Joy is a survival strategy

Staying informed on current affairs feels like microdosing hell.

Every day you wake up, tell yourself you won't check the news, open the apps anyway, scroll on social media to see even more doom …

You think that it's a duty to keep educating yourself on what impacts others. You believe you owe people who haven't had the privilege to be born with your passport, perhaps your skin colour or your social economic status to look at the horrors of what's going on dead in the eyes.

You feel weighed down by survivor's guilt, wondering what is in your power to heal the entire world.

And in the middle of all of that, you feel almost embarrassed to tend to your own joy.

Like laughing is a betrayal. Like choosing colour, beauty, pleasure, is something you have to earn once the world gets better. As if you should wait.

You are a healer. A coach, a therapist, a yoga teacher, a bodyworker, a guide. People come to you depleted and leave with something restored. That is not small. That is not separate from what's happening in the world, it is a direct response to it.

And you cannot pour from a vessel you've been slowly emptying since 2020.

Joy is not the reward you get after fixing everything. It is the fuel, it is the thing that keeps you showing up on a Tuesday morning when the news is bad and your nervous system is fried and someone still needs you to hold space.

The most radical thing a healer can do right now is refuse to burn out.

To protect their capacity to care, to stay in business. To keep their doors open for the people who need them.

I am not asking you to look away. I am asking you to build a practice, a business, a brand, a life, that can sustain you through this. So that you are still here next year. And the year after that.

Your joy is not a betrayal of the people suffering.

It is what makes you useful to them.

Tend to it like it matters. Because it does. 🌷