When Joy Feels Like A Lie You're Telling Yourself
A raw Wednesday. Philippians 1. And the long way back to purpose.
Let me be honest with you from the jump — this is not a polished post. I'm not on the other side of this one. I'm writing from the middle of it, which is exactly why I think it needs to be said.
This is me, out loud, on a Wednesday.
The Spiral Started With an Empty Calendar
I had time open up unexpectedly today. And you would think that would feel like a gift. For someone who has spent most of her life grinding, hustling, stacking jobs, filling every hour — you would think a wide open afternoon would feel like relief.
It didn't.
It felt like a trap door.
Because here's the thing nobody tells you about doing the deep inner work: when you finally stop using busyness as armor, the quiet gets loud. And the thoughts that move into that silence aren't always kind ones.
What is this all for? Nobody's depending on me. I'm nobody's number one priority. What's the point?
I'm not sharing those thoughts to be dramatic. I'm sharing them because I know I'm not the only one who has had them. And I think one of the most dishonest things we do — especially those of us who talk about mindset and healing and resilience for a living — is pretend we don't still have days like this.
I do. This was one.
Two Conversations That Cracked Something Open
Before my calendar cleared, I had two conversations that stayed with me.
The first was with a woman from my church. She reached out to me — out of nowhere — because God put my name on her heart. She's married. Has kids. A full house. And she was deeply, achingly lonely. Not in a visible way. In that quiet, low-hum way that is somehow worse.
The second was with a dear friend wrestling with something different but landing in the same place. She asked me — genuinely — whether it's more miserable to feel alone surrounded by people, or to simply be alone and feel the loneliness directly.
I didn't have a clean answer for her. But I held both of those conversations as I sat in my own quiet house with my dog, watching an afternoon I didn't plan for stretch out in front of me.
And something started to clarify.
We are all feeling this. Every single one of us. The married woman in a full house. The single woman in a quiet one. The high achiever who built everything she was supposed to want. The person who hasn't built anything yet and doesn't know where to start.
The loneliness is universal. The circumstances are just different.
We put ourselves in corners and think nobody sees me, nobody gets me, nobody understands — when really, almost everyone around us is carrying the same ache in a different outfit.
I Went to Philippians 1
I didn't want to spiral. I recognized it happening and I made a choice — the same choice I wrote about after last week's blog, the one where God gave me three words in a sauna: Study. Seek. Steward.
So I studied. I opened Philippians 1.
And I want to share what hit me, because I don't think it was an accident.
Verse 4-6: "Whenever I pray, I make my requests for all of you with joy, for you have been my partners in spreading the Good News about Christ from the time you first heard it until now. And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns."
Paul wrote this from prison. Not from a mountaintop. Not from a season of abundance and ease. From a cell. And the word he kept coming back to — over and over — was joy.
Not happiness. Not relief. Not "things finally got easier." Joy.
Verse 11: "May you always be filled with the fruit of your salvation — the righteous character produced in your life by Jesus Christ — for this will bring much glory and praise to God."
The fruit of your salvation. The character produced in you. Not manufactured by you.
I sat with that for a long time. Because I think a lot of my depletion lately has been coming from trying to generate something that isn't mine to generate. Trying to produce fire from a place of empty. Trying to perform purpose when purpose is supposed to be produced in me by something far greater than my own effort.
Verses 25-26: "Knowing this, I am convinced that I will remain alive so I can continue to help all of you grow and experience the joy of your faith. And when I come to you again, you will have more reason to take pride in Christ Jesus because of what he is doing through me."
This one stopped me cold.
Paul is saying — I'm going to stay. Not because life is easy. Not because he's thriving. But because there are people who need him to stay. Because there is still work to do. Because his being here matters to someone's faith.
And my honest reaction when I read it?
I wish I felt that.
I do want to help people. Genuinely, deeply. But that burning "I cannot and will not fail this mission" feeling — it felt distant. And I had to sit with the honesty of that rather than perform around it.
The Thing Underneath the Depletion
Here's what I started to realize as I sat with those verses:
I have some frustration toward God right now. I know He's good. I know His plan is bigger than my momentary pain. I know that none of the things I'm aching for in the flesh are going to matter in eternity.
And still — there is a frustration. A bitterness that I have to name, even as I know it's not the full truth.
Because I have a heart to serve. I have a genuine desire to pour into people, to help them find their way through the hard stuff. And I've worked so hard — in therapy, in coaching, in thousands of hours of inner work, in facing the darkest parts of myself including moments where I genuinely did not want to be alive anymore — I have worked so hard to get to a place where I have something real to offer.
And yet I still have days like this one. Still have the spiral. Still feel the weight of doing it alone.
But here's where it shifted for me. And I want you to track this because I think it matters:
In the middle of writing all of this out, I remembered why the suffering was worth it.
Not because it stopped hurting. But because it made me someone who can sit with someone else in theirs.
The woman from my church reached out to me because God put my name on her heart. And she needed someone who had been in the dark and knew how to hold it with her. Not someone who had all the answers. Someone who had been in the room.
I have been in the room.
I almost didn't make it out of the room. And because I did — because God held me in it when I had nothing left — I now know how to be that presence for someone else.
That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.
What I Know About Joy Now That I Didn't Before
Joy is not the absence of hard circumstances. Paul understood that better than almost anyone.
Joy is what becomes available to us inside of them — when we stop fixating on what God's hand is or isn't doing for us, and we start seeking His face. His heart. The who before the what.
I started this afternoon depleted, frustrated, and spiraling.
I ended it with purpose.
Not because anything changed. Because I stopped long enough to remember who I was serving — and why. And when that came back online, the "woe is me" faded. Not completely. But enough.
What I Want You to Carry Out of This
We are all feeling this. Your version might look like a full house that still feels empty. A quiet home that echoes too loud. A calendar that opened up unexpectedly and scared you. A life that looks right on the outside and feels hollow on the inside.
Whatever the circumstance, the ache underneath it is the same. And you are not alone in it.
I started this afternoon in a spiral. I ended it with purpose. Not because anything changed on the outside. But because I stopped long enough to get out of my own head — and remembered that the pain I've carried has never just been mine to keep. It's always been material. Evidence. A bridge to someone else who needed to know that the dark doesn't last forever.
That's what I want you to know today.
Not a five-step plan. Not a perfectly wrapped conclusion.
Just this: whatever you're carrying right now — the loneliness, the doubt, the quiet that feels too heavy — it is not the end of your story. And the fact that you're still here, still reading, still looking for something to hold onto?
That matters. You matter. And I'm here.
Jayme Shiarla · Mindset Transformation Coach · NLP Practitioner · Faith · Transformation · Purpose
