Joy is not lost. It’s just waiting for you to feel again
It’s a phrase I hear too often. “I’m OK.”
Those words hide more than they reveal. A client sits opposite me, smiling politely, telling me they’re “OK, broadly speaking” — and then, after a pause, admitting they feel like they’re slowly dying in front of their children’s eyes. Outwardly, everything appears intact: the career, the marriage, the stability. Inside, there’s only numbness.
This state has a name: anhedonia. The inability to feel joy. Food becomes bland. Music loses its pull. Achievements feel hollow. Family moments slip into duty. It isn’t sadness; sadness has texture. This is the absence of feeling itself.
What often sits underneath anhedonia is something called high-functioning depression. It doesn’t look like the stereotype. You still get out of bed. You go to work. You pay the bills. You show up for family. From the outside, you look fine — more than fine, maybe even enviable. But inside, there’s a slow erosion. A quiet despair. The problem is, because you’re still functioning, you may not realise you’re suffering at all. You dismiss the emptiness as a rough patch, a lack of motivation, just being tired. Meanwhile the days stack up, drained of colour.
And the reflex of our culture is to medicate. Antidepressants are prescribed at record pace. They can steady the floor, yes. But they also flatten everything else. The highs are blunted with the lows. Joy gets dulled along with despair. Life turns into management. Existence without depth.
But the truth few want to face: pain is not the enemy. As the Buddha said, life is pain. To deny pain is to deny life. It’s precisely through allowing ourselves to feel discomfort that joy becomes possible. You cannot numb selectively. When you mute suffering, you mute wonder. When you avoid pain, you also shut yourself off from joy.
The way back isn’t found in escape. It’s found in embodiment. Movement is the most direct route we have to reawaken feeling. Physical exertion — sweat, breath, heartbeat — reactivates the dopamine and serotonin pathways that anhedonia shuts down. When the body moves, it drags the mind with it. You remember you’re alive, not in theory but in the pulse of your veins.
One client told me, “When I sit still, I feel myself dying. When I move, I start to feel again.” That is the work. Not to float above suffering, but to step into it — to use the friction of pain as proof of life, and as the very condition that allows joy to return.
If you’re telling yourself you’re “OK, broadly speaking,” you’re not. That phrase is a mask. The deeper question is: are you willing to feel again? Not just the light, but the dark? Because you cannot reclaim joy without letting pain move through you.
This is where I can help. My work is about creating the structure and accountability to confront what you’ve been avoiding — to move, to feel, and to rediscover joy in the process of being fully alive.
If this speaks to you, don’t wait. Reach out. Together we’ll do the work that brings you back to yourself.
Big love. Chris
PS: Don’t hide from pain. It’s precisely by facing it — by choosing to move through it — that we return to feeling. And in feeling, we remember what it is to be fully alive.
