Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Observe that closet, cousin Elizabeth. What do you

say to that? Is it not the very essence of practicality and excellence?

Lizzie smirks with a teasing condescension.

Selves in a closet. Happy thought indeed.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Speaking with Joy. We have been exploring the themes in

my book aggressively happy, a Realist Guide to Believing

in the Goodness of Life.

And this week we reach what I like to think might be one of my most infamous chapters, which

I had so much fun writing, which is Be Like Mr. Collins.

And today to discuss the merits and drawbacks of Mr. Collins and how

Jane Austen might give us wisdom about living life well, I have my lovely friend Haley Stewart to chat

with me. Welcome, Haley. Thanks so much. excited to be here. I always look forward to doing podcasts together because I feel like we always end up spending the first like 15 minutes just updating each other in life. And we have both been kind of, we both had need to be aggressively happy for the last few weeks. Haven't we? Yes. So I think you got hit with COVID first,

then me and my family. And so it's been a rocky start to 2022. But we're getting there.

We're getting there. I like to think that I was just sandbagging 2022, you know? Like,

you just, you want to start off with low expectations so it can only go uphill from here,

which is also, and I've always thought that phrase, it can only go uphill is a weird phrase

because I think it's meaning, you know, like you're at a low point, you can get higher,

but it also just sounds, going uphill uphill sounds harder so it's kind of a

catchment too you know um it would almost be it's all downhill from here meaning it's all easier

but instead it means you're like going to rock bottom yeah exactly downhill from here so really i think

...