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SOUL WRITING
Practicing Soulful Joy One Smile At A Time
Be Intentional to it Every Day
Joy is not a concept or emotion that I understood or embraced early in life. You can blame it on family dynamics or parental modeling or … That doesn’t mean I didn’t innately know joy. Some people call it coping mechanisms. I refer to it as sprinkles of joy. It was my way of knowing that something moved me from bitterness and pain to joy and gratitude.
The definition of joy is “a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.” It comes from Old French joie, from the Latin Gaudium or gaudiere — rejoice.
When I needed to process, I wrote. First, I started with poems, then journaling, then essays for my college newspaper. When I learned the alphabet, I began to form sentences. My writing brought a feeling of great pleasure and happiness, and though I might not have shared a lot of my words with the world, I rejoiced that I was able to place them somewhere, outside of my heart, mind, and soul.
The counter to joy is sorrow or sadness. Experiencing sorrow or sadness can be the stepping stones to happiness. I know, I know. Please don’t throw anything at me. It’s hard in the moment. That’s the point, right?
I think I innately knew that writing was my journey to joy. I knew that writing…
