cygnoir.net

About a decade ago, I lost a friendship that I thought I’d have forever. While we were still friends, she taught me about philology and bravery and some other things I stuck in the “wisdom” bucket to carry along with me. One of these things was a comment I think about every time I write here. She told me that when people are truly happy, they don’t have to write about it online.

At the time, I took this as criticism. I felt very defensive about my online journal, and her words stung because I thought she meant that I wasn’t truly happy whenever I wrote that I was, that I was lying somehow. Now that I am a decade older and wiser, I think I get it. I don’t try to write about being happy anymore. I try not to even think about it in concrete terms. The more I think about “happiness” as an achievable goal, the more it makes me laugh. What a surreal goal to have! What does it even mean? And what would I write about it?

Once I let go of how to phrase my happiness, how to craft the words to explicate it perfectly, I realised that I had no idea what actually made me happy. I had been writing what I thought other people would read as “happiness”, like a good job, good relationship, good home, etc. But what did I believe? What do I believe?

I’m still trying to figure that out. And the sigil in today’s photo is part of both the source and the discovery.

gratitude: the luxury of contemplating topics like these · the subject of the sigil · that bit of truth from that friend – thank you, wherever you are