… changed since the last update. I see all these archives of my thoughts and psyche as keeping a personal changelog. They document what has changed in me since.
Maybe to many people this wouldn’t be useful. But I tend to have a poor memory, and my mind tends to be stuck in time from years of being chronically depressed, sometimes like a broken record that plays the same tune over and over again. Reviewing my past allows me to see myself clearer. Without my documentation I would truly believe I am the same old helpless boring person who is in constant despair, but my writing tells me otherwise. There were so many things I wanted to do and learn, and I have this impression of myself that I am not good at following through, but my personal history has demonstrated that I did eventually follow through, but sometimes it took many, many years. But what matters is that I did …

At one point, my life was not going very well. I was living with my parents. I was (and to a lesser extent, am) very intimidated by to-do lists. Trying to buck myself up, I put a big piece of butcher paper on the back of a door and labeled it “Accomplishments”.

I never wrote anything on that sheet. But every time I saw it – over years1 – I would think, well, hang on, that void isn’t right, I have accomplished stuff since I put that up. And mentally I would tick through growing list of accomplishments. I moved away, visited, thought through the list again.

It’s very easy for me to focus on the faults, the things I want to fix, what I want to get better at. But that blank piece of paper really did help me build a mental narrative around momentum, around being on the right track.

  1. thanks for leaving it up so long mom lol ↩