The Face Keeps the Score
by Royce
Nehemiah 8:10 — “Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
They said joy comes after winning. But what if joy is the reason for the win?
This is Alysa Liu, in the Olympic final — the highest pressure moment in her sport. She is not relieved. She is not managing anything. She is just — home.
That smile carried her to Olympic gold on February 19, 2026, ending a 24-year drought for the United States in women’s figure skating. She skated to Donna Summer’s MacArthur Park — a song about a love so consuming it breaks you, and the grief of losing it. And through every note of it, she smiled. Not performing a smile. Wearing one.
Her competitors that night had every reason to be confident. Their eyes were fixed, their jaws set, bodies coiled with the weight of what was at stake. Alysa was in third place going into the final. The pressure was real. But you would never know it from her face.
Because Alysa had already found what the others were still skating toward.
At 16, Alysa was already a national champion. But behind the medals was a girl who had lost herself. Training alone in a dormitory. Told what to wear, what music to skate to, what to feel. She also has ADHD — diagnosed only after she discovered 145 unfinished school assignments — a brain that craves novelty, autonomy, and challenge. In elite skating’s rigid, controlled environment, that brain had nowhere to go.
Her father later said she was traumatized, avoiding ice rinks entirely. So she retired, walked away, and spent two years just being a regular person: backpacking with friends, studying psychology at UCLA, hiking to Everest Base Camp.
Then in early 2024, she went skiing and felt something she hadn’t felt in years — a rush of joy. She went back to the rink out of curiosity, not obligation. Landed a jump on the first try. Called her old coach.
She came back — but on entirely new terms. She built a team around people who understood her ADHD. She took control of her music, her costumes, her choreography. She stopped skating to prove something and started skating because she loves to skate. Before Milan, she told TIME Magazine: “I don’t think anything is going to be hard about the Olympics. What is there to lose? Every second you are there, you are gaining something.”
And after she won gold she said: “What I like to share about myself is my story, my art and my creative process. A bad story is still a story, and I think that’s beautiful. There’s no way to lose.”
We learn to say the right things. We post the right captions. We show up, push through, manage our output. We can even build impressive results on a foundation of anxiety, people-pleasing, or fear of failure. For a while. But the face keeps the score.
What makes Alysa’s story more than a sports comeback is this: the very thing the system tried to suppress in her — the restlessness, the unpredictability, the ADHD brain that couldn’t sit still — turned out to be her greatest gift on the ice. She didn’t win by fixing what looked broken. She won by finally finding — and fiercely protecting — the environment where what looked broken could become free.
Nehemiah 8:10 was spoken to a crowd in ruins — people weeping over their failures, their losses, their long exile. And into that grief, the instruction wasn’t try harder or pull yourself together. It was: the joy of the Lord is your strength. Not joy as a reward you earn after surviving the hard thing. Joy as the fuel that makes you capable of facing it at all.
What Alysa discovered — almost accidentally, on a ski slope — is what this verse has always been trying to tell us. When you are no longer working to prove something, every moment becomes gain. Not because the results are guaranteed, but because the joy is already present. You entered with a full cup. The outcome can’t empty it.
This is what mentally healthy living actually looks like — not the absence of pressure, but the presence of a joy that pressure cannot reach. And for those of us who follow Jesus, that joy is not manufactured. It is not a mindset to maintain. It is a Person. Already given. Already sufficient.
The question isn’t whether you’re performing well. The question is: what does your face look like when no one is watching?
Reflection
- If you’re honest — when you show up for work, for relationships, for God right now, is it more often coming from a place of joy and freedom, or from a quiet pressure to prove something? What does your face say when you think no one is looking?
- Alysa didn’t overcome what made her different — she found a space where it could finally be free. Is there something in you that you’ve been trying to fix or suppress, that God might actually want to set loose?
Prayer
Lord, teach me the difference between striving and abiding. Let the joy that comes from knowing You — not from achieving for You — be what carries me. And where I have been trying to fix what You designed, give me the courage to trust You with it instead. I don’t want to perform a life. I want to actually live one. Make my face honest. Amen.