EP 0066 – Finding Joy

EP 0066 – Finding Joy

It’s Not You – It’s Your Fear of Joy

You’ve spent years armored against pain, scanning every room, bracing for the next hit. But the same walls keeping danger out are suffocating your joy. Happiness feels dangerous because being present means dropping the guard—and you’ve been trained to believe that dropping it gets you destroyed. Joy isn’t missing. It’s buried under decades of hyper-vigilance you still call protection.

The Armor You Built to Survive
Joy requires presence, and presence requires trust—trust that you can handle whatever comes next. But when childhood taught you that happiness is followed by humiliation, abandonment, or sudden loss, your nervous system learned to cap joy at the exact level you can tolerate without shattering. You scan, you prepare, you over-function, you stay busy, you collect things and people to fill the void. All of it is preparation for the shoe to drop. The tragedy is that you’re exhausting yourself defending against losses that haven’t happened yet, while the real loss—your capacity to feel alive—is happening right now.

Why Joy Feels Like a Threat
You avoid joy because joy makes you vulnerable. When you’re laughing, soft, open, you’re not scanning for threats. That openness once got you hurt, so now joy triggers the old alarm: “If I let my guard down, I’ll be caught off guard again.” Staying mildly miserable feels safer than risking the high of happiness followed by the crash. You’ve seen joy in others and judged it—too naive, too reckless, probably fake. Deep down, you believe people who look that free are either oblivious or about to get wrecked. So you stay vigilant, and vigilance starves joy.

The Prison of Constant Preparation
The price is steep. You live half-alive, addicted to distractions that numb rather than nourish. Overwhelm becomes a lifestyle choice to avoid emptiness. Relationships stay surface-level because real intimacy requires you to stop performing. Success, money, status—they all become elaborate ways to outrun the feeling that you’re not enough. The box you built for safety is now a cage. It’s predictable, small, and soul-deadening. Every time you choose safety over aliveness, you reinforce the belief that you can’t handle the real thing—joy, pain, or both.

Conclusion
The scale is tipped hard toward fear right now, but every time you feel the fear and don’t run, don’t numb, don’t pretend, you shift a single grain of sand. Joy doesn’t arrive as a reward at the end of the tunnel. It grows in the small, unglamorous moments when you refuse to abandon yourself. Picture your hand finally unclenching—not because the world became safe, but because you became strong enough to hold both the terror and the tenderness at once. That grip, loose yet steady, is where real freedom begins.