How to Feel Joyful Again

The rainwater was slowly filling my coat pockets, streaming down my face and neck, and finding the cuffs of my thick jumper. I was soaked to the bone and freezing.

As I attempted to keep feeling in my fingers, I peered out into the heart of midnight. I was on the deck of a sailing ship off the coast of France, and I distinctly remember feeling pinch-me joy.

I was seventeen and in Cornwall, away from home for the first time and working as a deckhand for a sailing company called Square Sail. Their beautiful age-of-sail ships featured in Poldark, Hornblower, and Doctor Who, and I was paid £50 a week to work hard and do what I was told.

On watch that night — as we sailed across the Bay of Biscay towards a sailing festival in France — I saw stars I’d never seen before. Listened to sounds I’d never heard. Despite the horrible weather and a coat that did little to protect me, I was on a grand adventure, and I was bloody loving it.

At anchor in Scilly, just days before the crossing to France.

That feeling came to be something I thought about a lot. Utter presence in the face of undiluted joy. Why isn’t all life like that? How do we find this more often?

Of course, I responded with hedonism for a while, until I discovered that getting drunk all the time and eating my weight in gummy bears before bed was actually a bit grim.

Unwittingly, I’d stumbled on a simple form of epicureanism: a philosophy of enjoying life.

That was a while ago. I’m in my late thirties as I write this, and my life derailed from this philosophy multiple times. I’ve dealt with bad relationships and burnout, jobs that left me soulless and sad.

Since those days at sea I’ve seen death and despair and wonder and elation… and it’s taken me a long time to land back in that way of seeing life again. Maybe it’s a maturity thing? Regardless, I’m glad for it.

Since leaving a shitty relationship and finding myself at rock-bottom, I decided to unpick — consciously this time — the philosophy of joy I’d stumbled across in my twenties. I wanted to recover my rotten attention span, and read long books again. I wanted to heal from heartache and choose a better partner for myself. I wanted to stop self-sabotaging, eating my feelings, hating my body.

I wanted to be that girl on the ship again. Soaked and delighted at being alive.

So last year I began experimenting with tools and mindsets and ideas I could weave into my every day, rather than lofty concepts I’d need to learn in some overly-expensive retreat somewhere too hot for my redhead nature.

Here are those things — the ones that properly worked for me and continue to work. I use these tools every day, every week, and they don’t cost me much, if anything.

I’m writing this as a reminder to myself of these priorities, and hopefully a signpost for you in the direction of your own joy.

Break the routine

In all my healing of the past few years, I found myself getting stuck in a predictable routine. Healthy for me, sure, but it also became a little monotonous. I can’t believe it’s July already, I’d say. Or this year’s gone way too fast. I started to see that this sense of time slipping out of my grasp was because I wasn’t learning and finding novelty like I was in my twenties.

So I decided to make a priority things that broke my routines, helped me learn hard things, and were unfamiliar. My budget’s been small, so I’m still working on this, but I chose to learn a ten-page behemoth of a Beethoven piano piece (somewhat regrettably — I’m still learning it a year and a half later). I started to learn portrait drawing. I went to a life-drawing class, and new meditation sessions. I took different routes to the post office, found an undiscovered-by-me woodland and its new trails, and joined a writing group.

I have much grander plans to get a van, start surfing again, travel around the UK, meet new people, go sailing... In the meantime, these smaller things have helped my brain wake up a little more.

Inside the safety of the routines and habits I’ve built, time congeals into one solid, rushing mass. When I add just a pinch of novelty, my mind stops skimming and wakes up again. It’s like I am slowing down time. Because I don’t want to get to the end of this year and wonder where it all went.

Confront emotions, don’t avoid them

That pinch-me moment on deck at midnight was me trying to save the polaroid of the moment a little brighter. I wanted to hold on to how magical it all felt. Of course, time moved on, and some really shit things happened in the following couple of years. Did I have a pinch-me moment while I processed these shit things? Of course not — that would sound insane. But I should’ve done.

I white-knuckled the turbulence, pushed my feelings down, and refused to acknowledge the despair I was feeling. I distracted myself and got lost in bad habits. What I should’ve done — and what I do now, even and especially when things are hard — is open my eyes to the moment. As long as we minimise how we’re feeling, ignore the emotions and crack on regardless, we’re staying stuck. We simply get really good at minimising, ignoring, and cracking on. Until something innocuous makes our brains explode at a really inconvenient moment.

Our brains tell us the feelings will eat us alive. But they don’t. The feelings are just a mouse in the corner asking for a seat at the table.

Here’s more I’ve written about this if you want to dive deeper:

chloemarkham.substack.com

The Feelings You're Most Afraid of Are Smaller Than You Think.

On grief, numbing out, & what's waiting on the other side.

Move for pleasure, not punishment

I used to treat my workouts the same as my diet: something to earn, or something to correct myself with. I needed to be better, to be a super flexy Instagram yoga model, if I ever wanted to teach award-winning classes (spoiler: my classes won awards even though my handstands were shit and I was a size 14).

I trained hard for my yoga teacher training in Bali in 2016 — I knew I’d be the slightly-fat pale chick in a room of tanned, handstanding babes. I was (although it’s all in my head, I know that now, and none of it fucking matters anyway).

I moved as punishment for the packet of sweets I ate the day before, I looked at my squishy belly and pushed myself harder.

Sustainable? Of course not. Injury-inducing? Absolutely. If we’re moving to correct ourselves, we’re assuming we’re broken in some way. And that shit is hard to maintain — it’s deeply demoralising, and who wants that?

What if, instead, I moved in a way that’s genuinely enjoyable? This one runs deeper than I can get into here, but the main takeaway: find movement you enjoy and do it often. This has changed the way I approach my entire routine.

Quit the apps that made me feel like shit

Social media was infecting me with outrage and reduced worth every day. I didn’t realise the extent of the problem until, six months after deleting the apps, I went back online to tweak my Instagram bio and got lost in the black hole again for a few minutes. By the time I resurfaced, my bio hadn’t been changed and I felt invaded.

The ads, the influencers, the algorithm-chasing vanity. None of it is healthy, helpful, or happiness-inducing. So I quit for good and installed News Feed Eradicator on Chrome on my laptop (get it for Chrome here, and I’m certain they do it for other browsers, too).

This was an act of self-preservation and I’ll never look back.

I wrote a whole piece about this — turns out the ship metaphor runs deeper than I first thought.

Get outside more often

I went for a walk in the woods the other day and literally told the trees my problems. I came home feeling not only lighter — I had a solution I couldn’t have imagined on the drive in — but I had more energy, more creativity, and less doubt.

It’s co-regulation, in its most basic sense; we’re regulating our systems alongside that of a calm, unhurried baseline; we’re connecting with something bigger than ourselves. The ocean, the forest, the skies. And when we’re moving our bodies, when we have nothing but time and space for brain-chewing and digging into the corners of our minds, more often than not some magic comes.

We need a dose of the non-human to bring us back down to earth. In the city we have the skies, the trees, parks and gardens. If we’re lucky we have deep woodlands, and coastlines, and moorland.

Especially when I’m tired, or pre-menstrual and feeling like the world’s against me, I need to remind myself: never doubt a walk outside as the greatest tool for inspiration and problem-solving.

Use my hands without monetising it

I remember a mentor once asking me, with a baffled look, why I bother playing the violin. Someone else gave me the same look when I said I was taking my grade five piano exam. Why put yourself through that? What’s the point?

Because it’s a joy. Sure my stress-sweat in the exam made me fumble, my voice cracked at the singing part (why there’s a singing part in a piano exam is beyond me), and after six years of owning a violin I still sound too much like a dying cat. But the certificate is framed — I got a merit (which is better than a pass, but not as good as a distinction) and I was enormously proud of myself. And I found a group of excellent folks to join. We gather every month and play fiddle tunes.

Working with our hands is a human tradition — our ancestors wove it into their days because they had to. Whether we’re playing music or making stuff or gardening or fixing a car — it’s a human necessity. Evolutionary science even tells us that our use of tools and manual dexterity drove the development of language and intelligence, not the other way round.

The happiest people I know use their hands, whether in their work or outside it, and they’re better off for it. So I prioritise this every day in some small way.

Slow down long enough to properly soften

This often happens to me in a restorative yoga practice or a nidra: I feel like I’m resting fully when I begin, until two minutes later I realise my hands are clenched, or my shoulders are bunched up, or I’m bracing my entire core.

Relaxing isn’t as easy as going from work-mode into our favourite chair and having a glass of wine. Our bodies take time to unwind properly. It’s the same reason we need the entire week we’re on holiday to properly relax; by day six we’re finally a goddess of the restful, it’s just a shame the flight home’s at 8am the following day.

Slowing down, being bored, loafing about — these are the philosophies of the truly joyful. Don’t discount making shapes out of clouds: it’s how we truly begin to soften.

I wrote more about this here:

chloemarkham.substack.com

This is What a Chronically-Online Nervous System Looks Like

& 12 ways to recalibrate (no cold showers required).

Memento mori

Remember you shall die. Depressing or liberating? I choose the latter. Living somewhat in the perspective of the finite every day, every week, is one of the best decision aids we have. Should you sack off work for a day and visit the museum with your mum? Should you take the big shiny job in the city only for the money? Should you tell the stranger she’s got excellent hair?

The answers come quicker and easier when we’re rooted in the magnitude of our wondrous, impossible lives. That you’re alive right now, with that brain and those thoughts, reading my words; that human evolution is such that I’m typing this on a fast, capable little machine that fits in my bag and connects me with people all over the world; that the people we love the most — ourselves included — will one day expire… fuck yeah I’m telling her she’s got great hair.

Don’t wait for later. Later is never guaranteed.

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