Joy Is the Point

I took a values assessment recently. It's called the Values Bridge, and the idea is simple enough: it asks you a series of questions to identify the values you hold most deeply, then measures how closely your actual daily life reflects them. The gap between the two, between what you believe and how you're living, is what it calls your authenticity gap.

The assessment scores that gap on a scale of zero to 100. Zero means you're fully living your values. Mine came back at 35, enough to land me in what the assessment calls "Dissonant," meaning: I know who I am. I'm just not living it yet. Not fully...I feel that.

My top five values came back as: family, service to others, present joy, achievement, and creative expression. For each one, the assessment shows you how wide the gap is between wanting that value and actually living it. Some gaps are small. Some are uncomfortable.

The gap that hit me the hardest wasn't the creative expression one, though that stings. It wasn't even the family one, which was actually pretty low, and I think I know why: I do drop everything when my kids need me. Every time, without question. I feel guilty about it, but I do it.

The widest gap was joy. Present joy. The value that says: life is meant to be savored now, not later. Not after the brand is built. Not after the content calendar is full. Not after the cut is done or the IEP is resolved or the inbox is empty.

Now.

And I sat with that for a minute, because I genuinely believe that. I believe it in my bones. I believe that the small moments are the whole thing, that the light on a Tuesday morning and the way my dog looks at me and the smell of oil paint and the sound of my kids in the other room, those aren't the backdrop. Those are it. That's the life.

And yet.

Most of my actual days look like logistics. They look like batching content and answering emails and tracking macros and managing school situations and planning the next thing and building toward something that keeps moving forward just fast enough that I never quite arrive.

I have been building infrastructure for a life I already deserve to be living.

That sentence hit…

There's a conflict buried in my results that explains a lot of my last few years. The assessment maps not just your values but where they pull against each other. And for me, achievement and joy are almost perfectly opposed. Achievement says: work harder, stay focused, prove it. Joy says: put the phone down, be here, it's enough.

I've been letting Achievement run the show while telling myself I'm doing it for the joy that's coming.

But joy doesn't work that way. It's not a reward. It's not something you unlock after you've earned it. It's a practice, or it's nothing.

Here's what I'm learning to give myself permission for:

• The morning I spend painting instead of posting, that counts.

• The client session that moves me, where I'm standing in a room with a woman at a moment of becoming, and I feel it too, that's not just work. That's the whole reason.

• Putting the laptop away when my kids walk in the door, without finishing the sentence I was in the middle of, that's not failure. That's my number one value, lived out loud.

• The slow cup of coffee before anyone needs anything. The walk with Trek when I'm not thinking about anything. The phone call with a friend that goes longer than I planned.
  

Those aren't interruptions to the life I'm trying to build.

They are the life.

I've burned out before. And when I look back at those seasons honestly, it wasn't that I worked too much. It was that I worked a lot in service of things that didn't feed me (along with the pure physical and mental exhaustion of them). That's a different problem, and it has a different solution. The solution isn't to work less. It's to stay closer to why.

Why do I photograph women? Because I want to witness them. Because there is something sacred about pointing a camera at a person and saying: I see you, right now, exactly as you are.

That fills me. It always has.

Why do I paint? Because it's the one thing I do with my hands where the only audience is me. Where the only measure of success is whether it felt true and I fell into flow.

Why do I move my body, train, show up for myself physically? Because it's one of the few hours in my day that is entirely mine. To flood my body with all of those good hormones makes for a great afternoon and evening and an even better nights sleep.

These aren't items on a list. They're the answer to the question of what my life is for.

The assessment gave me a word I keep coming back to: permission.

• Permission to let a soul-filling client session be enough for a day.

• Permission to count the painting as work, as real work, as the most important kind.

• Permission to stop treating joy like a destination and start treating it like a practice.

I know who I am. I'm just learning to live like it.

That's the whole project.

xo,

April