When Joy Comes With a Price

Blog 14: Part of the The Space Between Survival and Joy series - a lived moment of reclaimed joy, followed by the emotional cost that almost made me hand it back.

May 06, 2025

Last time, in When Being Present Is Its Own Kind of Overwhelm, I wrote about what it felt like to try to reenter my body - carefully, imperfectly, without force. What I didn’t know then was that reentry would come with a cost I hadn’t yet named. Because when joy finally arrived…it didn’t feel safe. It felt like a test I was destined to fail.

I wasn’t fully awake yet.

In that in-between place where the body feels things before the mind catches up, still wrapped in the residue of sleep, with just enough awareness to register sensation.

My body felt the pleasure of dancing for an hour straight the night before. The goodness, the fun, the songs, the movement, the people. It surrounded me like a warm blanket of joy I hadn’t felt in a long time.

My body was still holding joy, but the grief wasn’t far behind.

*Held in that soft, liminal space - before the mental scan, before the price, when joy still lingered in the body.*

And then I stirred.

Just slightly.

A subtle shift, enough to feel the ache.

A flood of soreness rose from my muscles like a flare - hips, spine, calves, shoulders - all aching in that unmistakable way that said: you didn’t just survive last night. You lived.

And that’s when it landed.

Look at what joy cost you.

It didn’t come as a thought, it came like a truth bomb - visceral, cellular, undeniable. My body had paid for joy. Fully. Completely. And I couldn’t un-think it.

It woke me up….fully.
I got up, hesitating and reflecting at the same time. How could something so joyous be followed by the crash of self-sabotage? Or was it? Did I really do this on purpose?
No. It didn’t feel that way.
Then why would that thought show up, right on the heels of something so good?

Shit. That was old programming. I cringed. After all this time, how was it still running?

It hit like a fault line giving way - splitting open something that had been sealed for decades.
My chest tightened. Heat rushed up my throat.
And then I was sobbing.
Not from thought. From my bones. Deep inside that had waited a lifetime to surface.

I didn’t try to stop it. I let it tear through me - loud, hot, full-bodied. A storm I wasn’t bracing for, but somehow already knew was coming.

The tears flooded down my cheeks, washing in a knowing that had lived in me for years. One I have felt but never faced.

This was the cost of joy. The one I’d been taught to expect. The one I’d paid so many times I’d forgotten it wasn’t owed.

And once that knowing took hold, the memories came. Not as thoughts, but as flashes…bodied, sharp and brash.

Flash: Age eleven, come in the door laughing. My dad’s voice: "What’s so funny, you think life is just one big joke?”

Flash: First time I got an article published. My sister: "Must be nice to play around with this stuff while the rest of us work.”

Flash: Making the dean’s list 4.0, glowing. My mother's tight smile: "Well, if that’s all you do, so you should be making a 4.0."

Flash: Years later, reading the will. Business to my sister. The final message: even in death, joy has a price.

The tears weren’t about sore muscles. They were about every girl who learned to mistrust her own pleasure. Every woman whose nervous system still contracts around celebration. Every daughter trained to equate joy with danger.

We learn it young. Not always through violence, but through subtle cues, withholding, tone. Joy draws attention. Attention brings scrutiny. Scrutiny finds fault. Better to stay small, stay tired, stay just broken enough that no one feels the need to knock you down.

My family didn’t hit. They invoiced. Every burst of happiness itemized. Every freedom cross-checked. Until your own nervous system becomes the collector, still running the numbers long after the house is gone.

I let it all move through me. Twenty minutes of shaking, grieving, remembering. I didn’t try and stop it or understand it. I was letting my body discharge decades of careful calibration.

The grief isn't soft. It's specific. It has addresses and zip codes. It has my mother's voice, my sister's bite, my father's disgusted silence. It has the family business that kept us fed but also kept score….every dollar was a leash and every opportunity a test of loyalty.

And underneath all that specificity - the collective wound. Generations of women taught to apologize for their aliveness. Taught that wanting too much marks you as selfish. Taught that joy without justification is suspicious, that pleasure needs permission, that happiness must be earned through suffering first.

The thing is, my body handled the dancing fine. I wasn’t injured and I didn’t collapse. I was feeling normal soreness, which meant - you had inhabited your skin instead of just carrying it around.

But my system ran the old software like it always had, scanning for punishment, bracing for backlash, convinced that last night’s freedom had triggered a cost.

I wrote in Are You Healing...or Trying to Earn Your Ascension? about how healing itself can become another identity - one that hovers above the body, always chasing upgrades. But this wasn’t that. This wasn’t floating. This was my body running a program so old, it no longer needed a reason.

My parents are dead. That sister who could weaponize joy with a surgical strike, I haven't spoken to in years. And, the family ledger that tracked every smile like a debit? Closed.

Trauma doesn’t care that the moment’s passed. It stays in the cells that still flinch. In the fascia that holds shape. In the quiet tension of a system that keeps scanning for the price of something that already happened.

The sobbing stopped when it was done - I allowed it to finish and move through me.

Then, I got up. Feeling the soreness in new places - hip flexors, lower back, all the spots that forgot they could move like that.

It dawned on me then: the old program ran, but it didn’t win. The scan happened - look what it cost you - but this time, I didn’t obey it.

My body stayed soft.

I didn’t retreat. I didn’t bargain, feel shame, guilt or apologize. I didn’t perform the ritual of penance that used to follow pleasure.

This time however, I stayed in my body because there was no invoice to pay.

Instead, I let it ache with the memory of the pleasure I'd lived.
And it felt good, like my body finally believed me.

The old program ran but my body stayed soft.

Love,
Sherry

NEXT >>> I didn’t know it then, but this was only the beginning. Because while this moment revealed the cost of joy, what came next asked a harder question: What happens when the pain is gone - but the wiring remains? That’s what I’ll write about in the next blog. For now, I’m just letting the joy stay.

It Exists (For Now)

Discussion about this post