Getting My Sunshine Back

Reflections on reclaiming joy and befriending uncertainty.

I remember when I was a child sitting at the edge of the creek in my backyard, my feet in the water, feeling the small current running around my ankles. I was seven years old. I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was just there, in the water, in the sun, perfectly content to be a small person on a small afternoon.

All throughout my childhood people used to call me a ‘ray of sunshine’. And I was. About ten years ago, I was starting to lose her. But I think I am finding her again.

Around my eighteenth birthday, a year before I went off to college, I felt a significant shift. That zest for life was beginning to diminish. All of a sudden, this overwhelming pressure to become an adult, to embark on a newfound responsibility, brought a level of intimidation I wasn’t prepared for. I was starting to feel anxiety in ways I never had before. What I didn’t understand then was that the sunshine didn’t just fade. It was traded. Somewhere around eighteen, the world stopped being a place I was allowed to explore and started being a problem I was supposed to solve. The question changed from “what do you want to do today?” to “what are you going to do with your life?” And those are not the same question at all.

Little Julia never had trouble with the first one. She woke up one day wanting to be a wedding planner and spent the whole afternoon cutting up magazines and making mood boards. The next day she was a teacher, setting up a classroom for her stuffed animals with a math workbook she’d pulled from the shelf. She changed her mind constantly and it never occurred to her that this was something to be ashamed of. The not knowing wasn’t a problem. It was just an ordinary Monday, with a new idea.

But adulthood has a different relationship with uncertainty. There is this quiet but relentless pressure to have a self that is legible, a path that makes sense, an answer ready when someone asks what you do. And somewhere in absorbing that pressure, I started to read my own openness as a flaw. Like the fact that I wanted to try everything and commit to nothing meant something was wrong with me.

It’s ironic, because I attended a conservatory arts college, trying to follow my dreams of becoming an actor. I had discovered being on stage at a young age, and for most of my childhood, this felt like the closest thing to euphoria for a little girl who loved to be bold, dramatic and shine. And while this was something that I loved (and still do), I still felt this fear - that by being forced to choose a path, even one that has brought me joy, would somehow lock me into a life decision I couldn’t take back. I knew I wanted other things, but I didn’t think I was allowed to go after them anymore. I spent most nights that first month away from home crying myself to sleep, hoping my roommate couldn’t hear me sniffling into my pillow.

Life continued to happen. I moved back and forth across the country (a couple of times), I lived in many places, took on many jobs, all in hopes of finding something that might become the one almighty “thing” I would claim as my life’s meaning. I thought this would be acting. I hoped it would - it would make my life so much easier if this felt like the ultimate “yes” of my life’s purpose. I lost the ability to be present in my life by becoming so focused on fixing this “problem.” I took all the personality quizzes, read all the self help books, analyzed my astrology, went to therapy.

Everyone said “you need to heal your childhood trauma. That’s why you’re anxious.”

And so I tried, and I continued to feel shame in not knowing what I wanted. I watched people around me settle into careers, relationships, versions of themselves that seemed decided. I kept waiting to feel decided but I never did. I didn’t know yet that the not knowing wasn’t a failure. It was the most honest thing about me.

I’ll never forget this one fall evening in my final year of college, I had friends over to watch Harry Potter. Everyone was on the couch, immersed in wands flying while I was having a silent panic attack. I excused myself and ran a bath.

I sat in the steaming water, held my hands to my heart, and started to cry. I was having flashbacks to my younger self. I was reliving the moment I came home from my first day of kindergarten. I remember walking outside, sitting on the hammock in my backyard and slightly swaying back and forth, letting the sun take me.

I then saw myself sitting at the creek, like I loved to do on those crisp southern spring evenings.

In the bathtub, I had this moment where it felt like a literal ball of light was emerging out of my chest. I felt this immediate sense of relief, grief and expansion all at the same time. I cried even harder.

That was the first time I understood I’d been grieving a person. The person was my younger self.

Today I’m twenty-eight. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to manage the grief. Fully adopting the narrative that this is how life must be. Full of struggle and pressure and shame. That Little Miss Sunshine, that Little Julia I knew is gone for good.

What I know now is that Little Julia wasn’t confused. She was free. And the sunshine she had came from exactly that freedom. I don’t believe she’s gone for good anymore. I’m on a journey to get her back. I want to reestablish my baseline as joy. I want to go back to finding the small, simple pleasures in the mundane. I want to go back to embracing wonder, feeling content in uncertainty. I want to get my sunshine back.

I think trying to do all of this ‘healing’ as a means to find joy hasn’t been working for me. I think instead, Joy is the way in. Returning to my inner child, not trying to fix her, is how I actually reclaim my sunshine.

Lately I’ve been meditating with little Julia in mind. Not trying to heal her. Just sitting next to her. Asking her what she remembers. Letting her tell me what mattered when nothing was an obligation yet. Then I go about my day, trying to keep that feeling close. And it’s starting to work.

I woke up last week talking to myself again - something I used to do every day as a child. I looked in the mirror. I gave myself a little wink and told myself how excited I was to go to the park for an afternoon walk. So simple. So mundane. I haven’t done that in years.

I made a little something to go with this. It’s called The Joy Anchor. It’s a seven-minute meditation for the days when you can’t find your way back to yourself. I made it because I needed it.

I’m writing all of this in case you have your own younger self you’ve been missing. The one who didn’t need to have it figured out. The one who could sit in a creek and call that enough.

She’s not gone. She’s just been waiting for you to stop apologizing for her.