When did you stop laughing?

I stopped laughing for a while. It didn’t happen all at once. It happened the way most losses happen when you are very busy carrying everything: quietly, gradually, with no single moment you can point to.

The world saw someone who was fine. Capable, present, functioning, even smiling. And I was those things. But inside there was a kind of flatness that I could not quite name. I was not unhappy in any way I could justify. Nothing was wrong. Everything was just a little grey.

It took me a long time to understand what had happened. Not to my circumstances, but to me.

I had stopped making room for the things that made me feel alive.

How it happens

It does not happen because you stop caring about joy. It happens because you are so good at caring for everyone else that your own small pleasures become the first thing you deprioritise.

It is always reasonable. It is never the right time. Other things matter more. It does not seem important enough to protect.

You become exceptionally skilled at creating magic for the people you love. You remember what makes them feel seen. You notice what they love and you make it happen. You hold the emotional texture of their lives with genuine care and attention.

And somewhere in all of that, you stop applying the same care to yourself.

Not because you do not want to. Because you have quietly, incrementally decided that your own small joys are not quite as important as everyone else’s.

The night of the falling stars

Last summer there was a meteor shower. My husband was abroad for work. My first instinct was to let it pass. It’s late. It’s just me. It’s not really that important.

Then I caught myself. I knew, clearly, that watching would make me happy. So I took my blanket into the garden, settled in, and stayed. It was getting cold. I did not care.

And I saw one falling star. Then another. Then another.

I sat there alone in the dark, a little chilly, smiling at the sky. Nobody witnessed it. Nobody needed to. That moment was entirely mine.

I think about that night often because it was so small and so complete. It cost nothing. It required only that I decided it was worth doing.

That is the thing about small joys. They ask very little of you except the decision to show up for them.

What the research says about small things

Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson spent decades studying what actually sustains people through difficult periods and builds a life that feels meaningful. Her findings challenged a lot of assumptions.

It is not singular peak experiences that build resilience and a sense of a life well lived. It is the accumulation of small positive moments woven through ordinary days. Brief encounters with beauty. Small pleasures noticed and savoured rather than hurried past. Moments of lightness that are treated as worth having.

Her research found that these small moments do something structural: they broaden your thinking, build psychological resources, and over time compound into something that looks very much like a person who has not lost herself.

The women in her studies who fared best were not the ones who had fewer problems. They were the ones who had learned to notice and protect small positive experiences even inside difficult circumstances.

This is not toxic positivity. It is not gratitude journalling as a substitute for real change. It is something much more specific: the decision to stop cancelling on yourself.

The things that kindle a spark

You know what they are. They are usually small, sometimes a little embarrassing, not particularly impressive.

The ridiculous figurine you bought in a thrift store that makes you smile everytime you spot it. The feathers you have been quietly collecting on your walks without quite knowing why. The mug that is just yours and makes the coffee taste different. The silly dance in the kitchen with your kids. The barefoot walk on a Thursday afternoon because the weather was right and you felt like it.

These things look insignificant from the outside. They are not. They are evidence that you are still in there. That the person underneath all the roles has not gone anywhere. She is just waiting to be included in her own life.

The problem is not that women do not know what lights them up. The problem is that they have become so skilled at dismissing it. It’s not that important. I don’t really need this. Maybe later. I’ll do it when things settle down.

But things do not settle down. And later has a way of becoming never.

Not happiness. Aliveness.

I want to make a distinction that I think matters.

We talk a lot about happiness as the goal. But happiness is large and abstract and dependent on too many things going right at once. Chasing it tends to make you aware of how much is missing.

What is actually available to you, always, is aliveness. The small kindling of something in your chest when you see something beautiful, or funny, or unexpectedly moving. The moment that is just yours. The thing you did for no reason except that it made you feel like yourself.

That is not a small thing. That is the texture of a life.

And for women who carry a great deal, who have spent years making sure everyone else’s needs are met, who have become extraordinary at creating meaning and magic for the people they love, learning to apply that same care to themselves is not a luxury.

It is how you stay whole.

A question to end with

What is one thing you keep from yourself because it does not seem important enough?

Not a holiday. Not a life overhaul. Something small. Something that would make you smile, or feel like yourself for a moment, that you have been quietly cancelling on.

Say it out loud. Even just to yourself.

That is where it starts.

Kaat

This summer I have a few spaces available for a single 90-minute (online) coaching session. One real question you are carrying. No commitment to a full trajectory. A free 20-minute introduction call is the first step.

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From time to time I write essays about identity, motherhood, responsibility and reconnecting with yourself.

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