Introduction to Joy’s Stories

A brief explanation of the stories and their benefits

The Achievement Spectrum validates and seeks to embrace life as a whole. It recognises the importance of breakouts and breakthroughs, across the spectrum of life.

This page and the first collection of ten anecdotes which follow, stand as a testament to a major achievement of my own and form but a puddle in the vast ocean of what I have so far recorded.

For many years bitterness carried in my heart had negatively eroded the quality of my life. As a result of writing my stories however, they have emerged as an invaluable tool in rooting out buried disappointments and angers and illuminated more effective ways to manage my emotions. They have also helped free me from hate and resentment and to find a genuine sense of forgiveness.  No one could have penned it more aptly than Mark Twain when he wrote: “Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

Those footsteps through my memory have brought tears, sadness and laughter.  Some written just for the sheer delight of recalling cherished moments, while others have afforded me the opportunity to heal accumulated wounds.  

Giving voice to my history then, has not only allowed me to situate myself in that past, but also to navigate my present with a greater degree of clarity and awareness – my own breakouts and breakthroughs.

I have since fallen in love with that once skinny scrappy little kid that I was; whose passage through life seemed booby-trapped to trip her up time and time again.  And, in recounting her journey, I was able to hug her in her fears and confusions; to  finally offer her a safe place to look back and, best of all, I can now say:

                                 “You know what kid, you were great; come, hold my hand

                                                       And we will go forward together.”