My Journey to Joy

Joy does not simply happen to us.

We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day…

—Henri J M Nouwen

As a young woman, I longed to move at the pace of my soul. Tune into my wildness. Embody my instinctual feminine wisdom. Make joy my life’s GPS. Most women I know do too. In the pages that follow I share why—and how—I did it.

I recognize that many people often feel a need to compromise about many things. For most people, life doesn’t offer many opportunities to sayHell yes! and sayingHell no! is an unaffordable luxury.

But I have learned that often the major barrier to joy is the belief that “It isn’t possible in my situation.” I recognize that some life choices are not easy to reconcile with joy. I’ve been there. Many times. Real life includes a lot of messy choices, phases, and jagged transitions: divorces, young children, caretaking elderly parents, and juggling precarious finances in a post-pandemic world.

In these pages, I share everyday wild remedies and root medicine that most people can apply easily. My ultimate rewilding, however, came in the form of choosing to take a sabbatical and leave behind the nonprofit world in favor of homesteading. I acknowledge the privilege that allowed me to make some messy but necessary choices, enabling me to craft a life of radical joy.

The ability to sayHell no!is a muscle I developed through consistent use. For me, it began with small choices, which created momentum over time. The stronger my initial discernment became, the better choices I made (or remade). Like a river, momentum began to naturally flow my life towards joy.

This book offers raw and real reflections that jump back and forth across the timeline of my life. By their very nature, my confessions and journal entries are tender, fallible, and vulnerable, filled with many questions and few answers. In contrast, what I learned along the way and share as a roadmap of possibility will sound and feel blunt and bold.

That’s because there is more than one of me. In these pages, I am both seeker and guide, student and educator, ego and soul. I have written what I needed to learn. If there is judgment, it is reserved for me alone. The tone and voice of this book reflect the complex and contradictory reality of being human and having a learning conversation with oneself across time.

These experiences happened mainly between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-five as I was still climbing the nonprofit leadership ladder in predominately middle-class Caucasian communities. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) who are women executives, founders, and leaders, have the most to gain from my high tuition lessons because there is more time in an activist or corporate career to course correct from the seven activist addictions. And yet any activist, of any age, has much to gain from recovery from the seven activist addictions.

For decades I have journaled my life experiences as a way of making sense of them. Here I share my private diary of how I made joy my GPS by becoming the Chief Executive Officer of my life. May my honesty and vulnerability encourage hope and possibility. Something can and will collectively change once we individually admit