Little Joy Letter No. 7
First and foremost, Happy Halloween! 🎃
It's Halloween week, and I have been thinking about rituals.
Halloween is a wonderfully ritualistic holiday, isn't it? Every year, people pick out costumes, carve pumpkins, decorate their homes, and take their children trick-or-treating. Cities host their annual parades, haunted houses, and community celebrations. We pull out the same decorations, watch the same movies, and return to the same traditions year after year. 👻
Blake and I have our own October ritual. Every year, we spend the month watching horror movies. 🔪🍿📼 Some are old favorites, some are wonderfully terrible, and occasionally we stumble across something that genuinely scares us (paranormal activity!). It's something we look forward to every year.
And there's something comforting about all of it. The familiarity. The anticipation. The fact that, no matter how much life changes, we have these little traditions waiting for us.
In fact, Halloween itself has a long history rooted in ritual. Its traditions trace back in part to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. It was believed to be a time when the boundary between the living and the dead grew thin. Over centuries, those traditions intertwined with Christian observances such as All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, evolving into the Halloween we recognize today. 🧙♀️🐈⬛🔮
Think about that. Thousands of years of human beings developing rituals around the changing seasons, the unknown, and even the possibility of lost souls wandering among us.
Which got me thinking.🤔
Human beings are ritualistic creatures. We gravitate toward religion, schedules, routines, traditions, and familiar patterns. We build our lives around things that give us a sense of meaning, belonging, and perhaps a little control over the unknown. 🧘♂️🕉️✨🕯️
But what happens when the rituals we keep aren't things we do, but things we tell ourselves?
I have a confession.
I think soul-searching might be one of my most consistent personal rituals. 🤍🔍📖
I kid you not, I probably tell someone that I'm soul-searching at least once a month.
Ask my husband. ask my friends!
One month, I'm considering another education program. The next, I'm wondering whether I should find a new job. Then I want to start something entirely different, pursue another creative idea, or completely rethink something I've already built.
Hell, even The Little Joys of Art has been through its own identity crisis because I decided I needed to do a little more soul-searching.
And the truth is, I think I've felt a little lost for most of my life.
The strange part is that I can't entirely explain why.
Ever since I was a child, I have carried this belief that I was supposed to make a difference. Change the world. Do something big.
I joke about it, but it really has been a story I've told myself for as long as I can remember.
“i am meant to do amazing things!”🤩
And somewhere along the way, I think I absorbed the idea that making a difference meant becoming someone important. Someone successful. Someone with money, recognition, influence, or a name people knew.
Of course, as an adult, I know that doing amazing things does not mean you have to be famous.
I know that making a difference can happen in the smallest of moments. In the way we lead, the way we love, the way we show up for people, and the way we leave something just a little better than we found it.
I know that.
My life has not been miraculously changed by a famous person. My life has been changed by people closest to me- family, friends, doctors, work colleagues, and (hate to admit this) exes.
But knowing something and actually believing it about yourself are two very different things.
Which brings me to something else that happened this week.
I had the opportunity to hear an absolutely fabulous talk by Cam F. Awesome, a championship boxer and motivational speaker whose story revolves around failure, resilience, and learning how to redefine what it means to win.
There was so much to take away from his talk, particularly around how our losses and experiences help shape us.
But what has really stuck with me is the idea of how we talk to ourselves.
The stories we repeat over and over again. The language we use. The things we believe about ourselves simply because we've been telling ourselves those same things for years.
And how much of that language is learned?
Think about your first reaction when you make a mistake.
I'll tell you mine.
"WTF, Joy? What is wrong with you?" 🤦♀️
Seriously. That's my immediate internal response.
Not, "Well, that didn't go as planned."
Not, "Okay, what can I learn from this?"
Just immediate frustration and anger with myself.
And the ridiculous thing is, if someone on my team made that exact same mistake, I would never respond to them that way.
I would talk through what happened. Figure out what we could learn. Remind them that mistakes are part of growing and that we move forward by learning from them.
I can extend that grace to other people without a second thought.
But myself?
I'm terrible at it.
And there I go again.
I'm terrible at it. 🤦♀️
See how quickly that happens?
Cam's talk had me thinking about how many of these patterns we learn long before we have the ability to question them. The way we hear adults talk about themselves. The way failure is discussed. The way achievement gets celebrated while the messy, complicated process of becoming someone is often overlooked.
We absorb those messages. We repeat them. Eventually, they become part of our own internal dialogue.
And now I'm wondering just how much of that internal dialogue is responsible for this constant feeling of being lost.
Because if I've spent most of my life telling myself that I'm destined to do something bigger, something more important, something more, then what happens when I'm simply living my life?
What happens when things are actually good? ☀️🏡🌱💛
Would I recognize contentment if I found it? 🥂✨🥳💖
Or would I immediately start looking for whatever comes next?
I don't think there's anything wrong with dreaming. In fact, I think our ability to imagine something better is one of the most extraordinary things about being human. It's how we create, innovate, grow, and change the world around us.
But I am beginning to wonder about the difference between ‘wanting to grow’ AND ‘believing that where we are is never enough’.
More money. More education. Another promotion. A different career. A new project. A new adventure.
We are constantly looking toward the next. 🍀🛣️🌈☀️
And maybe that's healthy.
Maybe that restless curiosity is what keeps us moving forward.
But maybe, sometimes, we are so busy searching for the life we think we're supposed to have that we forget to notice the one we're already living.
And if that's true, how would we ever know when we've arrived?
I started this letter thinking about Halloween rituals, ghosts, and the idea of lost souls. 🌫️🚶♂️🌫️
And somehow I've ended up wondering whether we're all a little haunted.
Not necessarily by the dead (but I am sure we can easily do a little joy letter on who does haunt each of us), but by the versions of ourselves we thought we would become.
The lives we haven't lived.
The opportunities we didn't take.
The accomplishments we haven't achieved.
The lingering suspicion that somewhere out there is a better version of us, and we're supposed to be searching for it.
Isn't that a little terrifying?
To think that we could spend our entire lives chasing something without ever knowing what “it” actually is? and whether we've already found it? 🌀
I don't have an answer.
I don't even know if feeling lost is necessarily a bad thing.
But I do wonder whether some of us have become so accustomed to the soul searching that we've forgotten what it feels like to simply be found. to sit in our current self.
So, this Halloween, while we're celebrating all things spooky, I have a question for you. it is the same one i have asked myself this week.
Are you searching for something because you genuinely want something different, or because you've spent your whole life telling yourself that what you have isn't enough?
And perhaps the most haunting question of all: 😱
Would you recognize happiness if you weren't looking for something more?
Until next time,
Joy🩷
The Little Joys of Art