taught me to stop pretending I had it all figured out.

There’s dignity in being humbled. Grace in the laugh you manage three days after humiliation. We talk of ‘growing from our mistakes’, but sometimes it’s enough just to smile in their direction and keep going. Joy doesn’t ask you to be perfect. It only asks you to stay in the game.

The Return Path to Joy

Grief has an excellent poker face. It can show up anywhere—at weddings, barbecues, the frozen peas aisle. One minute you’re choosing between petit pois and garden variety, the next you’re crying because they liked the ones in the microwavable bag.

Loss doesn’t always announce itself with black veils and tragic music. Sometimes it’s just silence. The kind that rings. The kind that keeps forgetting itself and expecting someone to walk in the door.

We like to pretend joy and grief take turns. That one packs up when the other arrives. But they don’t. They overlap like bad scheduling. You’ll find yourself laughing at a funeral, weeping at a birthday party, feeling something too much because once you felt everything at once and survived.

Joy returns—eventually—not like a parade, but like an old dog. Quiet. Persistent. Curling up beside the ache without trying to fix it. It doesn’t need to erase what was lost. Just sit beside it long enough for you to remember who you are—when you’re not breaking. That’s the secret no one tells you:

Joy isn’t what pulls you out of grief. It’s what survives it.

The Daily Rebellion

Joy isn’t a mood. It’s a stance. A refusal to let the bastards have the final say. It doesn’t mean walking around with a deranged grin or pretending your inbox doesn’t resemble the aftermath of a minor flood. It means noticing the good biscuit. It means humming while folding laundry, badly. It means laughing at the day’s absurdity before it eats you.

We’re conditioned to think of joy as the prize for surviving everything else. But some days, joy is the survival. It’s the breakfast you didn’t skip. The text you sent that said ‘thinking of you’ even though you weren’t quite. The four deep breaths before the fifth would have been a scream.

Joy doesn’t need a reason. It is the reason. For staying kind. For turning up. For not giving in to the slow rot of cynicism. It’s small. It’s daily. It’s yours. Take it.

A Toast to the Glorious Everyday

So, here’s to the late-night gigglers and early-morning eye rollers. The overthinkers, underachievers, biscuit dunkers and inappropriate snort-laughers. The ones who’ve cried in loos, danced in kitchens, and clung to hope with teeth and sarcasm.

To the ones who said ‘I love you’ awkwardly, made peace messily, and showed up anyway. To us. May your energy be joy. Not because the world is soft, but because you refuse to let it harden you. Drink your tea. Text your mate. Breathe deeper than you need to. You’re still here.

That’s not nothing. It’s the whole bloody miracle.