Happiness, as we usually chase it, is a settling — the sense that things have finally landed where we wanted them. It is measured against outcomes: the job secured, the relationship stabilized, the uncertainty resolved. It is, by nature, retrospective. It arrives after.
Joy does not wait for after. It shows up in the middle of things — in the argument that's being had honestly, in the work that's hard but yours, in the unresolved situation that you are still, somehow, fully present for. Joy is not the reward for getting life right. It is what becomes available the moment we stop postponing our participation in it until conditions improve.
This is a difficult thing to accept, because it offers no guarantee. Happiness promises that if you arrange things correctly, you will feel settled. Joy makes no such promise. It only says: whatever is happening to you right now, there is still a way to be in it that isn't merely enduring it.
That way in is rarely obvious from the outside. It usually has to be found inside the specific, unglamorous facts of a particular situation — which is the harder, and more honest, work.
Describe a situation you're actually in. Not the abstract version — the real one.