Man only likes to count his troubles; he does not calculate his happiness.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Your Year of Doing the Math on Joy. This is the year you start tallying the other column, the one that's been growing quietly while you were busy elsewhere, and the numbers are genuinely delightful. That skill you taught yourself for no good reason except that it pulled at you? It pulls at someone else this year, someone who finds out what you can do and gets the particular expression on their face. You know the one. A friendship deepens in the spring, made stronger by exactly how unusual your thinking is, and you stop explaining yourself in that conversation and just enjoy it. By late autumn, you find a way to put the self-taught thing to real work, and the fit is satisfying in the way that only accidental expertise ever is. Count what's good. This year rewards the tally.