The Shape My Joy Takes: personal Essay Series

This seventh essay is not about what wholeness looks like from the outside—it’s about what it feels like deep within. What Wholeness Feels Like is a quiet, sensory meditation on the slow, sacred moments that remind me I am no longer searching, fixing, or proving. It’s about warm floors, easy breath, and ordinary magic. It’s about the way peace settles into your bones when you finally return to yourself. More than a reflection—it’s a homecoming.

This sixth essay is a quiet kind of rebellion. I Never Needed A Witness is about choosing to live fully without the need to be seen, celebrated, or validated. It’s a meditation on the magic of private joy, on the moments that belong to no one but me, and the gentle power of building a life that isn’t curated for anyone else’s gaze. These are the sacred, unshared corners of my world—the ones where the truest parts of me have always lived.

In this fifth essay, I reflect on the life I’ve built—not as a reaction to what I left behind, but as an intentional act of devotion to everything that lights me up. A House Made of Yes is a poetic meditation on boundaries, joy, slowness, and sovereignty. It’s about choosing softness without surrendering strength, about making a home within myself that welcomes only what serves my spirit. This is the architecture of my freedom—built one yes at a time.

In this fourth essay, I honour the multitudes within me. Not as a performance, not as proof of resilience, but as a reclamation. For too long, I was asked to choose—a singular self, a pleasing self, a version of me that stayed small to avoid taking up too much space. But I no longer belong to that narrative. The Women I’m Becoming is a love letter to all of me: the soft, the strong, the fiery, the tender. It’s a reflection of what it means to live as a woman untethered, uncontained, and wholly, gloriously mine.

In this third essay, I explore something I once thought I had lost for good: my laughter. Not the polite, practiced kind used to ease tension or fill silence—but the real kind. The kind that spills out of you before you can stop it. The kind that belongs to people who are safe, seen, and at home in themselves. This is an ode to the sound of my own joy, the people I share it with, and the quiet revolution of laughter that no longer comes from survival, but from abundance.

This second essay in The Shape My Joy Takes is a portrait of selfhood, made up of the quiet, shimmering pieces that call me home to myself. It’s not about healing from harm or proving my worth—it’s about recognizing the moments that make me feel most me. This is not a list of hobbies or habits. It’s a reverent celebration of the textures, scents, sensations, and soul-deep connections that remind me of who I’ve always been beneath the noise. A reminder that joy isn’t loud—and neither is truth. But both are mine now.

This is the first in a ten-part series called The Shape My Joy Takes—a quiet celebration of the life I’ve built from softness, stillness, and sovereignty. These essays are not about what I escaped, but about what I’ve chosen instead. They are love letters to the small rituals, the gentle rebellions, and the steady, sacred claiming of my own peace. In this opening piece, I begin with where every day begins: the morning. Not the frantic rush I once mistook for living, but the slow unfolding of presence, comfort, and care. A rhythm I crafted with intention. A rhythm that belongs only to me.