The Courage to Choose Joy: Why Stepping into Play is Braver Than You Think

✨ Last weekend I gave an in-person “Power of Play” workshop focused on embracing our creativity, silencing the inner perfectionist critic, and embracing our childlike emotions of joy and playfulness. The session was intentionally scheduled as the final event after a very emotionally intense weekend, in which we delved into the underworld of our psyches, limiting beliefs, and at times past traumas that we all carry with us knowingly or unknowingly.

✨ The event was intended as a catalyst for joy, the journey upward, back from the seedy underworld of unbridled, uncomfortable human emotions. Its sole purpose was to invite us back to life, to invite us to embrace the joy of being alive, and to experience the full spectrum of our emotional being, not only the yucky feelings we have grown accustomed to.

✨ As a coach who has delivered herself from the underbelly of depression and burnout in the past years, I was also invited to make the journey back from Erebos. Not much unlike any hero’s journey, I encountered a legion of my private tormentors, like subconscious programming and conditioning, whose usefulness or accuracy had never been reassessed nor updated. What I mostly found was that it was so much easier to live in Erebos than to make the journey back. After all, it felt familiar; I had spent decades there, and everyone else lived there, too. However, my choice, once I was, I was able to choose differently, was to pick a new neighbourhood.

✨ Being able to choose is the imperative criterion here. Just, like many of the wonderful participants, for years, I too, was not able to choose anything else than the familiar playground. Therefore it was not surprising that the participants who chose to join my “Power of Play” workshop were confronted with the same. Some of them actively abandoned ship, never to return; some ran away temporarily but were lured back in by the sounds of glee coming from the outside, others embraced reckless abandon, and took the journey back home to our natural state of joy and happiness.

✨ But here’s the thing about joy—it’s unfamiliar. It’s uncomfortable. As Brené Brown so poignantly puts it, joy is one of the most vulnerable emotions we can experience, perhaps even more so than fear, sadness, or anger. The reason is simple: joy feels like a risk. In our culture, we are conditioned to believe that joy is fleeting, and that the moment we truly allow ourselves to feel it, something will come along to snatch it away. We’ve been rehearsing for tragedy for so long that joy becomes a muscle we’ve forgotten how to flex.

✨ During the workshop, as we moved toward play and lightness, I saw something interesting emerge. Joy, for many, felt foreign, like stepping into a space they weren’t sure they were allowed to enter. While it’s easy to imagine that diving into our darker emotions is the hard part—and trust me, it is—what many don’t realize is that stepping into joy can feel even more daunting. Joy requires us to step outside the comfort zone of our pain, our guilt, and our limiting beliefs. We are far more comfortable wrestling with our demons than letting ourselves fully embrace the goodness of life.

✨ Why? Because it’s unfamiliar, and we fear what’s unfamiliar. Even more than that, we fear being caught off guard by joy, only to have it slip away. Brown calls this foreboding joy, a form of self-protection where we anticipate the worst even amid something good. It’s a way of keeping ourselves from being too vulnerable, from feeling too much, and yet it’s also the very thing that prevents us from experiencing the richness of life.

✨ In the workshop, I saw participants wrestle with this concept. For some, it was easier to retreat into the shadows, to avoid the lightness of joy altogether. After all, joy requires trust—trust in the moment, trust in ourselves, trust that we are worthy of feeling good, even if it’s temporary. It’s a trust that many of us have never fully cultivated because we’ve spent so long managing disappointment and bracing for the worst.

✨ But here’s the beautiful part: for those who stayed, for those who allowed themselves to lean into the discomfort of joy, something incredible happened. They found themselves reconnecting with a part of themselves they hadn’t felt in a long time, if ever. The more they played, the more they laughed, the more they realized that joy wasn’t the enemy—it was the doorway back to themselves.

✨ And this is where the real work begins. It’s not in the excavating of our pain or the deep dives into our trauma (though that’s important work, too); the real work is in learning to choose joy in the midst of it all. To recognize that, yes, the world can be hard and life can be messy, but that joy is still available to us. Not as a reward, not as something we have to earn, but as our birthright.

✨ Joy, I’ve come to realize, isn’t about perfection or the absence of pain. It’s about allowing ourselves to fully feel, to step out of the comfort zone of our familiar suffering, and to trust that joy is not only possible but necessary. Because in the end, it’s joy that brings us back to life. It’s joy that gives us the strength to face the difficult things, not the other way around.

✨ And in that space of playfulness, of childlike abandon, we begin to remember what it feels like to be alive, not just surviving, but truly living.