I am healing, but one of the steps to healing is to start to experience joy. If action is the antidote to anxiety, then joy is the antidote to suffering, struggle, and sadness. Joy in the midst of suffering is not something we wait to feel. It is something we learn to practice while life is still hard. The mistake most people make is believing joy only exists when pain disappears. But healing rarely works that way. Often, joy and suffering exist at the same time.
Healing requires holding two truths simultaneously: your pain is real, but it is not the whole story. When people lose the ability to see anything beyond their suffering, they become trapped in it. Joy becomes the doorway that lets light back in. 
Here is how to find and open that doorway:
We must start with the reality that joy begins with permission. Many people subconsciously believe that if they allow joy while suffering, they are betraying their pain. But pain does not require loyalty. You can grieve something deeply and still laugh with a friend. You can struggle internally and still enjoy a sunset. Joy is not denial of suffering. It is refusing to let suffering become your entire identity. A wounded person who allows joy is not ignoring their wounds. They are reminding themselves that life is larger than the wound.
Ultimately, joy comes from meaning… not comfort. Comfort creates a sense of happiness, but meaning creates joy. Happiness depends on circumstances going well. Joy comes from believing that your suffering still has purpose. A parent who sacrifices for their child may be exhausted, worried, and stressed, but they still feel deep joy because the struggle has meaning. Meaning transforms suffering from pointless pain into something that shapes you.
To experience joy does not require a sense of largess or emotional overwhelm. Joy grows through small moments. It is exponential. Happiness is an experience. It comes. It goes. Joy quietly builds upon itself. It is a conversation where you feel understood. It is observing your child. It is a sunrise. It is helping someone. Joy is not an action, rather it is the experience of action manifested. And every interruption reminds your nervous system that the world is not only pain.
Joy does, however, require a sense of presence. Suffering traps us in the past or the future. Joy almost always lives in the present moment. When you are fully present, even if briefly, the mind loosens its grip on the narrative of suffering.
Joy is also closely connected to love, and perhaps the most surprising truth is that many people rediscover joy, not by focusing on themselves but on others. When you help others, even when you are suffering — especially when you are suffering — you step outside of your suffering. So many of us try to use control and narrative writing as a shield to our suffering, but it is a shield made of paper. Joy is the sword that not only protects us, but is the path to being free. Joy expand the heart beyond its wounds.
Joy is our act of defiance. It is our courage in struggle. When life is painful, choosing joy can be rebellious and empowering by not allowing your suffering to have the final word. Joy is a declaration that the darkness does not own you.
One of the strange paradoxes of healing is that people who have suffered deeply often experience the deepest joy later in life. Suffering strips away illusions, and clarifies what matters. Small things become precious. Connection becomes sacred. Life becomes something to cherish rather than something to control. Joy, in this sense, is not the absence of suffering. It is the wisdom that grows because of it.