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#every joy must be tempered with the grim knowledge that joy is fleeting
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#just more daily processing lol#i came into class today and one of my students was like#‘you always seem so happy! you seem like just a happy person’#and it was just nice because i think i am! i think that at some point in the last five to seven years#i just kinda turned a corner into being a happier human#i definitely still get stressed and unhappy but i feel like my ‘resting state’ is a lot more positive than it has been in the past#i think a lot of it is environmental / situational like#grad school can be pretty emotionally bleak but teaching really fulfills me and makes me happy and i care about my research#it’s sunny like.. 300 days out of the year here#and i have a good group of friends who i love#also im not an angry self loathing closeted lesbian anymore lol#ANYWAY#i was thinking about this bc i just had a long phone call with my mom#and i love her a lot but one thing that is just v difficult sometimes#is that she is just relentlessly a glass half empty type#her mind always goes to the worst possible outcome#nothing can be celebrated as it is because celebrating something might somehow jinx the future and trigger calamity#every joy must be tempered with the grim knowledge that joy is fleeting#every word of encouragement must be folded into a warning about how things could unravel#negativity and worrying about you is sort of her love language#it’s not even that she’s being critical of you specifically it’s just like shes trying to protect you by anticipating what could go awry#but man! it’s hard to live like that#and i know she thinks that i am too blasé about the future#and i ‘live in lala land’ (her fave phrase for me lol)#but you know what? i think that what she thinks of as me being naive#is just like me not wanting to live in that cramped anxious headspace of believing everything will go wrong#there’s not a right way or a wrong way to be! but you have to be the way that makes you feel happy or secure or whatever#and i want to choose to feel joy and happiness and excitement even if it means someday ill get walloped out of nowhere by catastrophe#why contaminate the moments of joy with the fear that someday somehow i might not be joyful?
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