When Joy Feels Like A Foreign Language

by Agnieszka Wolsoncroft

Thursday last week marked three years since my Babcia left us.

I was walking through a shopping centre on an ordinary Sunday when I felt it.

A heat wave, sudden and complete, moving through my whole body. Not a hot flush. Not a dizzy spell. Something else entirely—a warmth that felt like arms around me, like someone pressing their cheek to mine the way she always had.

I remember thinking: this is not a good day for shopping. I'll go home.

Twenty minutes later, my phone rang. My mother's voice.

"Babcia passed away. About half an hour ago."

She had come to say goodbye.

I stood in my kitchen in Perth, phone in my hand, and I knew it with absolute certainty: she had found me in that shopping centre, in the middle of the day, and she had held me one last time before she left. That heat wave was her. Her goodbye. Her I love you. Her I'll see you again.

And in the days that followed, when grief threatened to swallow me whole, I did the only thing I knew how to do.

I remembered her. Not the loss. Her.

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Close your eyes for a moment. Come with me.

It's summer in Poland. I am small—maybe six, maybe seven. The kitchen smells of warm fruit and sugar and something that can only be described as Babcia. She is at the stove, and the plum cake is in the oven, and the whole house is filled with a smell so particular, so completely hers, that even now—forty years later, on the other side of the world—I can bring it back in an instant.

She always saved me the corner piece. The best piece, where the pastry goes slightly golden and crisp at the edges and the plum filling pools in just right. She'd slide it onto my plate with a wink, as if we were sharing a secret the rest of the world didn't know about.

We were.

The secret was this: she saw me. Fully. The girl who would rather be in the forest than in front of any television, who filled notebooks with stories that others called daydreaming. Babcia never called it daydreaming.

"You have stories in your soul," she'd say, peering over her reading glasses while I scribbled away. And before I understood what that meant, before I believed it myself, she believed it for me.

She taught me to read at three years old. She told me: "A girl needs to be independent. It is great to have friends, to have a husband, but you must learn to be like the Sun—absolutely capable of shining alone, on your own terms."

I didn't understand it then. I understand it now. I am trying to live it now.

#

And then there was Dziadek.

My grandfather took me to the forest the way other grandfathers take children to toy shops or football games. To him, the forest was the greatest gift he could give. He was right.

He knew where every wild mushroom grew—which ones to pick and which ones to leave alone, how to read the forest floor the way some people read books. He knew where the blackberry bushes hid their sweetest fruit, where the blueberries grew low to the ground in little clusters. And the wild strawberries—oh, the wild strawberries. So small you could barely see them. But the smell. There is nothing in the world that smells like a wild strawberry found in a Polish forest on a warm summer morning. Nothing.

He showed me how woodpeckers dig holes in pine trees and hide their acorns for winter. He taught me to move quietly—really quietly, the kind of quiet that comes from slowing your whole self down, your thoughts, your breath, your footsteps—so we wouldn't spook the red squirrels.

I have walked in forests all over the world since then. Perth bushland. English countryside. Bali's green hills. Thailand’s tropics. Many others.

I always take him with me.

I show him: look, Dziadek. Look at this tree. Look at this bird I don't know the name of. You would know its name. I take Babcia too. And my dear friend Athol, who lived ninety-five magnificent years and left me richer for having known him. And now my Dad, too—who spent his last moments watching his fish in the quiet of his armchair, at peace in his own way, with his own version of the forest.

I carry them all. They come with me everywhere.

This is what grief taught me, eventually. That love doesn't end. It just changes its shape. It becomes a walk you take together even when only one of you is still here.

#

But I didn't know that yet when Dziadek died.

I was twenty-five. Living in London. Lost in the particular way that your mid-twenties can make you lost—trying to figure out who you are, far from home, making mistakes, starting over. The gratitude practice I would later build my life around didn't exist for me yet. I had no tool, no method, no language for what I was feeling. What I had was instinct.

And my instinct said: if you let the grief be the whole story, it will consume you. So find the other story. Find it and hold onto it.

So I closed my eyes and I went back to the forest. I walked the paths he'd shown me. I smelled the wild strawberries. I moved quietly so I wouldn't spook the red squirrels. I let myself feel the specific texture of his presence—his patience, his knowledge, his particular way of showing love through teaching—until the memory gave me something grief couldn't take away.

A calming feeling. A warmth. A knowing that what he gave me was mine forever.

I didn't have a name for this practice then. I didn't know I was doing anything deliberate. I just knew that focusing on the good, really focusing—not as a way of denying loss, but as a way of honouring what was real—was the only thing that kept me standing.

Years later, I would come to understand this as the foundation of the #TAG Method. Thanksgiving. Appreciation. Gratitude.

When feeling is absent—when joy feels like a language you've forgotten, when grief sits heavy and gratitude seems impossible—you don't start with feeling.

You start with memory. With attention. With the deliberate act of returning, again and again, to what was good and true and irreplaceable.

That is Appreciation. Training your eyes—and your heart—to see the gifts even when pain is loudest.

That is Thanksgiving. The active choice to honour what you were given, not just mourn what you've lost.

And Gratitude—the feeling, the warmth, the thing that finally returns to your chest after you've sat long enough with the other two—that follows. It always follows, eventually. Not on demand. But it comes.

#

Here is something I have never told many people.

When I was twelve years old, I read Anne of Green Gables for the first time, in my childhood bedroom in Poland. And somewhere between the first page and the last, I knew—not hoped, not wondered, but knew with the quiet certainty of something already decided—that one day I would adopt a child. Then I read that book—the whole series—many times over.

A girl. I wanted to call her Ania. The Polish spelling of Anne.

I thought: that is too much to ask for. The name is too specific, too particular, too much like asking the universe to sign its work. So I held that part loosely.

I held everything else tightly. I knew.

Decades passed. Endometriosis. Three surgeries. One miscarriage that brought me to the bathroom floor, and a voice in the silence that said simply: Never doubt Me. Four years of adoption process—forms and waiting and hoping and trying to practice gratitude in a language my heart had temporarily forgotten how to speak.

Then the call came. "There is a possible match. A little girl."

They told me her name was Daliya. I thought: that's beautiful. Then they said she had a nickname—the name she preferred, the name we would later put in her legal documents.

Anya. Pronounced exactly like Ania. Exactly like the name I had whispered to myself at twelve years old and then decided was too much to ask for.

It was not too much to ask for. Nothing is too much to ask for.

#

Anya is seven now. She trusts joy. She runs ahead on beaches, she dances in supermarket aisles when a song she likes comes on, she feeds kookaburras from her hand and squeals with the same delight I felt in that Polish forest finding wild strawberries.

She is learning, slowly, that happiness is allowed to stay. I am always learning it too.

On the hard days—and there are still hard days, there will always be hard days—I do what Dziadek taught me without knowing he was teaching it. I go quietly. I move carefully. I pay attention to what's real and good and irreplaceable.

A plum cake smell. A corner piece with a wink. Wild strawberries. A heat wave that was really a goodbye. A name that was really an answer.

#grief #faith #grateful #childhood #walks #joy

I take them all on my walks.

And joy, which sometimes feels like the most foreign language in the world—which sometimes I can hear other people speaking and cannot find in my own mouth at all—comes back.

Not because I forced it. Not because I pretended the grief wasn't real. 

But because I kept practicing the grammar even when I'd forgotten the words.

Thanksgiving. Appreciation. Gratitude. Action. Awareness. Feeling. 

The power of three that holds you when everything else falls away.

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In two weeks, I'll share why most people's gratitude practices fail—and what changes when you understand the difference between Thanksgiving, Appreciation, and Gratitude. It's simpler than you think, and more powerful than you can imagine. Come back. I'll be here.

With love and gratitude, 

Agnieszka

#

If grief has made joy feel foreign to you right now—if someone you love has left and taken a language with them—I see you. You don't have to feel grateful today. Just find one memory. One smell, one sound, one moment that was real and good and theirs. Sit with it until it gives you something grief can't take away. That's where the practice begins.