I left my office in Kochi and came back home when the company switched to full work from home. I did not expect that switch to come with a mood pattern attached, but a few months in, one showed up. Slow, predictable, and impossible to unsee once you have seen it. A sine wave of happiness, running quietly under everything else.
Here is how it goes.
The slide down
I start somewhere neutral. Fine, not much either way. Then the routine does its thing.
Wake up, work from two feet away from my bed, and barely leave the house except for the Friday mosque. I used to go for runs in the morning. Then one day I slept late and skipped it, and then that skipping went a little too far, and I have not run in a while. This is not a story about running, though. It is a story about the wave, and the stalled runs are just one of the things riding it.
The longer that routine runs unchanged, the lower I go. From neutral, slowly downward, until a few weeks to a month later I hit the bottom. Sad, angry, frustrated, irritated, all of it at once.
The climb back up
The bottom is where the fix quietly begins.
From that lowest point, I start planning a trip. Something a month, maybe a month and a half out. And the moment the planning starts, the line begins to lift. Not because I have gone anywhere yet, but because there is now something on the calendar that is not just another identical morning.
By a week or a few days before the trip, I am back at neutral. In the last few days before departure I cross above the line. Then I leave, and it keeps climbing at a steady pace through the trip itself. The odd part is where the peak lands. Not during the trip, but a few days to a few weeks after I am already back home.
And then, from that peak, it starts sliding again. Back down to neutral, then below it, and the whole cycle sets up to repeat. Bottom, plan a trip, travel, come home, peak, slide. Round and round.
What else rides the wave
It is not just my mood on this curve. A lot of things ride it in parallel.
My productivity at my full time job tracks it. So do the side things I do outside work, and my day to day routine, and how well I hold any of it together. When the wave is up, all of it is up. When it bottoms out, all of it bottoms out with me. The mood is just the part I notice first.
I do not have a neat fix to end this on, and I am not going to pretend I do. For now I just know the shape of the thing, which is more than I knew a few months ago. Maybe naming it is enough to catch it a little earlier next time. Or maybe I just need to plan the next trip.
