The moment you abandon your joy is the moment you lose everything
The day I stopped chasing happiness and finally found joy.
"You are shining so bright. I am so proud of you, Noel" My dear friend Mar left me that message this week. And I sat with it for a long time.
Because she is right. When I am on a stage, when I am writing something that moves people, when I am in a room full of women ready to go deeper into themselves, something in me ignites. I am not performing. I am not working. I am being exactly who I am supposed to be. That is not happiness. That is joy. And I know the difference because I know exactly where it comes from.
It comes from alignment. From living inside my values. From creating and serving and showing up in the ways that are most essentially me.
But here is what I have been learning, the hard way, this past month.
When life gets complicated, and it has been very complicated lately, something quietly happens. The problems start demanding all of your attention. The challenges stack up. The things you need to fix multiply. And without even realizing it, you start spending less time on the things that make you shine. Less time writing. Less time creating. Less time serving. Less time being you.
And here is where it gets painful.
Because the less time you spend in alignment, the lower your energy drops. And the lower your energy drops, the harder everything becomes. The problems feel bigger. The solutions feel further away. You stop vibrating at the frequency that attracts everything good into your life and start vibrating at the frequency of the problem itself.
You become the problem.
I have seen this with people I love. I have lived it myself. There is a myth that when life gets hard, the responsible thing is to give your problems everything you have. To put your head down and grind through it. And yes, you need to be on top of things. That part is true.
But what nobody tells you is that the moment you abandon your joy to fight your battles, you lose the very thing that makes you powerful enough to win them.
The more stress there is, the more you need to lean into your strengths. The more problems you face, the more you need the things that bring you alive. Not less. More.
Thank you, Mar. For seeing me. For reminding me of what I forget when life gets loud.
That is the distinction I want to sit with today. Between happiness, which depends on what is happening around you and disappears the moment things get hard, and joy, which lives in alignment with your values, your gifts, your truest self. Joy is not something life can take from you. But you can walk away from it without noticing.
And walking back toward it is always the most important thing you can do. For yourself. For the people around you. For everything you are trying to build.
That is exactly what we explored inside this month's Magic Garden Circle.
Together, we mapped the Wheel of Joy and asked the questions most people are too busy to ask.
Where is the color?
Where has it faded?
Where are your values fully alive?
And where have they quietly gone silent?
Watching these women reconnect with what truly brings them alive reminded me, once again, that joy isn't something we find.
It's something we choose to make space for.
And that's exactly what we do inside Magic Garden Circle every month.
Each gathering opens a new conversation, a new creative practice, and a new opportunity to come back to yourself.
If something in this letter is speaking to you, I'd love to welcome you into the garden before our next gathering.
