purpose, joy and sharing your gifts in the right arena.

You can live your purpose in the wrong arena.

And the dissonance in your body can become so loud that travelling the world in search of others caught in the same predicament begins to feel necessary.

I remember asking myself: Am I building in the right space?

I was building Indigenous economies. I was living my values. I was sharing my gifts. From the outside, the work aligned with everything I said I believed.

And still, something felt wrong.

Not necessarily the work.

The arena.

I began to wonder whether I was building the right things for the wrong people. Whether I had mistaken alignment with purpose for belonging. Whether meaningful work was enough reason to remain in spaces where my body was constantly bracing.

Then someone asked me a different question:

Are you living your joy?

Because if I wasn’t, they suggested, perhaps my body was accurately reading what my mind kept trying to rationalize.

We live our joy through belonging and connection. Through reciprocity. Through being witnessed. Through being with people who do not require us to abandon ourselves in order to remain among them.

Being with the right people can change our very biology. So can being with the wrong ones.

Our relationships, workplaces, communities, and environments can move us toward wellness or toward illness. And when our bodies fall out of sync with the environments we inhabit, we can begin to believe that something is wrong with us.

Something is broken.

Something needs to be fixed.

Something needs a diagnosis.

But what if the body is not betraying us?

What if it is communicating?

Our bodies are constantly responding to what we ask them to carry: the pain, the trauma, the stories, the silence, the pace, the pressure. The behaviour of those around us shapes us, too. We adapt. We brace. We contract. We become vigilant. We learn what is safe to say, where it is safe to soften, how much of ourselves a room will tolerate.

And when an environment moves toward chronic tension, stress, fear, or pain, the body is not broken when it speaks.

The feelings are not failure.

The exhaustion is not always a lack of resilience.

The dissonance may be information.

So I have been sitting with a different question:

How do we release ourselves from systems, spaces, and relationships that drain our energy but never restore it?

How do we know when we are being called to persevere—and when we are being called to shed?

Snakes teach us that growth sometimes requires leaving a whole skin behind.

Regalia teaches us that what we carry can be added, removed, inherited, repaired, remade, and chosen with intention.

Perhaps we can be this way, too.

Perhaps finding our voice, purpose, and joy is not about discovering one permanent self and defending it forever.

Perhaps it is about learning what is ours to carry in this season. What must be released. What must be reclaimed. What deserves to be adorned. What no longer fits the body we are becoming.

This is where I return to the agreements that have guided my work:

Contribute Our Gifts.
What is mine to offer?

Own Our Actions.
What is mine to take responsibility for?

Yearn for Growth.
What skin am I being asked to shed?

Act on Legacy.
What becomes possible for those who come after me because of how I choose to live now?

For years, I thought living my purpose was the destination.

Now I wonder whether purpose is only the first question.

Because we can live our purpose in places that diminish us. We can use our gifts in systems that consume them. We can become extraordinarily effective in environments that make us unwell. We can confuse being needed with belonging. We can mistake endurance for alignment.

I was once asked whether I was living my purpose.

It was an important first step.

But the question that changed me was whether I was living my joy.

I think now that joy may be the more important destination.

Not joy as constant happiness. Not joy as the absence of grief, responsibility, or struggle.

Joy as recognition.

Joy as belonging.

Joy as reciprocity.

Joy as the body no longer having to scream in order to be heard.

Joy as finding the people with whom your gifts become medicine.

Joy as discovering that perhaps you were never meant to stop living your purpose.

Perhaps you were simply being called to find the right arena.