Life after brain injury chains bad news with worsening health, brief moments of feeling better, lost opportunities, increasing psychic pain, and despair ascending when medicine fails to heal, families blame us, and friends leave. Yet messaging bombards us to feel grateful, look at the bright side, and think of others. The messaging is like flinging mud at our brain injury grief, grief from having died while remaining physically alive, grief from loss upon loss upon loss. The worst is when we’re told to feel joy, as if it’s the same as happiness.

The operative myth is “feel.”

How can we feel when brain injury has killed off our affect?

How can we feel happy when reality teaches that whatever we imagine, it’ll be worse?

How can we experience the emotion of joy when despair clings like gloppy mud?

We can’t.

But joy can drive our lives.

As long as we don’t expect to *feel *joy.

“Joy is not about feeling happy; it’s about seeing beauty and the good, taking the next step in healing in the midst of raw pain and despair.” From Brain Injury, Trauma, and Grief.

For Christians, the “joy of the Lord” is an adage. When drowning in raw brain injury grief, that adage feels like stones hurled at our heads. Whether we’re a devout follower of Jesus or an atheist, we experience the same struggle with despair and psychic pain that fills our being with such intense grief that we cannot even think. This is why I wrote my award-winning self-help book, Brain Injury, Trauma, and Grief: How to Heal When You Are Alone. When health care professionals barely acknowledge our extraordinary grief and cannot heal it, we must turn to our own selves to heal it.

Yet turning to ourselves, self-talking to pick up my book and follow the Action Plans, is akin to turning an ocean-going freighter in Toronto’s small harbour. Almost impossible.

That’s where joy comes in.

Joy is a state, not an emotion. Like a quantum particle, it secretes itself in our consciousness in our brain and heart. Despair may devour every aspect of our thoughts and emotions (if we have them), but that quantum particle of joy exists, waiting for us to call it up into the light.

One way neurorehab expresses the state of joy is when they have us write down goals, then tick them off as we accomplish them.

Joy is action.

Joy changes us from sagging lumps in front of the TV, or curled up and buried under blankets, to a person who got out of bed, ate breakfast, and replied to one email. Or a person who got out of bed, ate lunch, and attended a Lindamood-Bell class to restore their reading comprehension. Or a person who lifted themself off the couch, turned off the TV, and shovelled snow off a small section of sidewalk.

Joy for us with brain injury isn’t about working for eight hours with a smile on our face; it’s the simple act of getting out of bed and accomplishing one small goal while psychic pain squeezes our heart and despair turns our thoughts into a miasma. It’s reaching out to people who can connect us with clinics that provide neurostimulation, neuromodulation home devices, and psychological support as they treat our neurons and restore our cognitive abilities and energy as much as they’re able. Which is radically more than any standard rehab that exists today in the medical system.

Joy is dragging ourselves out the front door, with emotional pain screaming to get back into bed, yet still taking transit to that fatiguing appointment with the brain biofeedback clinic because it’s an act that says, “You’re worth healing. And no matter what others say and how alone you are, you are pursuing it.”

• Take our Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Test
• Find a therapist near me

Joy is passing that message on.

Many ancient cultures teach about our interconnectedness, that we are one with the world. Zoroastrianism, the world’s first monotheistic religion, teaches that humans are part of Earth’s ecology, not its owners. When we live in harmony with Earth’s ecology, joy sprouts.

That interconnectedness inherent in our humanity, that we have with each other and with all life on our planet, doesn’t go away when others abandon us. We can still find our interconnectedness with the world through encouraging or comforting another hurting person on social media; watching large fluffy snowflakes drift down to frost the window; nurturing our favourite herb in a windowsill pot; saying “Hi!” to the friendly, approachable neighbourhood dogs (especially when we have no dog to snuggle up with); leaning against the strong, rough bark of a tree; walking in cleansing summer rain; or watching squirrels chase each other through the local park. Even when we can’t afford flowers, we can inhale their fragrance or admire their bloom in spring, summer, and fall.

When we say thanks each time joy stimulates action, we acknowledge it, which strengthens our mind to call out joy through the despair.

As that act of joy drives you to resist the freezing action of grief and reach out to those who can heal your neurons, you will transform your life. Bit by bit. Only by looking back at the previous year will you be able to see the healing changes, for in the moment, the relentless chain of bad news and obstacles that stop you cold for a day or week may hold the upper hand. But those small joy actions, one by one, counter them so that at the end of a year, despair may still cloak your thoughts, but you will have healed a little or a lot. Continuing to self-talk to call up that quantum particle of joy accelerates that healing.

Joy lets you tick off your accomplishments. Those ticks adding up shout that you are alive, you haven’t allowed your anguish to triumph, and abandonment and isolation haven’t nailed you to the couch. You love yourself enough to use joy to heal your brain injury and its extraordinary grief.

Copyright ©2026 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy