Natural scrolling turned itself off, can't toggle back on

Within the last 48 hours, natural scrolling on my Macbook Air M1 turned itself off, and I can't turn it back on.

Within system preferences, it still shows it checked, or on. If I uncheck it, and restart my computer, nothing changes. If I check it again, and restart my computer again, nothing changes. No matter what I do, the scrolling behavior remains "unnatural."

This happened prior to the latest update to MacOS 11.5, so when the update appeared I hoped installing it might fix things, but nope, no change.

I am using an external, wired mouse. If I used the trackpad on my laptop, then it works properly at the same time that the mouse doesn't work properly.