The Shape My Joy Takes II: Things That Make me Feel Most Like Me

This is a collection of essays not about surviving—but about living. Not about pain—but about presence. These are not reactionary—they are revolutionary in their refusal to look back.

This is a 10-part series of personal essays. Check back each day to read the next essay.

Want more softness, strength, and quiet joy? Click here to read the full Shape My Joy Takes series.

There are moments when I slip so fully into myself that I forget I was ever asked to be anyone else.

They’re never loud, these moments. They don’t come with applause or warning. They arrive like a favourite song in a quiet café—unexpected but familiar, a melody I know by heart.

I feel most like me when my dog rests her head on my knee, eyes closed, trusting me completely. Her breath slows mine. Her weight reminds me I’m needed. Loved. Safe.

When I’m barefoot in the kitchen, swaying slowly to a song that feels like a secret. One hand on the kettle, one hand tracing the rim of a mug. The scent of cinnamon. The flicker of candlelight at ten in the morning—because I believe in magic that serves no purpose but beauty.

When I run my fingers over the spines of books I’ve read twice and will read again. When I find notes I scribbled in margins, pieces of myself tucked between pages like pressed flowers. Whole worlds I’ve visited, survived, escaped, returned from.

When my husband looks at me like I’m still the girl he met, but also the woman I’ve become. When he wraps his arms around me, and suddenly the world quiets. His love is a soft place, a sacred place, a place I was never asked to shrink to fit inside.

I feel most like me at the ocean. Wind in my hair, salt on my lips, toes buried in wet sand. I do not ask permission to take up space there. I never did. The ocean has always known me as I am: wild, wide, uncontainable.

When I laugh so hard I snort, then laugh harder because I snorted. When I laugh with people who don't keep score. People who clap when I win. People who see my softness not as weakness, but as wonder.

When I write. Oh, when I write. The world comes into focus, and I remember—this is what I was made for. These are my fingerprints on the page. This is me, untouched, unbent, unapologetic.

When I stop trying to be good and simply choose to be true.

When I let my hair dry in the sun. When I say no without explaining. When I cry at the end of a movie I’ve already seen. When I touch something that reminds me of my childhood and it doesn’t hurt anymore.

I feel most like me in the moments no one else sees.
In the stillness I don’t have to defend.
In the life I made from scratch.

And I know now—beyond a doubt—that this version of me was worth every mile it took to find her.