Joy Is a Choice: How I Found Peace After Trauma

After our ordeal, I expected the healing to come naturally. I thought that once the crisis was over, peace would simply return. It did not work that way.

Healing, I discovered, is not passive. It is an active, intentional pursuit — and the first tool in your kit is the decision to choose joy, even when the circumstances have not yet caught up with that choice.

What Choosing Joy Looks Like in Practice

It is not toxic positivity. It is not pretending the pain does not exist. It is something far more honest: acknowledging the wound while refusing to let the wound define your future.

For me, choosing joy looked like:

• Morning gratitude — writing down three things before my feet hit the floor, no matter how small.
• Guarding my input — being intentional about what I watched, read, and listened to during the fragile early months of recovery.
• Telling the story out loud — because there is extraordinary power in naming your pain instead of letting it quietly run your life from the shadows.

The Moment It Shifted

I was on stage at a women's event in Cape Town, sharing our story for the first time publicly, when a woman in the third row started crying. Afterwards she said: "I thought I was the only one."

That moment crystallised everything. Joy is not just something we keep for ourselves. When we choose it in the middle of suffering, we give everyone watching permission to choose it too.

That is the ministry of the testimony.