Not Jinxing It II

Another piece of the not-jinxing-it puzzle occured to me today, which is that I don’t really know why I’m happy at the moment. Obviously, there are a million reasons, and so many things to be grateful for - but that’s always been the case. What has meaningfully changed between now and a year ago, when I was really struggling? Obviously there are things, big things at that: a new job and the end of the pandemic being in sight for starters. But those two factors feel disproportionately smaller to the difference in my mental health between now and then. My new job is great, but it’s still a job, and my old job was a job too. With the pandemic ending, I am only just starting to make plans for the future, and haven’t particularly struggled with being locked down and having my options limited this past month. If anything, I’ve enjoyed the strict routine and simple life. I haven’t cracked some code, figured out what has been holding me back or uncovered the secret to my own happiness. It all seems a bit… lucky. Or random. Or arbitrary. I don’t know, and perhaps I shouldn’t care enough to try to know, but because I can’t pinpoint what has made the difference, that makes it impossible to know what to avoid in the future if I want to stay sane. Which makes the Sisyphean boulder rolling back down the hill seem equally as lucky, random and arbitray, which in turn makes me a lot less compelled to tell anyone I hauled it up there in the first place.