Happiness On The Inside

When we are no longer able to change a sitauation, we are challenged to change ourself.

- Viktor Frankl

When I was sick in my twenties, I wasn’t just housebound—I was bedbound. A dark night of the soul, as they say.

I felt like a speeding train that had just crashed into a brick wall. My entire life came to a sudden stop.

I couldn’t help but wonder what terrible thing I had done to deserve such a debilitating illness, especially after everything I’d already lived through. After all the darkness I had already seen.

It didn’t just break my body. It broke my spirit. (Hugs, past Twila.)

But what I didn’t know was that the experience would completely transform me. A chrysalis. A death and rebirth, the way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

As poetic as that sounds, chrysalis is a long, slow, scary process.

By year three, it brought me to a fork in the road. Because being housebound isn’t just a physical prison. It’s a psychic one, too.

I realized I could take the dark path of self-pity, self-loathing, despair. Or I could choose the harder path of hope and light, even though I might never be well again.

That was the moment I understood something life-changing: I had a choice.

The dark path was easier. I could slip into it like a warm bath. It asked nothing of me. It was almost inviting me in.

But I had grown up reading books with heroines who didn’t take the easy path. They walked through fire. They chose the light. And their open hearts were their strength, not their weakness.

How could I let them down now when it mattered most?

That season taught me the most profound lesson of my life: Happiness, joy, contentment can all be found even in the darkest circumstances. Not because life suddenly gets better.

But because they were never on the outside.

Not in the job. Not in the person. Not in the experience we’re so sure will make us whole.

They live in the softest place in our hearts. Always with us. Always on the inside.

Writing Prompt:

Think of a moment in your life when you felt completely undone. What did that moment ask of you? What small light - if any - helped you keep going?

If you could go back and sit with that version of yourself and tell them one thing, what would it be?