Where do you think your joy comes from? Is it your relationship? Your things? Your job? Does it come from food? Or validation from others? Or getting pregnant?
I promise you it comes from none of those things because joy is an emotion triggered by your thoughts. What you think about every day contributes to how much joy you do or do not have in your life.
Nothing else.
If you think things are awful all the time you’re likely to have fewer joy-filled moments than someone else who thinks more optimistically.
But we aren’t hard-wired to be joyful all of the time. The human experience is filled with challenging moments that are meant to be just that: challenging.
Take infertility for example. If we skipped and sang ourselves all the way to the fertility clinic every time, we might get a strange look from the nurses and doctors.
But many of us carry around negative thoughts about our infertility experience everywhere we go – the park, the grocery store, the dentist.
Okay, okay, so you don’t have to be joy-filled at the dentist either. But take a moment to recognize what you are letting yourself think when you are in those spaces. Does the negative emotion attached to your infertility struggle show up everywhere you go?
For most of is, it does. We let the experience of infertility cast a dark shadow over the rest of our life because we think it should.
I promise you, it doesn’t have to be that way.
You can be experiencing everything about infertility and still have joy in your life. You can be in the depths of the struggle and still smile and find things that make you laugh.
Life is 50/50. Half of the time it is going to feel awesome and half of the time it is going to suck. That is just how it is.
The difference comes with how you respond to the half that is awful. Do you drown your sorrows with alcohol? Do you eat all of the cookies in the package? Or do you learn how to feel and process your emotions before responding in a way that doesn’t serve you?
No matter what, you get to decide. Always.
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