A Time Machine to Emphasize Gratitude
How a diary entry and a playlist showed me that I finally made it to the next chapter.
I have a pile of books and notebooks that I keep moving from surface to surface in my apartment. I’ve been hesitant to put them away properly because they are on my long lists of to-read or to-organize. At another attempt of organization, I flipped open my diary notebook that captures 2022-2025. Typically, I don’t revisit my diary entries. I have this grandiose vision of them becoming a New York Time’s Bestseller years from now about the artist behind the art, or something like that. But until then, they are usually off-limits. Yet, I sat down to read a page anyway.
On the first page, I spent two paragraphs confessing my unrequited love for a straight man that I knew very little of. I remember having a crush on him, but forgot how deep it was. Mind you, I was already thirty. I spent the next couple paragraphs psychoanalyzing why I was so enamored with him. I concluded that I was struggling with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Invested, I continued reading. Within a couple pages, I convinced my therapist that I had BPD and we began treatment. Then I met a psychiatrist and she diagnosed me with and prescribed medication for Schizoaffective Disorder. I detailed the zombie-like experience of those drugs.
As I continued reading, I wrote a compelling argument that I have neither of those disorders but instead was Autistic. Between the discussions about mental disorders, a man who pursued me told me that he was not ready to date anyone (this was a chronic pattern that left me defeated every time). On another page, I brought my guinea pig in to get a tumor removed and he was never woken from his surgery. I found a mama kitty and her six babies in a Home Depot parking lot. I brought them all into my bedroom and raised hundreds of dollars on TikTok to nurse their respiratory infections. I was in graduate school and was struggling with consistency to finish writing the book I wanted to use as my thesis and then publish. I was lonely and was watching everyone around me move forward in their lives as I stayed still in my art studio behind Grandma’s house. Above all else, I was so incredibly depressed. I felt trapped. I was suffocating. I kept dreaming for the next chapter of my life.
A shiver danced down my spine as I realized that I am here. I am in the next chapter of my life. I moved to Oregon six months ago and I brought three of those kitties with me. I am no longer attaching myself to unavailable men. I am not experiencing Borderline symptoms nor do I obsessively research Autism and try to find myself in the description. That book that I was struggling to write is finished. I’m actively querying agents to represent it. And I am so not-depressed that it is almost hard to resonate with the version of me who wrote that diary.
My sobriety birthday is six calendar weeks before my belly button birthday, so for the last few years I have had a tradition to make a playlist of songs that represent my life at that period. You may be surprised how vastly different they are. The titles are “six thirty-four,” “five thirty-three,” and “four thirty-two.” A few nights ago, I spent my hour-long jog around my new favorite jogging track listening to “four thirty-two,” which would have been created in 2023. I can’t remember the last time I visited that particular playlist. It was incredibly depressing music. Ballads, heartbreak, suicidal ideation, etc. Music is the closest thing to a time machine I have ever experienced, and listening to that playlist opened a window for me to look back on that version of myself. I was reminded of many late nights when I would go out to my art studio after Grandma went to sleep and I would listen to that playlist and dance expressively and interpretively by candle-light. That was how I shook the anxiety, how I overcame the depression. I fought day in and day out to stay afloat. To stay sober. To stay sane.
I don’t really have to do that anymore. I’m not opposed to an emotional candlelit dance release, but my emotional regulation does not depend on that now. I wake up baseline and live my day as such. As I sit here typing this, I am trying to think if I have even had one panic attack in these past six months. I don’t recall a single one. What a gift. What a fucking beautiful gift to have made it here to this chapter in one piece and to feel whole.
My heart beats with gratitude.
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Dude, I am so proud of you. As someone who also deals with depression and anxiety, I really resonated with this. It’s funny that you said you were hoping your journals would become a memoir of the artist behind the art, I think the same way about mine! I hope that after I have long passed away, someone will attempt to understand my work better by reading my words. Anyway, I love that you are thriving in Portland! I lived there once a long time ago, lots of fond memories.