There’s a sort of mental trap inherent in my motivation for holding myself to these weekly posts.

The point of these periodic posts is, mostly, to track mindsets or thoughts over time, and doing so necessitates the idea that change happens gradually rather than all at once. This has been an extremely difficult idea to accept. I’ve assumed, as I’ve heard lots of addicts do, that there will either be a discrete external event or an internal realization that leads to a dramatic change in myself causing me to be able to realize my idealized self. This offers a great way to rationalize being unproductive or suboptimal one day — the somewhat intoxicating idea that the next day, you’ll wake up and be who you wanted to be. With enough self-mastery/mental strength/willpower (call it what you will), this is technically possible. The problem arises when, day after day, that reformation never comes. Which isn’t surprising. The mindset held by a person unable to make a relatively minor, day-to-day change is not conducive to the willpower required for such a dramatic overnight transformation.

But what is the alternative?

Believing that change is a process is an implicit acceptance of not having the requisite mental strength/fortitude/capacity to change at will. To someone who possibly over-romanticizes those supposed intellectual values, that absence of ability could be construed as an irredeemable failure. This is a belief that would prevent someone from embracing the concept of gradual change. I’ve held that belief for a while now — and I’ve used it to justify my inability to accept said gradual change. But perhaps even shifting away from that idea, which I’ve held strongly for a while now, isn’t the instant change I thought it might be. Maybe shifting away from that idea requires time and patience the same way a larger gradual change does, and failing to recognize that causes an undue fear that I haven’t changed at all. Because while I say I’ve held that belief strongly for a while now, I’ve seen evidence that I’ve been acting in ways inconsistent with it. I’ve improved in numerous ways over the last year through repeated effort and forced discipline, not through magical internal realizations. So perhaps I’ve already been moving away from that belief, and just not recognizing it because the concept of slowly divorcing an idea never came to me. I’ll choose to believe that, because I think it both better fits data and is the more pragmatic one.

So to come back to what I mentioned at the beginning — a trap in writing these weekly posts — I do not want to convince myself of change I have not truly gone through. Periodic updates of any type generally contain some sort of concrete statement of progress or the like, and I do not want an idea to form that I need to (for my own sake) present evident weekly growth of any sort, because that could easily lead to delusion. One way to go from here is to make these weekly posts monthly — but I believe that still misses the point. If the goal here is to accept periods of gradual change without feeling pressured to form and internalize concrete evidence that I’ve improved, then maintaining weekly posts without that is the way to go. As before, these posts are not “for” other people. They are an easy way to force a conscious examination of ideas — because that is necessary for writing — and a way for me to better track myself in a way smart watches are as of yet unable to do so.

And so for this week I won’t say I’ve changed dramatically as a person, or started some new habit, or met some goal. I have strengthened some habits (to the extent you can within a week), I have read more books, worked out more, and slept better. I am unsurprisingly mostly the same person I was last week; just somewhat better, and that will do.