Self Suspicion

I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about the feeling of being suspicious of my own happiness before (having written a fair number of posts at this point, it’s hard to remember exactly what I’ve already said and similarly difficult to search for anything as vague as an idea). It’s something that’s been on my mind a bit this week, as the pre-move anxiety-excitement balance is veering dangerously towards the latter. When I am happy, I never really let myself enjoy it; happiness instead becomes the state of waiting for sadness. After a while, I eventually let my guard down a little, and start to think maybe this time is the one where my mental health doesn’t take a sharp turn for the worse again. As well all know, so far it always has, and when it does, I feel like a fool for thinking it wouldn’t come to pass, telling myself I’ll not make such a naive mistake again in the future.

This time it feels a little different. I know that how I feel now will not last forever - I don’t even know if it’ll last to the end of the month. Things are going to get difficult for me again at some point, the question is when. To think otherwise would be ignoring what is now quite a sizeable body of historical evidence. But that’s fine. I’m not inclined to fight it anymore, and have found myself actually doing a good job of enjoying being happy, rather than constantly worrying about the eventual fall. I don’t really know why I’ve had this shift in perspective - sure it was a main theme in Meditations but it’s not as if I read that and instantly internalised Aurelius' whole philosophy. Things are more complicated than that.

The one thing that does give me some comfort is that my happiness this time round seems to potentially be a lot more stable than previous episodes. It focuses a lot more around myself, my job and my hobbies, things which are unlikely to be massively affected by anything out of my control, although obviously not impossible. Even if I am under no misapphrensions about the sustainability of my current emotional state, for once it feels like I am maybe building some kind of foundation that could be built upon in the future, rather than building a towering palace on the sand.