Time With Myself

Balancing time to write, with time for partner, kids, or work. Time with my partner, with time for myself. Time for myself with time with myself. For there is a difference. I think of writing as time with myself. Being interrupted while engaging in this act only brings out the worst in me. So I often end up not doing it. Time for myself I can always interrupt without much complaint.

The “being interrupted while engaging in this act” part hits close to home for me. When I’m off on adventures in my own head, nothing makes me more enraged than when I have to dismantle the world I’ve spent hours building because my kid wants to tattle on my other kid.

Life is a balancing act of relationships—and sometimes we forget the most important one is with ourselves. Though my words may bridge toward others, the truth is: I always write with myself in mind. A selfish act. But a worthy one. I am my own therapist. I know what I need to know. I just have to sit and listen.

I wonder how many people blog to understand themselves, or to validate their existence. How many write just to spend time with themselves, while the whole world wants to take its share.

My journal is my lifeline these days. It is a record of exactly how I’m feeling in real time, and something I am sure I’ll appreciate having as I get older, when my memories of this part of my life are viewed with nostalgia-tinted glasses.

But in the present, I often will take my journal entry for the day and paste it into an LLM with no prompt, just to see what it says about me.

And while I am painfully aware of the likelihood of the LLM parroting back a sycophantic answer that puffs me up (which, hey, I’m human and totally not above), I often find that it gives me a connected insight across the day that I otherwise wouldn’t have reached on my own.

Maybe instead of sharing those thoughts with an algorithm, I should share them here. Blog-ust is almost neigh, after all!

But the simple act of getting your thoughts out of your head and into a format that you can read back later is incredibly helpful for reminding you that you’re alive and growing.