What brings you joy?

Two-ish months ago I posted about my newsletter on LinkedIn, got a bunch of new subscribers (yay!), and then immediately stopped newslettering. Just after the LinkedIn post, I went back to work full time and it's been harder than I anticipated to keep up with personal projects. Some family health stuff has been keeping me extra busy, too.

A month ago my twin brother was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma (he's cool with me sharing this here as he's been sharing his journey with millions of people on X), so I've been back and forth between home and Miami, where he lives.

I'm in Miami now and decided that during this trip I'd make an effort to get back to my daily morning routine, which has gone out the window over the past couple months. My ideal morning consists of waking up early, making a cup of tea, writing Morning Pages, and doing yoga. So I've been doing that since I got here.

Morning Pages is a journaling practice from The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. If you're not familiar with it, The Artist's Way is a book that outlines a 12-week program for overcoming creative blocks. If I'm being honest, the book didn't really resonate with me. But Morning Pages are everything. Morning Pages are three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing done first thing in the morning and their purpose is to basically clear out all the garbage, organize your thoughts, and make space for creativity.

Over the past 10 months of writing Morning Pages, I've filled 10 notebooks with a whole bunch of garbage. But in addition to the garbage I've recorded dreams I wouldn't have remembered otherwise, worked through problems, come up with new ideas, and even written a bunch of new lyrics to "the diarrhea song" while on an early morning train ride from New Jersey to DC to visit my mom:

When you're riding on a train, and you're feeling stomach pain...
Diarrhea! Diarrhea!

When you're pulling into Trenton and the gurgles start to set in...
Diarrhea! Diarrhea!

But I digress! The reason I'm here is to share that last week while I was writing Morning Pages I decided to make a list of stuff that brings me joy. I've been writing a lot about the stressful, less-than-ideal things that are going on in my life and needed a reset.

I'm not for toxic positivity and I think it's good to feel all the feelings. But I also think it's important to zoom out and see the bigger picture when we're going through something difficult. And the bigger picture still includes the tough stuff, but it also includes silly stuff and laughter and love and tasty stuff and friends—and bears scratching their backs on trees (really!).

The power of positive writing

But before I get into my list of stuff that brings me joy, I want to give a shout out to the power of positive writing. Writing about things like gratitude, meaning, and joy can have lots of benefits. Here are some exercises to try.

Three good things

Take a few minutes before you go to bed each night for one week to write down three things that went well that day and reflect on why they went well.

This exercise, called “Three Good Things,” is a positive psychology intervention developed by Dr. Martin Seligman that has been shown to increase levels of happiness and gratitude, and decrease levels of burnout and depression. Seligman says this activity works “because it changes your focus from the things that go wrong in life to things that you might take for granted that go well.”

I try to do this every night before bed. Even on days when I don’t feel like there’s anything to be grateful for, I'll come up with something. Maybe I'm grateful for clean sheets because I did laundry, something that made me laugh, even briefly, a moment of unexpected kindness from a stranger, or the fact that a hard day is ending and tomorrow is a fresh start.

Gratitude letter

Think of a person that’s made a genuine difference in your life. It could be a parent, a teacher, a friend, colleague, or neighbor. Then write them a letter expressing your gratitude. Then... share the letter! Call and read it to the person over the phone, send it in the mail, or deliver it in person!

The research shows that simply writing a gratitude letter can have a positive impact on your wellbeing—taking the time to savor what you're grateful for is powerful. But through the process of writing, you also get the words out of your head and into a form that another person can receive. And actually delivering your letter can have an even greater impact than just writing it.

But don't take my word for it. See gratitude in action in this feel-good video:

Meaning reflection

I went through a phase where I was really stressed at work. Inspired by Viktor Frankl's idea that we can find meaning in any situation, I started a weekly journaling practice to find meaning in my work.

Every Monday I wrote a few sentences about what was meaningful about the things I'd be working on that week. How was my work going to help people? What new skills was I going to learn? What connections was I going to make? I'd read the reflection every morning after that. Then, on Friday at the end of the day I'd write down 5 things that went well that week at work.

Within a matter of weeks, I felt more positive about work than I think I ever have. Instead of focusing on what wasn't going well or what was stressing me out, I was focused on the meaningful stuff. The lens through which we look at life makes a big difference.

The joy list

So I don't know if this is an official thing or not, but this is what I did this week when I was writing Morning Pages. It started after I wrote something about how the weather in Miami has been terrible. It's been in the mid-90s, humid, and there's been a bunch of rain—but I wrote that because of the rain there's been a lot of rainbows.

Writing about the rainbows is what inspired me to start writing about stuff that brings me joy. And it felt really good. I smiled a lot and even laughed some—and laughing out loud when I'm by myself is definitely one of the things that brings me joy.

Anyway, here are a few of the other things on my list:

When things look like other things—like a dent in the subway wall that looks like a sloth or an owl, or a box of pads that looks like me when I have cramps. I recently learned that this is called "pareidolia." It's the psychological tendency to perceive meaningful shapes or patterns in inanimate objects, clouds, or other randomness.

Songs with parts that are fun to sing. One of my current faves is "These Eyes" by The Guess Who. In particular, this part is super fun to sing: "These eyes have seen a lot of love but they're never gonna see another one like I had with you."

People that celebrate airplane landings. When my flight landed in Miami this lady in the row behind me started clapping and cheering when the plane landed. She cheered for like a full minute. She was so happy to be in Miami.

Samanco. Have you tried this? This ice cream that looks like a fish?? It says "It's Fintastic!" on the box and it really is fintastic.

Freakin' bears scratching their backs on trees. A couple weeks ago my husband Dante and I were at our lake house and I was asleep and he woke me up screaming "Megan! Megan! Bear! Come heeeeere!" And there was a bear outside scratching its back on a tree and wow it might be one of the best things I've ever seen. I didn't know bears really did this outside of cartoons.

Em dashes. I love 'em and I won't stop using 'em—even if people accuse me of being AI. And speaking of AI, I'm proud to say there was no AI used in the writing of this post (outside of one final check for typos, of which it found two).

When other people tell me about things that bring them joy. So please do! And thank you for reading.