How to rigorously improve your life
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My rant on the importance of writing down what we think
I have been journaling since 2012. Back then, I was an edgy high school girl, not knowing anything about how weird and complicated the world really is. My idea of a high school experience was mostly shaped by the Disney channel: I dreamt of having a fun life, with cute boyfriends, a clumsy best friend that had my back no matter what, going to concerts, and so on. Imagine how shocked I was when I discovered how boring high school actually was. Teenagers don’t really go around having double lives like Hannah Montana, and not living in Malibu also seemed a bit disappointing at the time.
I think that back then I wasn’t really journaling — or at least I didn’t label it as such. It was more of a ‘writing my secrets in a diary because I am 14 and nobody understands me and I want to grow up and -’ kind of experience. But it helped me. It most definitely did. At some point, however, I got really angry (because being 17 and having no real problems in your life makes you really angry for some reason) and I destroyed the diary and threw it in the trash. Now, a couple of years later, I am really curious about what I was actually writing down. I wish I could look into my thoughts from back then and laugh at myself or be surprised at how smart and witty I was.
Assessing how realistic we are
Of all the things I wrote down back then, I remember describing my dream life, my dream future. I remember complaining about my parents (I wonder what horrendous things were they doing apart from being supportive, loving, and trying to understand me), my friends, my boyfriends. But I also remember that little diary being there for me no matter what stupid thing I was talking about. No matter how minor it was, my diary was there for me, and I was able to spill the tea. No worrying about how it would tell someone else my very important secrets, and no worrying about being boring. I could just be myself, explore my thoughts, look into scenarios: all the benefits of talking to a friend, but without the ‘oh my god why did I say that’ which would most definitely happen afterward.
Right now, I am 23, I work as a software developer, I live with my cool boyfriend, and I keep in touch with my high school BFFs — I’m glad the second F has been sticking to us for 8 years. Also, I wonder if this is what I’d imagined my life to be like. Also, I remember being a bit embarrassed about journaling when I first started dating my boyfriend. I felt like a 14-year-old girl writing her special secrets in her special pink diary. I came to realize how self-conscious we tend to be and how much we tend to think (and overthink) the way in which other people might perceive us. Of course he didn’t make fun of me. And of course he found it cool (or at least he really likes me) and now he also keeps his own journal (which might have been a cute Christmas gift from me).
Accepting other people’s opinions
‘What would I do right now if I weren’t afraid of how others see me?’ is a question that we frequently see in most books and articles which want to help us to stop caring so much about other people’s opinions. Because, in the end, that’s what they are and nothing more: opinions. The Stoics teach us about accepting what we cannot change: acceptance is one of the four pillars of stoicism. Because it is true, there’s only a limited amount of things in life that we have full control over, and we cannot spend every single moment cringing about what we did or being anxious about what’s coming. Seneca presents us with a good way of viewing this: “True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future […]”. But can we really do that so easily?
We control what we eat, we control what we do. But we cannot control what we think — we can just train ourselves to have a better relationship with our thoughts, to live with them, to understand them, to learn from them. We cannot control what other people think about us — but we can be nice, we can do our honest work, be good to others, make a good impact around us. Being a good person is free, and it is priceless. I cannot stress enough how much you can change a person’s day by simply smiling at them and saying something nice. Just think of how easily one’s day can be ruined by a mean remark. And let’s do the opposite.
But of course: regardless of how we behave, how we dress, how we talk, we cannot please everybody. This is the fascinating part about life: we are surrounded by millions of different worlds, each of them shaped in a different way.
Getting comfortable with ourselves
We cannot comprehend what is going on inside someone else’s brain: we can only get closer to understanding the thoughts and experiences they share with us. We can get intimate with people, we can know everything there is to know about them, but we cannot completely understand their world. Therefore, we cannot control what someone else believes, how someone else behaves. We can do our part, be proud of what we are and what we do, and learn how to care less.
Journaling about your daily interactions will indeed make you a better observer, as Tom Kuegler points out in a beautifully written article. Looking back on a situation will help you remember some details that you missed. By looking back on how a person treated you, you might even change your perspective and the outcome of the interaction. Because let’s be honest: we are not expert communicators. We do our best to listen and to understand, but sometimes we’ll still look a bit too much into a single sentence and keep ruminating ‘oh my, why did she say that? What did she mean? Did I upset her?’ when most probably, that person didn’t mean to give us any subliminal hints about why they hate us and why we are horrible. They were just talking, in the same way that we were.
I enjoy looking back on interactions from one or two years ago. It is really easy to start having resentments about a particular interaction. You keep blaming yourself for saying something, about making an awkward comment, about not having said that fun comeback that you thought of 4 days later while showering. But yet again, in retrospect, maybe that interaction wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe you were having a bad day. Maybe that person forgot about it in a week, while you keep yourself awake at night, cringing over something so unimportant.
Avoiding the thought spiral
One good lesson that I learned about cringe-worthy situations is simply thinking if it will matter in a year. Or in five years. Because it most probably will not. I could spend hours cringing at stuff I said while I was in high school. Or in college. Or at my previous job. Or even at the current one, or even yesterday. Because this is what we do: we blame ourselves for every little mistake. When in reality we are not that bad. And we are not as awkward as we think we are. People don’t pay as much attention as we think they do. Some do, some don’t. Nonetheless, we cannot control how we’ll be perceived in an interaction. And even more importantly, we cannot change the past: we can only change how we look at it.
The idea that I want to emphasize after so many paragraphs describing how I cringe at my high-school self is that we cannot control the world around us, while we can control how we look at it. Just like history: it is written by the winners. We can write about anything, and we can learn so much by looking a little bit deeper into what happens to us. We can help ourselves be less anxious and we can stop all those spiraling thoughts that keep us awake at night.
Conclusion
You matter. You are sufficient. You can do anything that you want to do. Write about everything and stop blaming yourself so much for just being a human being. Try befriending your thoughts. You don’t have to start big: even writing one short sentence on your notes app is sufficient. What’s important is to be consistent, to do it every day or as often as it is needed. Here’s a fun exercise: write down 3 things that make you feel grateful right now.
And thanks a lot for reading! I really hope that you enjoyed my thoughts. If this helped at least one person, then I consider it to be a success. Baby steps!
