We Found Joy: May Edition
"I hysterically sobbed. How dare you and thank you."
In May, I showed you two doors.
One opened outward, onto your own neighborhood seen through new eyes. The other opened inward, toward the child you used to be. I expected most of you to pick the easier one. (And there is no shame in that — sometimes we need to).
But you didn’t. Over and over, you reached for the door you’d been avoiding.
And almost nobody described something grand. There were no skydives. No monumental moves. What you sent me instead were small, specific, quietly brave things.
A library card finally claimed after years of putting it off. A lunch eaten alone, on purpose, with a book. A drive down a road you’d never turned onto.
I often encourage you to see the beauty in what’s already around and inside you, like a naturalist tracking what’s hiding in plain sight. And your reflections from May read like dispatches from the field — if the field was your ordinary life.
New Neighborhood Challenge
For the ones who went outward, it wasn’t really about sightseeing.
Submission after submission started the same way — I’ve lived here for years — and ended with a list of firsts.
After 5 years of saying no, Kristi, finally said YES to the Kinetic Sculpture Race and the “Drag Strip Divas” team. She’s already planning on going again next year.
Amy, twelve years in Austin, finally went to see the bats. Cally, five years and three Australian kilometers from a market that’s been running since the late 1800s, walked there for the first time. Judy, twenty-five years in the same city, finally stopped at all the places she used to just drive past and wonder about.
Read closer and it was never about the bats or the markets. It’s about finding joy in your community. Listen to what Jenn wrote, after finding places she didn’t know existed:
“…it just made me feel a sense of joy in my community I haven’t felt in way too long. It might sound silly, but it healed a part of me that I didn’t realize was even broken.”
That’s the secret of the outward door. You think you’re going to find your neighborhood. You come back having found something of yourself.
Inner Child Challenge
And the ones who went inward weren’t really standing still.
The women who sat down with their younger selves weren’t retreating. They were reaching — out, and back — for someone who’d been waiting a long time.
Allison’s whole reflection was one line:
“I hysterically sobbed. How dare you and thank you.”
Tory wrote her younger self a letter and cried through all of it:
“…because most of it was things I didn’t realize I was still waiting to hear.”
Liza wrote to herself at five and told her that what was coming wasn’t her fault. She signed it:
“You are love and light. I love you, Liza.”
There was a quiet theme running through a lot of your reflections. So many of you wrote: I finally let myself.
Jade let herself go to an event alone:
“It’s OK to say that I want to go somewhere to do something for just me.”
Sarah let herself walk into a thrift store without shame and walked out with a fifty-dollar sequined gown for her 50th birthday. She saw herself:
“…not as the poor kid, but as the kid with unique style.”
Kris let herself do the ballet solo she was never allowed as a child.
Julie let herself set out her great-grandmother’s china for a tea party of one.
Victoria put it most plainly:
“Giving myself permission to put myself first was the hardest thing to say” — and the thing she most wanted to keep practicing.
And then there were the ones I had to sit with for a while. The ones that moved me to tears.
Nicole, deep in grief after losing her mother, used the challenge to say yes to small joys when joy felt impossible — a movie on a lawn, a beach walk alone she’d always been too scared to take.
“If it sounded joy-like, I did it. There was a lot of power in just saying yes.”
R. started the month with a sound bath and ended it in a hospital bed with sepsis, writing to me on June 1st:
“Life really happened, hard, in May. But I’m ready to find Joy in June.”
Jennifer wrote:
“At first the inner child challenge was terrifying. I don’t have the life I had imagined when I was 10-13 years old… I looked at her hopes and dreams, what she wanted for her life, and her future family.”
Then she wrote down “some new goals and implemented some changes” and picked up a paintbrush — her house will be blue and white by end of summer.
None of those are small, and all of them are. That’s the paradox you keep teaching me.
Whether you walked out your front door or sat down on the floor with the kid you used to be, you did the same brave thing. You decided you were worth the time. You gave yourself permission to take up space.
That doesn’t sound like much.
It is, in fact, everything.
With so much joy,
Finding joy on purpose. One badge at a time.
P.S. My background as a therapist informs everything we do here at Joy Finders, but this program is not therapy or mental health treatment. It’s a playground for you to explore joyfully, connect meaningfully, and chase everyday enchantment
Wasn’t expecting to cry first thing in the morning, but I went ahead and did, because these are so beautiful!
My edible canvas. A lemon cake with candied citrus and edible flowers.