NOEMAYA

Validation is when I need others’ permission to be myself or to be happy. This means, and experience confirms it every time, that I have the capacity and I alone hold the power to be happy and the courage to be myself. I have full access to that source of life, vitality, and joy. Yet I have shut its gates, releasing only a few drops at a time when the outside world gives a certain cue.

I have placed conditions on my own joy: If this happens, then I can have some. Like parents who hide the chocolate and dispense a piece only if the child behaves, I’ve learned to ration happiness through obedience. Perhaps this early external dynamic is what taught us, unconsciously, to impose the same pattern within—to guard our own fountain of joy as if it must be earned.

When someone laughs at your joke or appreciates what you’ve done—when someone, in essence, buys you—only then do you permit yourself to feel worthy of the taste of joy. You open the gates for a moment, let joy spill through, and then quickly shut them again in the absence of external permission. Often, you choke the throat of joy to punish yourself instead: if a comment or behavior raises eyebrows, you seal the spring and deny even the faintest drop that was beginning to moisten the soul’s tongue.

We stand guard at the gates of our own joy, opening them at the smallest signal, slamming them shut at the slightest threat. If only we knew the strange commandments we’ve written against our own happiness. The withering we feel is never from the world itself but from the way we interpret its light.

Our fountain has become dependent on external influences, which, if we’re honest, are nothing but our interpretations of them. And that dependence puts us in a dilemma: either we manipulate others for access to our own joy, or we retreat into isolation and delusion.

None of this means ignoring social grace or the cues of others. One must still read a room and respond appropriately. If you test a joke on different audiences and no one laughs, perhaps it isn’t funny, or simply not the right moment. But that doesn’t mean you must swallow the reaction as a verdict on your essence and access to your inner joy.

Social feedback should serve only as navigation, helping us refine our craft and our impact, since much of what we do touches others. The trouble begins when we treat that feedback as permission to open, or more often as reason to close, the inner wellspring of joy.

Think of the intoxication of falling in love—the way it lifts your chest, lights your eyes, keeps you awake through the night. That’s when the master gate flies open and the fountain rushes through you. You’ve allowed yourself to drink freely, and it overwhelms you precisely because you so rarely do. All that because someone loved you and desired you, or rather because you interpreted a phenomenon in precisely that way, to mean being loved. Yes, even that is a matter of interpretation: you chose to take that attention as proof of worth to access your joy, something you already possessed, and you bloomed like a flower under the sun of your own permission.

What if one could live like that daily, to move through the world as if already accepted, already desired, already loved? What if one could own one’s own cues and permissions, and what if one went even further and dropped that power dynamic, the need for permission, and allowed oneself free and unconditional access to one’s joy!

Where It Begins

All of this is learned, and innocently so. When harsh feedback pierced your spirit, when others projected their cruelty onto you and punished you emotionally, you absorbed the lesson: love is conditional. And we pass it on, we make behavior about the person, we shoot the messenger: “I give you permission to feel your own joy only if you give me permission to feel mine.” Do you see the consequence? If I am sad, it’s probably your fault and I will do whatever I can to shut off your valve or else force you into permitting me to open mine. I am happy, it must be something you have done, so I’ll do whatever I can to manipulate you into doing that thing over and over again. We become over-sensitive and addicted to those external cues, and we make it our mission to manufacture and control them.

This endless hunger for validation is simply the wish to taste one’s own joy. No wonder addicts suffer from the same disease of permission-seeking. It makes one manipulative, forever bargaining for a sip of what is already theirs.

What if I could accept myself a little more? Give myself what I keep expecting from others? Let the fountain flow without waiting for approval? It would free others too—from my silent demands, from my constant performing like a dog begging for a treat while sitting on the box that contains the treats.

The Trap of Self-Judgment

Stop the constant judging of yourself and your behavior. It’s a loop, a trap. When you judge every move you make before others, you punish yourself and shut down the flow of joy. Then you perform harder to earn permission to open it again, which only deepens your self-consciousness, because you know it’s not real, that it’s performance. You become self-obsessed, endlessly picking at your own seams.

Let go. Be whatever you are. Give yourself the joy you expect from others. That alone resolves most of behavioral issues you failed to fix by your efforts, because now authenticity has replaced performance. The best actors are those who become one with their character and not those who perform it.

We grow so dry of joy that we pant for it, chasing it through self-gratification, through people, through fleeting highs. And in that state, how many poor choices do we make? Choices of people, of purpose, of pleasure, all driven by the need for a kick rather than by shared values or truth. Anyone who gives a hint of attention becomes our validation officer.

The Return to the Source

Give yourself the love and attention you seek from others. Remember: it was never them giving it to you. It was always your interpretation of their behavior as “I-am-worthy-of-my-joy” that reached you. They never handed it to you: you read it that way.

That’s why, as adults, we feel we need a reason to be happy. When happy for no apparent reason, have we not all been asked, almost suspiciously: “Why are you so happy?” As if it should take an outside event, a holiday, a bonus, a kiss, to produce happiness. We’ve forgotten that it’s none of those things that make us happy; it’s rather us using those things as cues to give ourselves permission to open the internal valve to the flow of our bliss.

Children, on the other hand, don’t need a reason to be happy. In fact, they need very strong and compelling reasons to be momentarily unhappy, and even that is a struggle for them because they have to learn how to be unhappy, how to find and close the valve, but they don’t need to learn how to be happy. Joy is their default state. They haven’t learnt to put conditions on what’s rightly theirs, their inner joy.

So, maybe the task isn’t to earn joy, but to remember that it was never gone. The fountain never stopped flowing; we only forgot how to drink from it. And the moment we stop waiting for permission, life rushes back in, clear, effortless, and our own.