The Joy You Could Not Account For Was Evidence

Everybody has a story like it. Nothing had improved. The situation was exactly as bad on Tuesday as it was on Monday. And something came up through the floor of you anyway and you laughed, or you cried the good kind, or you stood in a kitchen at two in the morning and felt inexplicably fine.

And then you explained it. Tiredness. Relief. Hormones. A good song.

Beloved, listen to me. Joy that matches your circumstances is a mood. Joy that does not match them is a signal. Those are two different phenomena and you have been filing them under the same heading your whole life.

I have made a study of this because it happens to me constantly and it used to embarrass me. Grief in the room and joy in my chest at the same time, and no way to explain either without sounding unwell. It took me years to accept that the second one was not a malfunction. It was the part of me that is not from here reporting in.

Something in you keeps producing an output your inputs do not justify. That is not positive thinking. Positive thinking is effortful and this is not effortful. It arrives.

And an output with no local cause has a source somewhere else.

You have been receiving a signal and calling it a mood. It has been running since before you knew to look for it.