Sunday Porch Conversations: Joy With a Limp

You’re allowed to be glad before everything is fixed.

A family of quail came through the yard this morning. If you’ve never seen Gambel’s quail run, I need you to understand: they don’t run so much as panic forward — a dozen little wind-up toys with feathers on their heads, all urgency and no plan. And I laughed. Out loud, alone, at 5:30 in the morning, the kind of laugh that comes up from somewhere before you approve it.

And then — I caught it. The clamp. That reflex that arrives half a second after joy does, checking my laughter against everything that isn’t finished yet. The grief that hasn’t closed. The prayers still out. The people I love who are still in their long heat. Some old accountant in my chest looked up from the ledger and asked the question she has asked my whole life:

“What exactly do you have to laugh about?”

Maybe you know her. She keeps a different set of books in every chest, but the arithmetic is always the same: joy must be earned, and it isn’t earned until everything is resolved — the healing finished, the loved ones safe, the world less on fire. Until then, gladness feels like a betrayal. Of the pain. Of the people still in it. Of the seriousness of everything.

Here’s my chapter, and it has a professional twist: I sit with pain for a living, and for years I let that become my license to defer joy. Somebody was always in crisis — somebody always is — so my own gladness sat in the waiting room indefinitely, like it needed the world’s permission slip. I called it compassion. I called it solidarity. But hear the truer thing I had to admit on this porch: my joylessness never lifted a single person out of their pain. It just meant the pain won twice. Somewhere along the way I had confused feeling bad with doing good, and they are not the same currency. They never were.

Your joy doesn’t abandon anyone.
Your absence of joy rescues no one.

And there’s a nervous-system truth underneath this that I wish someone had told me decades ago: for many of us who grew up braced, joy is the most dangerous feeling there is. Not sadness — sadness we know how to hold. Joy is exposure. Joy means letting your guard down in a world that has previously charged you for that. So the clamp isn’t a character flaw. It’s an old bodyguard, still billing hours, still certain that if you don’t get too happy, you can’t be caught off guard by the loss. As if rehearsing the sorrow in advance has ever once made it smaller when it came.

· · ·

So here is the turn, and I want to say it as plainly as anything I’ve said all summer:

Joy is not the reward at the end of healing. Joy is rebellion in the middle of it. Laughing in year four of the grief is not a betrayal of the grief — it is proof that the grief did not get everything. Delight, in a life that is still unresolved, is the most defiant thing a nervous system can do. The old songs knew this: the ones who sowed in tears were promised they’d come back singing — nobody said they had to wait until the field was finished to hum.

And you don’t need the polished kind. I’m not talking about the joy in the stock photos — whole, uncomplicated, both hands in the air. I’m talking about the kind I had this morning: joy with a limp. Gladness that shows up leaning on everything it’s been through, laughing at quail with tears still on the books. Gladness with a limp still counts as gladness. It might be the only kind grown people get — and I’ve come to believe it’s the sturdier kind, because it has already met sorrow and decided to stay anyway.

The laugh came before I approved it.
That’s how I know it was mine.

No bow. The ledger-keeper in my chest doesn’t retire quietly, and yours won’t either — she’ll be back tomorrow asking what you have to laugh about. But now you have an answer: quail. This coffee. That one text. Being alive in a body that made it this far. Small things, unearned, right in the middle of the unresolved. That’s not denial of the heat. That’s water in it.

So this week, when the laugh comes up before you approve it — let it all the way out. Somebody in your life is still in their long heat, yes. And nothing tells them survival is possible like the sound of somebody laughing on the other side of the wall — somebody who they know for a fact is limping too.

With warmth from the porch,

Kristi

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About the Author

Kristi M. Estrada, LPC-S, NCC, SEP, is a licensed professional counselor-supervisor and somatic trauma therapist in Phoenix, Arizona, founder of Kristi Estrada, LPC-S, SEP & Associates, and the creator of Trauma Restorative Care™. Known to many as The Healing Servant, she writes at the intersection of nervous system science, attachment repair, and a faith that has been through the fire and walks with a limp — held deeply, never handed to the reader as a requirement. There’s a seat on this porch whether you pray or not. Kristi’s writing is shaped as much by what she has survived as by what she has studied, which is why she doesn’t offer tidy answers — she’s never been healed by one. Her Sunday Porch Conversations reach clients, clinicians, and everyday readers who are tired of tidy answers and ready for true ones. Learn more at healingservant.com.