I am aware of how blessed I truly am

Awareness fades fastest on the things that improved. A raise, a recovery, a move to the place you wanted to live — within about three months all of it becomes the new floor and stops registering.

That adjustment is a mercy in bad times and a thief in good ones. It's why people arrive at exactly the life they used to want and feel roughly the same as before.

The counter is memory. Not comparison to people worse off — that produces guilt, not gratitude — but comparison to yourself, five years back, wanting what you now have and no longer see.

What would that version of you envy about today?