Tis’ the season…
Now is the season in your life where you shouldn’t be afraid to create joy, celebrate new beginnings, and adjust your internal compass.
Everything in this season may not make sense but you are here, and you are worthy of being here, worthy of feeling joyful. Every day won’t be a day where you jump for joy or feel overwhelmingly happy, and that is okay. Give yourself permission to experience the full range of emotions that come with pursuing joy.
According to licensed therapist Katherine Atherton:
“Joy is a deeper emotion than happiness that comes from within — from a sense of purpose and meaning, including finding meaning in suffering — and from relationships with others. It therefore lasts longer than its counterpart. It’s also relatively independent from happiness.”
Joy isn’t dependent on feeling happy every single day or being fully satisfied with your circumstances. It is a deeper understanding of the cathartic experience that is life. Motherhood and womanhood often make us feel these emotional shifts with greater intensity. We rarely find the full meaning of joy, not because it doesn’t exist within us, but because we don’t slow down long enough to look deeply for it.
So as you move through this season, ask yourself:
Where can you find the most joy right now?
Is it in your career? Your relationships? Motherhood? Community? Spiritual connection? In tangible things?
Wherever you plant your joyful roots, may they be planted in sturdy soil, not sinking sand. May they endure the trials that inevitably come. May your joy be undeniable, lasting, and filled with something richer than the here and now.
May you feel how worthy you are of divine peace.
May you feel how worthy you are of joy beyond where you currently stand.
May joy be your compass, not just this season, but in every season to come.
With love and joy,
Amber
Gratitude is not always being grateful for everything
It all begins with an idea.
As Thanksgiving nears, I find myself reflecting on everything I am truly grateful for, and realizing that gratitude rarely stands alone. Often, beneath the surface of what we cherish most lies a history of sacrifice, loss, or pain. Gratitude and sacrifice are more intertwined than we like to admit.
I am profoundly grateful for my family and their health, something so many people can no longer say in today’s world. That gratefulness is real. It is grounding. It is precious. But I also know that behind it sits a mountain of sacrifice. As a mom, I give of myself every single day, my time, my energy, my resources, my body, my mental health. Motherhood is a privilege, yes. But privilege doesn’t erase pain.
For me, becoming a mother wasn’t wrapped in joy from the start. My birth story was traumatic. My early postpartum days were marked by shadows, by a grief that felt out of place in a season that was “supposed” to be full of bliss. And even now, as I sit in my joy—real, earned, abundant joy—I still carry the echoes of the anguish that once swallowed me whole.
People love to remind you, “Well, at least you’re a mom. At least you have a good life.” And while that may be true, it’s also incomplete. I’m learning that two things can coexist within one reality: joy and pain, gratitude and resentment, peace and anxiety. We do ourselves a disservice when we try to force one emotion out to make room for another. Life doesn’t work like that. Motherhood certainly doesn’t.
Sometimes, motherhood feels like both a blessing and a burden. And honestly? That’s okay. Don’t @ me because I admit feeling ungrateful at times. I’m human. Maybe if more of us allowed ourselves to acknowledge the difficult parts—the sadness, the uncertainty, the exhaustion—we’d stop treating gratitude like a mask we’re required to put on. Maybe we’d actually experience gratitude in its fullest, truest form: not as a performance, but as a soft place we return to once we’ve been honest about what hurts.
So this Thanksgiving, I’m choosing to honor the coexistence. The joy and the ache. The gratitude and the grief. The parts of motherhood that fill me, and the parts that emptied me before I even knew how to ask for help.
Because maybe gratitude isn’t about pretending. Maybe it’s about finally allowing ourselves to feel everything.
"We don’t have to pretend to be fine when we are not. We don’t need to push through and be strong. Gratitude is a soft landing place that requires us to be honest, open, and willing to look at everything we’re facing and not turn away."
–Alex Elle
With love <3 and gratitude,
Amber