Literally Life Changing

Usually life changes slowly. You look back at yourself from ten years ago and think “Huh… I can see some similarities, but that person is a very different person from who I am.” You can even write a blog post about how you feel grief over those people having been slowly erased from existence and replaced with someone else.

Rapid changes are rare. They’re usually dramatic enough that they only exist in fiction, and we get some really epic, memorable fictional moments portraying them. They’re rare enough that I doubted they actually exist in real life. So I was quite surprised to find myself subjected to a sudden, drastic change.

I’ve had a heck of a month y’all.

I.

So, first, what was the change?

My happiness set-point seems to have been permanently moved up several notches. This is a MAJOR deal, because the shift took me from below-neutral-baseline to above-neutral-baseline.

Since my early teen years, my life has been focused on the constant management of myself. If left alone, I trend downward into depression and despair. This is because the world is objectively bad, and I can see that, so obviously my disposition will reflect the reality of the situation we’re all in.

The first (and hardest) step was realizing that this is the reality of myself. The constant work thereafter was to work against this entropy of emotion. Being careful to avoid too much negative stimuli. Limiting how much I consume/experience of the art and people that I am most drawn to, because it reinforces the spiral. Doing constant work to improve my mood, improve my surroundings, make the world around me and the life I live better. I have to always be doing something, creating something, being productive or useful in some way, in order to build up positive emotions and value-of-life points. Because these will slowly be drained away in my drift to low-set-point happiness, and I know that, so I gotta keep at it.

(This is really good for IRL productivity, btw!)

Now that’s just… gone. Left alone, I will slowly drift into a place of being peaceful and low-key happy. Not like genki happy or anything, but kinda warm and pleased. The world doesn’t feel like a hostile place designed for misery anymore. The world feels like it is understanding and full of love. Individual things can be bad and make me feel bad. But I’ll gradually revert to feeling not-bad over time.

I cannot begin to say how huge this is.

II.

How huge is this?

This is so huge that I literally feel like a different person. I wrote about mourning for my past selves just a couple months ago (prescient?), but I can’t even mourn for who I was in August now, that person is too divorced from my current experience.

I was in the middle of writing a novel, and while I can see what the person writing that novel was doing, I no longer grok the emotional thrust of the narrative, and I worry that I will have to complete a work that was started by someone else, and the novel will suffer for it.

I’ve already started changing the practicalities of how I live, and they aren’t drastic now, but I suspect they’ll add up to significant changes over time.

It’s not just that I’ve changed. It’s that I have an internal sense of the entire world being different. There’s a lot to assimilate here. That’s part of what I’ll be doing for a while, both privately and here.

III.

What the heck caused this?

Man, I don’t even rightly know. I’m going to try to catalog just what happened over the coming week(s?), and will put much of it up on this blog. My previous post described how my pilgrimage in England began with a religious ritual, but that’s a later interpolation. I didn’t know it was a religious ritual at the time. It may have been the start of my time in a sanctified land, but the process had begun earlier — it had to have begun earlier for me to be open to feeling that it was a ritual at all. There’s a lot of things that could have done this, or could have contributed, and having all of them so close one after the other is what pushed things over the activation threshold. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find out. That’s what writing is for, after all.

Let’s see where this takes us.