the progress you made this year is real even if you can't…
1 reactions
the progress you made this year is real even if you can't feel it right now
there are stretches where you look at your life and genuinely cannot find the evidence that anything has moved.
not because nothing has. because the way you measure progress is broken for this particular kind of growth. you're looking for landmarks, visible before-and-after moments you can point to and say that's where things changed. and the kind of change that actually lasts rarely works that way. it works underneath, in the slow shifting of defaults, in the things you now do automatically that used to cost you significant effort to even attempt.
six months ago you would have handled that conversation differently. you know this because you remember how the old version of you handled that exact kind of conversation, and you remember what it cost you afterward, the hours of replaying it, the conclusion you always arrived at that you'd done it wrong somehow. and last week you had the same conversation and it just went fine and you moved on by the end of the day and didn't think about it again until now.
that's not nothing. that's actually the whole thing, the way growth actually looks from the inside, which is mostly invisible because you were busy living through it instead of watching it from outside.
the problem with measuring your own progress is that you move with it. you grow and the new version of you becomes the baseline and the old version gets harder to access and so the distance between them stops feeling like distance. it just feels like where you are. and where you are always looks like standing still because you can't feel yourself moving from the inside of the movement.
four people in your life right now are watching you be a version of yourself that an earlier version of you would have found genuinely unbelievable. they see it even if you can't. the evidence is there even when the feeling isn't.
you don't have to feel the progress for it to be real.
it happened while you were busy surviving the year that produced it.
#inspiration
there are stretches where you look at your life and genuinely cannot find the evidence that anything has moved.
not because nothing has. because the way you measure progress is broken for this particular kind of growth. you're looking for landmarks, visible before-and-after moments you can point to and say that's where things changed. and the kind of change that actually lasts rarely works that way. it works underneath, in the slow shifting of defaults, in the things you now do automatically that used to cost you significant effort to even attempt.
six months ago you would have handled that conversation differently. you know this because you remember how the old version of you handled that exact kind of conversation, and you remember what it cost you afterward, the hours of replaying it, the conclusion you always arrived at that you'd done it wrong somehow. and last week you had the same conversation and it just went fine and you moved on by the end of the day and didn't think about it again until now.
that's not nothing. that's actually the whole thing, the way growth actually looks from the inside, which is mostly invisible because you were busy living through it instead of watching it from outside.
the problem with measuring your own progress is that you move with it. you grow and the new version of you becomes the baseline and the old version gets harder to access and so the distance between them stops feeling like distance. it just feels like where you are. and where you are always looks like standing still because you can't feel yourself moving from the inside of the movement.
four people in your life right now are watching you be a version of yourself that an earlier version of you would have found genuinely unbelievable. they see it even if you can't. the evidence is there even when the feeling isn't.
you don't have to feel the progress for it to be real.
it happened while you were busy surviving the year that produced it.
#inspiration
1
| 5,000 mlx | |
| 6 | |
| 1 |