As someone who usually writes about trauma and addiction, lately I find myself interested in joy. At first, I thought that this has to be a contradiction. But now, the deeper I go into studying grief and traumatic growth, I find it makes perfect sense. And as I study more about spirituality, I keep coming to joy.

But joy is not happiness. It is something sturdier, quieter, and far more mysterious. It is not what happens to us; it is what grows in us when we choose to stay grateful, and to stay connected—even, and especially—when life is not happy.

At first glance, joy looks like happiness’s brighter, louder cousin. We often use the words happiness and joy as if they’re interchangeable, as if they both live on the same emotional shelf. “I just want to be happy,” people say and it sounds like the same wish. But when I look at my own life, and at the lives of people I love, the moments I recognize as joy rarely showed up when everything was going my way. Joy arrived in fun times certainly, but it also showed up in hospital rooms, and in kitchens at the end of long, complicated days. Joy doesn’t erase pain; it glows inside it.

There is nothing wrong with happiness, of course. It’s wonderful, and we need as much of it as we can get. But happiness is fragile because life is fragile. When circumstances shift—and they always do—in recovery we say “life on life’s terms” —happiness scatters. A phone call late at night, a doctor clearing his throat, a child struggling in ways we can’t fix, or an aging body that no longer takes our direction.

Joy can come from my relationship with that something greater, like a Higher Power --which means I can feel joy even when I am not happy.

Joy has an odd relationship to pain. It doesn’t cancel it. Instead, it widens the frame. Joy is also deeply relational. Many forms of happiness are private: my success, my vacation, my good news. Joy, on the other hand, makes the circle bigger. We find it in shared meals, shared sorrows, in recovery circles, and in the rooms where people tell the truth.

When I look back on the seasons of my life, the happiest chapters are easy to remember—vacations, successes, celebrations. But the most meaningful moments, the ones that shaped me, are threaded with joy that was not dependent on things turning out well: Sitting with a friend in recovery, holding a patient’s hand in the hospital, telling the truth when it would have been easier to hide. None of those moments were “happy,” and yet each carried a sense of being fully alive to what mattered most.

I think about a memorial service I attended years ago. The grief was clear and raw and jagged. But there was also laughter—genuine, full-bodied laughter—as stories were told about the person we’d lost. Not nervous laughter, but laughter rooted in love. That room was not “happy.” But it was full of joy.

So, I no longer say, “I just want to be happy.” Happiness will come and go as it pleases, like weather moving across the sky. Instead, I want to be capable of joy. Joy doesn’t deny how hard life can be, but it refuses to believe that hardship is all there is.

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Diane Cameron, Albany New York