After a couple of years of feeling depressed now and then and being focused mostly on advancing my career and the skills attached to that, I noticed that I need to do something about myself.

Often times my mood swings between ultra-happy and ultra-sad. It’s a variety of things that cause that, but the most common thing is an inner voice that talks bad about myself. It’s like an auditor that cannot accept any mistake I make. It starts with small things like simple mistakes, i.e. forgetting to buy tomato sauce, even though that was the thing I went out to the super market for. My inner voice would call myself an idiot and that inner voice is often so loud that I say this aloud to myself. Worst of all, if I’m in a conflict and I messed up, I’m constantly beating myself up mentally, so much that it paralyses me from fixing the situation, which spirals into an endless loop of negative thoughts.

My amazing girlfriend is helping me, but it’s ultimately me who needs to take action. I saw a video from an online psychologist on how knowledge is created. The video was created as a response to one of his followers saying that the knowledge they gain is all from the internet, books or conversations with other people and then supposing that they are an impostor in the sense that nothing they know came from them. The psychologist replied to that that knowledge comes from within. Let’s say you read two books and they have conflicting information about a topic. Ultimately it’s you who decides what you think is right and that is now your own knowledge that you created from within yourself. And similarly I cannot just rely on my girlfriend telling me what to do to fix myself. I need to create that knowledge myself form within.

With this blog I want to give myself some space to note down some of my feelings, good and bad moments, findings on how I coped with different situations and also the missteps that I would like to not repeat again. Since this is a journal-type blog, opinions or beliefs I state might change over time. After all I’m working on myself and that’s one of the core qualities of this practice. I know that I can do this. Now what remains is doing it. One of my colleagues at work once said to me that a wrong decision is better than no decision. I think that this can also be applied to working on myself. Working on yourself in some way is better than doing nothing, even if it’s not the best of all ways to work on yourself. I can still course correct later, once I gain more knowledge about myself.

Wish me luck!