Why We Sabotage Our Own Joy and How to Finally Let Goodness Land
I have a confession to make, just between you and me. A few months back, I got an email that should have made me pop champagne. It was the kind of career news you screenshot and send to your mom, the kind that validates years of thankless grinding in the content mines. It’s a fuck yeah, I was right all along type of moment, a complete flashstorm hitting a scorching desert out of the blue (yes, that desert is my paid writing opportunities) and here I am - reading, re-reading, my heart doing its frantic, hummingbird thing in my chest.
But the feeling wasn't elation. It was the cold, metallic taste of pure dread. My first thought wasn't: “Yes! I did it!” followed by a BBC sound effect library-perfect champagne pop. It was: “Oh god, this is the part where they realize I’m just three kids in a trench coat pretending to be an adult.”
I spent the next hour not celebrating, but actively mapping out every possible way this good news could curdle into a spectacular public failure. By the mid-afternoon, I could list all the reasons why albeit a flattering offer, this came in the worst possible time & saying yes would require moving mountains. It would mean leaving home for a few weeks & there’s just not enough time to plan accordingly, so tough titties. Dream on, beautiful dreamer. Wasn’t meant to be…
My desperation to find an excuse to sabotage the good thing that hit me out of nowhere was so great, I kid you not: one of my totally legit reasons as for why not saying yes to this amazing offer was - if I leave right now, who will pick up the Vintage order package that’s meant to arrive next week (my husband is fully capable and more often than not asked to that anyway) AND my cats will forget my face (they don’t care).
I know…
I sabotaged my own victory before it even had a chance to land. And I bet you know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?
It’s that gremlin that whispers in your ear when someone you’re dating is kind, attentive & emotionally available - and you immediately think, “What’s the catch? What do they want from me? Oh god, I’m inside my own Dirty John storyline & they will make podcasts about me!”
It’s the full-body flinch that happens when a stranger offers a genuine compliment, compelling you to deflect it with self-deprecation as if it were a live grenade. (If like me, you spent anytime living in the UK, this is possibly still your default modus operandi.)
We have become a culture that is profoundly, deeply terrified of good things. We are fluent in the language of anxiety and cynicism, but when it comes to receiving joy, we are barely literate.
With our phones acting as little black mirrors of endless global horror, a moment of personal peace can feel like a profound moral failure. We’ve joined a tribe of the righteously anxious, where the price of admission is a constant, low-grade hum of despair - or currently RAGE.
Human identity is forged in the crucible of a fundamental paradox. From our earliest conscious moments, we are subject to two powerful, contradictory commands: first, to belong, and second, to be unique.
Do you remember those moments in our early teens? The awkward fumbling as we tried on different personality outfits, desperate to fit in somewhere - goth kids, jocks, mean girls, theater kids, stoners, nerds… Finding a place within a tribe tells you who you are. It tells you how you speak, what you wear, where you hang out. There is a safety in belonging - we are, of course, conditioned to slot ourselves within a supportive group, because doing this messy ride through life alone is just not an option. From an evolution standpoint, that means peril.
And then, just as you drunkenly but blissfully stumble through and out of your twenties with a better idea of who you are, the script flips entirely. The cultural imperative changes. Suddenly, you are bombarded with platitudes insisting that your ‘weirdness is your superpower’. That the very things which once marked you for exclusion are, in fact, your greatest assets.
The evidence seems compelling: the ridiculed nerds and ostracized loners of a previous generation are now the titans of our world. We are told to look to the ascendant figures of Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, even that alien doomlord Peter Thiel. They are presented as the ultimate proof that individuality wins. But here lies the final, cruel twist of the paradox.
In achieving this apotheosis of the outsider, they have once again found themselves utterly alone, so far removed from the rest of humanity by the sheer scale of their wealth and power that they might as well be extraterrestrials. They (still) don’t belong.
So, it seems that embracing your radical weirdness isn’t the simple answer either. It’s just another kind of isolation, proving there is no single, simple recipe for navigating the chasm between fitting in and standing out.
Humans are made to thrive in company. The whole blue zone longevity secret really does come down to good fats & community. Having a place within your tribe. And in the tribe of the chronically online and socially conscious, the uniform is often outrage. The language is one of crisis.
To admit to feeling blissful feels like you’re breaking the rules, like you’ll be kicked out of the club for not taking the state of the world seriously enough.
As the great writer and psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote:
“To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”
We choose the tribe & in doing so, we exile the part of ourselves that just wants to feel the sun on its face.
So we learn to flinch from goodness. We’ve become deeply, profoundly afraid of it.
This fear of receiving goodness runs deeper than just social pressure. A few months ago, a dear friend looked me dead in the eye and gave me a compliment so generous, so full of love, that I almost fell over. My immediate, visceral reaction was not gratitude. It was panic. I started deflecting, making jokes, minimizing. Also a familiar tic, I bet. I was trying to hand the gift back as fast as possible, like it was a hot coal.
Why are we taught that struggle is noble and ease is suspicious. We’re conditioned to believe that anything we haven’t bled for isn’t truly earned. Honorary shout out to my dear parents. There’s a saying in Czech I had drilled in me my whole childhood. It goes: Bez práce nejsou koláče!
This literally translates as: No work, no pies! But in more nuanced way you could say: You can’t have pie without rolling the dough, or If you don’t knead it, you don’t eat it.
And sure, there’s truth in that, effort does matter. But somewhere along the way, the proverb stopped being a gentle reminder to contribute and turned into a moral decree that joy must be rationed, pleasure must be “paid for” - usually in advance - and anything that comes with ease is either undeserved or a trap.
We’ve been sold the idea that life’s sweetness only counts if it’s sprinkled over the blistered hands and sleepless nights of our own labor. Which is funny, because nature doesn’t seem to operate on that principle at all. Fruit grows on trees without them clocking in a 9-to-5.
Yet here we are, clutching our metaphorical pies like they’re forged medals of endurance, instead of remembering that sometimes, things can simply arrive: ripe, generous, and without a receipt of suffering stapled to them.
🌿✨❤️🔥
This is the exact work I’ve been wrestling with in my own soul…and it’s the reason I crafted my latest guided meditation - The Rebellion of Delight.
It’s not about floating away from the world’s problems. It’s a training ground for the revolution in your own nervous system. It’s a space to practice the dangerous act of paying attention to the small, good things. It asks a question:
What if pleasure wasn’t indulgence, but insurrection?
We’ve been trained to distrust joy. To fear peace. To accept struggle as the baseline.
F*ck that.
The Rebellion of Delight is my new meditation designed to dismantle that fear.
Joy, blessings, grace…they feel like cosmic loopholes we’re about to get busted for exploiting. The poet and philosopher David Whyte defines courage in a way that completely rewired my brain:
“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life.”
Read that again. Not our resistance to life, not our battle against it, but our participation with it. And what is more heartfelt, more vulnerable, more full-throated participation with life than allowing a moment of pure joy to land, unedited, in your heart? To receive a gift without deflecting?
That, my friends, is not weakness. It is an act of terrifying courage.
We’ve forgotten that, as the Persian mystic Rumi said, sorrow is meant to prepare you for joy.
“It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter... Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”
We’ve gotten so used to the sweeping that we bolt the door when a new guest arrives. So here are some little ways to keep that door wide open - through sacred acts of noticing, by relishing the small gods of everyday miracles, and by actively hunting for beauty in a world that some stupid fucking nerds have set on fire.
If you have your own little cheat codes at hand: your secret handshake with the Universe, your ways of sending out positive energy even (or especially) when the going gets tough, please share them in the comments.
Let’s lift each other up!
A Feral Field Guide to Receiving Goodness
So how do we begin this rebellion? How do we unlearn a lifetime of flinching and start building the muscle of reception? I’m not going to lie to you, this is a very much three steps forward, two steps back - type of situation. It won’t take shape of a neat little switch you flip. It’s a clawing, stumbling, come-back-to-yourself kind of practice, fail, remember to try again, feel too exhausted to try, but doing it anyway, and repeat.
It’s choosing the other way, again and again, until it worms its way into your bones and becomes the only way you know.
Here’s what I’ve been messing with. Maybe it’ll spark something in you too.
🌿 Practice the Art of the Tiny “Thank You”
Start small. The next time someone tosses you a compliment: "I like your shirt", "You made a good point in that meeting"..your only job is to resist the urge to deflect. No "Oh, this old thaaang?". No "It was nothing." Just take a breath, look them in the eye and say: "Thank you." RADICAL!
Feel the weird, vulnerable heat of that. Marinate in the urge to take it back and apologize. That awkward burn in your chest is your nervous system making new tracks in the snow. That’s the feeling of a new neural pathway being forged. It’ll feel like hell at first (again - doubly so if you happen to be British). Do it anyway.
👁️ Go on a Beauty Hunt
Five minutes a day. That’s all. Hunt for something beautiful and let it hit you in the ribs. Extra points if you leave your infernal phone behind. Extra extra points if you take it with you, and manage to ignore it for the full duration of your beauty hunt. No posting, no picking it apart, just take it in. The sun bleeding through rusted fire escape bars. The obscene fractal on a dead leaf. Let it feed you like you’ve been starving. Let your eyes drink until they’re drunk.
This is you teaching your gaze to linger, to gorge itself on what’s quietly miraculous. This is you sharpening your vision into a blade that can cut through the algorithm of despair.
And then, maybe do something with it. Not in the sense of “monetize” or “share”. I said it before - we need to end the tyranny of hysterically attempting to convert every simple moment of joy into content, every skill we’re developing, every talent we’re blessed with into a stable income.
I mean: let it leak. Let that fragment of beauty bleed into the way you stir your tea, the way you answer an email, the way you touch someone’s arm when they’re speaking. Let it tint your voice with something softer, or sharper, or more alive.
The point isn’t to hoard beauty like some dragon with a Pinterest board. It’s to let it compost inside you until it grows strange new roots, roots that push through your daily life, breaking up the concrete of habit. Maybe it changes the way you listen. Maybe it makes you slower to judge. Maybe it just lets you smile like you know a secret no one can scroll past. Whatever it does, let it.
⏳ Reverse-Engineer a Good Memory
Pick a moment when joy was stupidly pure, when you didn’t second-guess it. Don’t just remember it, crawl back inside it. What did your shoulders feel like? Your breath? Was there a buzz under your skin? Spend 60 seconds in the re-creation. You’re teaching your body that joy is not some long-lost dialect, it’s your mother tongue. (Pssst, I crafted a meditation journey around this embodiment practice - see above.)
And then, keep the translation alive. Let that remembered body-language sneak into today’s version of you. Walk into the grocery store with the same easy shoulders. Make dinner with the same slow, unhurried breath. Let the hum under your skin ripple out in the way you greet the cashier or text your friend back.
This is the trick: the more often you rehearse it, the less it’s a memory and the more it’s a muscle. One day, without even trying, you’ll notice you’re standing in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday and your body is already speaking fluent joy. That’s the reprogramming. That’s the jailbreak.
✨ Schedule a “Useless” Delight
Put something on your calendar this week that has no productive purpose whatsoever. It’s not self-improvement. It’s not a networking opportunity. It’s just for the sheer, unadulterated delight of it.
Lie in the grass and watch the clouds. If an ant gets tangled in the jungle of your forearm hair (guilty), lift it right in front of your eyes and watch him find a way out and free himself, macro-lense style. I promise you, there will hardly be more fascinating POV to have today…or maybe prove me wrong! Find many more like this!
Go sit in a café and stare at strangers’ shoes, inventing their secret lives with every step. Make a playlist of the songs you worshipped at fifteen and let them shred you beautifully from the inside out. Mine? Higher by The Cardigans. Perfect Indian by Sinéad O’Connor. Songs that taste like bruises and sunlight at the same time. Let yourself remember the feral pulse of being young, untethered & completely alive.
The saying goes: "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" and I swear this is a gospel. This is a radical act of anti-capitalist pointlessness - a tiny rebellion against the tyranny of “do more, earn more, become more”.
It’s the part of you that refuses to apologize for existing just to savor the fizz of life before it’s corralled into spreadsheets and checklists. And when you do it, really do it, even for fifteen minutes, the world feels different. Like you’ve cracked open a secret door and smelled the air on the other side. So schedule it. Guard it. Throw everything else in the bin for a while.
You deserve this delicious, useless rebellion. If it becomes a tradition, a non-negotiable weekly meeting with the Self, even better.
Your joy is not a finite resource you’re stealing from someone else. It is a wellspring. When you are full, you have more to offer. When you are nourished, you have the strength to show up for the fight.
Your happiness is not a betrayal of the world’s suffering. It is a defiant act of hope in the face of it. As my personal hero, the great Maya Angelou taught us, her mission was not merely to survive, but to thrive and to do so with passion and compassion.
Let’s end with an invitation from the poet Lucille Clifton. a question that feels like the most important one we can ask ourselves and each other right now. In her poem, she builds a life for herself without a model, out of "starshine and clay" and then she turns to us and asks:
"won't you celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed?"
Every day you are still here, still breathing, still capable of feeling the sun on your face, is a victory. It is a miracle worth celebrating. So please, the next time that perfect, golden moment finds you, don’t flinch. Don’t apologize.
Take a breath and let it in. Let it land. Let it nourish you. It is the most courageous, rebellious & sacred thing you can do. The mystic poet Hafiz knew that the light we seek is already inside us, calling it "the astonishing light of your own being".
Let it fucking shine.
Huge thanks for reading this far. Appreciate your eyeballs! If this helped or just made you feel less alone in the chaos, pass it on. Help the spell spread.
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