When Happiness Was Out of Reach, Joy Found Her in the Hospital
After a stage four cancer diagnosis in her 30s, Kate Bowler learned the difference between ease and sudden wholeness.
Good Inside with Dr. Becky · Resentment, Joy, and Why Moms Don't Believe They're Allowed EitherKate Bowler lay in a hospital bed with a diagnosis she thought would keep her from living past Christmas, past summer, past everything she loved. Nothing anyone said could make it okay, and in her mind the story was simple. It would be horrible, it would be painful, and nothing would ever be good again.
Bowler, a professor at Duke University and the author of several books, had spent much of her 30s living with stage four cancer. For long seasons, she said, happiness was not always available. Happiness, as she had come to understand it, was ease, many small circumstances lining up at once, and she could not line them up.
That absence sent her looking for something else that could still be promised when times get tough. She found joy. Where happiness feels calm, joy is, as Bowler put it, "this big, bright, enlivening feeling" that "startles you awake."
The difference mattered in that hospital room. Bowler said she would have told you that joy was impossible there. Bowler joked, "I'm not that good of a person," adding, "I can't engineer that."
Then it came anyway, in bizarre and beautiful moments she could not have predicted. For a moment, amid terror and pain, she felt deeply whole. She felt loved by other people and loved by God, and carried by that feeling. It arrived like a gift from outside herself, not something she made up.
She describes joy that way, as what Bowler called "a surprise of temporary wholeness." In a single moment, a person can think, as Bowler put it, "Even if nothing is okay right now, it is deeply okay," and feel that life is still meaningful and good to be alive.
What stayed with her was the sense that joy does not require a climb back to happiness first. It can, as Bowler put it, "come find you in the dark." When people are tired, she suggested, maybe they could renew a belief that the best parts of life would not go find somebody else, in Bowler's words, "with better luck and more money." As Bowler put it, "they can still pick you out of a lineup and convince you that your life is beautiful."
Questions people ask
What is the difference between happiness and joy in this story?
Happiness depends on favorable circumstances lining up, so it fades when life gets hard. Joy is described as a sudden, enlivening sense of wholeness that can appear without any change in circumstances, which is why it can coexist with grief, pain, or fear.
Did Kate Bowler survive that prognosis?
She lived past the Christmas she feared she would not see, and continued teaching and writing. Her later work explores faith, suffering, and joy, and she has spoken openly about living for years with a serious cancer history while raising her son.
Is there science behind the idea that joy and sadness can mix?
Researchers distinguish positive emotions that are calm from those that are activating and involve both reward and stress responses. Joy is often put in the second group, because it can feel energizing and overwhelming, even tearful, rather than relaxed.