The Fundamentals of Joy

Today I drove by the house that I lived in until I was 5 years old. I hadn't planned on it. I was on my way to Whole Foods to return an Amazon product and took a couple wrong turns. Since moving back to my hometown last month, I find myself disoriented on old freeways and streets that I stopped regularly navigating 22 years ago.

Today, the neighborhood I got lost in was not one I would find myself in very often these days. Signs of struggle and poverty are abundant here and as I drove around in my very middle class bought-this-year-car, I found myself feeling very out of place and if I'm being honest, nervous.

I challenged myself to find the house based on my 5 year old memory. I was about 3 weeks into Kindergarten when we moved but still remember the new walk to school with my mom and sister. I navigated the hazy but instantly familiar street names. This was the neighborhood where my parents met - she 13 and him 17 - after the neighborhood kids gathered to watch firefighters distinguish a house fire and he, bold as you please and quite suspiciously, asked her and her friend for a lighter for his cigarette (he "didn't know she was so young!" Sure, Bobby.)

After a few false positives, I found it. The corner house with the side yard that seemed so big, where our swing set with the concrete bases that had our initials in it used to be. Immediately next door is a blue apartment complex and during the Christmas that I was 4 years old, a man had held his family hostage with a gun and police evacuated us out in the middle of the night because his apartment was a direct shot into the bedroom I shared with my 7-year old sister and my infant sister. I remember the police officers huddled around us as we ducked out and into their cars. That man killed himself that night.

The following September, my parents moved us to the suburbs with a discounted rent that was a deal from a family friend but more than double what they had previously paid and with no real plan of how to make ends meet. Suffice it to say, there was a lot of financial stress in my household.

But there was also A LOT of laughter.

Joy can feel scarce when your priority is sacrificing and scrapping everything paycheck-to-paycheck to get your kids out of a bad neighborhood. Joy is what my parents clung to for survival.

Most of the time, my parents came home bone weary from being treated poorly by their bosses. Neither were in the position to design their dream career path but they got by. As I grew up, I watched my mother become the breadwinner and navigate promotions between constant layoffs and uncertainty in the mortgage and banking industry. She had high financial literacy but was terrible with budget planning and constantly overcommitted our finances. She emotionally supported my father through menial job changes and failed Amway efforts and the MLM like. A year before my father passed away, he and I stayed up late one night and talked about his POV at the various jobs he worked and what that experience was like for him - physical exhaustion, mental health battles, constant stress and anxiety. The courage it took to get up and face it everyday and come home to 3 dynamic, emotional teenagers as well as my mother's stressful days.

It's funny how kids fundamentally absorb the pressure of the household. Sometimes that pressure was directly taken out on us girls. Sometimes it was subtle but felt deeply nonetheless. I have a clear memory, at maybe 8 years old, of driving with my parents. I lived in that neighborhood from Kindergarten through high school graduation. The neighborhood was low income, though better than the hoods my parents had their first cigarettes in and we never got evacuated by the police in that home. I remember looking at the people in their apartments and looking at my parents and thinking: No. No, this will not be me. There's more to life than survival. There will be more joy for me. I will find it.

This is not my tale of picking myself up by my bootstraps. I didn't do that because I don't believe anyone does. I was helped. My parents put me in a better, more stable environment than they grew up in. They loved me unconditionally and made me confident in my intelligence and abilities. I had strong female role models who showed me how to take up space and advocate for myself. Because of that foundation, I was able to feel and use joy, humor and levity to my advantage and that has been an absolute differentiator for my career journey so far. Joy is hard to come by when you are on base level survival. But when you have fundamental needs met, you are given an opportunity that you should never pass up to access more joy.

I encourage you all to look around you and take stock of your ability to access fundamental joy. Bring levity with you to work, bring humor, bring gratitude. Those things spread and as a result, help your own well-being improve as well as those around you. Bobby always said that the best times were the buddies he made at work and the laughing they would do together to through the long days.

Next week, I dive into my ideas on prioritizing the Fundamentals of Joy At Work. Leveraging joy in the workplace not only improves job satisfaction and productivity, it just may change your life.