Lately, I feel like I’m just… stuck.
Like I’m so obsessed with optimizing everything that I end up doing nothing at all.
The Habit That Once Helped
Take something as simple as writing a gratitude journal.
So many friends have told me I should try it — that it might help me stop spiraling, stop complaining about life, stop feeling so bad about myself all the time.
And the thing is… I have done it before. And yeah, it did help.
Back then I’d just write down 3 things each day:
- something I was grateful for;
- something that made me happy;
- something I appreciated about myself.
Nothing fancy. Just simple. But looking back now — those entries actually made me feel really grounded.
The Spiral of Overthinking
But at some point I stopped.
And now that I’m trying to start again… I just can’t.
It’s not that I don’t want to.
It’s that the moment I think about writing, a thousand questions and possibilities flood my brain.
Should I write by hand? I actually love handwriting — it slows me down in a good way.
But now I have this whole digital garden setup, and I want everything centralized and searchable and linkable.
So I start thinking — okay, maybe I can handwrite first, then digitize later?
But that sounds like extra work, and I start spiraling again.
Even when I finally convinced myself to start writing, I then get stuck thinking:
What format should I use?
Should I just write three bullet points?
Or should I explain what happened that day for context? …
And once again, I give up.
It’s like I can’t just write.
My brain turns everything into a system.
And it’s exhausting.
What I Actually Want
But what I actually want is so simple.
I want to write something that brings me peace — not something that becomes a whole workflow, or something I have to optimize later.
I want to go back to how it used to feel: simple, quiet, grounding.
But somehow, I’ve made even gratitude… complicated.
I don’t know exactly when or how I became like this.
But I miss that version of me who could sit down, write three honest lines, and feel okay.
I want to find my way back to her.
See also
A Poem, a Court, and a Quiet Faith — an earlier reflection on how a poem, a sport, and a simpler time once gave me a quiet sense of direction, and what it means to feel “enough”