Sometimes I feel like time just happens to me. The Earth has revolved around the sun yet again for three hundred and sixty-five days, and I have nothing to show for it.

Before I tried writing this, I perused the very few entries I’ve managed to publish here last year. I felt my face contort and wince at the words I was reading. My God, do I pour myself out so much sometimes. I sent everything back to drafts, where they belong. How many times have I done this exactly? This cycle of writing, posting, looking at what was said, getting struck with embarrassment so deep in the brain and low in the spine, before ultimately pressing “DELETE.” And yet I persist. I keep posting outpourings of myself into the world. I desire to know if anyone reads this other than myself. My desire to Know Who Has Seen Me is my moral failing. I say I don’t want to be perceived, but I do. I pretend that I’m writing this for my mental well-being (or something adjacent), but I don’t. Why else would I register this domain and code this layout from scratch when I could have just dumped all of these in the Notes app, if not for the hankering to be seen? If not to seek an audience, albeit imaginary?

But I digress. What do I have to show for the 365 days that just passed?

Written in my Notes app:

I may never be content, but tonight I am happy. Nothing more than a Saturday morning spent reading a book, the sun hitting the windows just right, my hair drying after a long, long, much-awaited-for bath, and the weariness from having spent interminable hours cleaning the house slowly leaving my body. As I sprawl across the bed, in these unending white, white sheets so very fragrant with some kind of flower, waiting for Lou to come up and fetch our food, skimming YTS for a film we could see, I’d call myself a fool to ask for more.

In my journal, with pen on paper:

There are days when my nihilism takes hold of me and I see no point in doing anything, like I hadn’t a care or responsibility in the world. Because why? What is to be done (I second you, Chernyshevsky, I so do), and for what? Then there are days where I plan everything I am going to do to fill the hours ahead of me—with so much passion and glee, and a knowledge imparted to me by God knows who, maybe him/herself?—that today is going to be great, today is not going to feel so gray, it’s going to be filled with all the colors human eyes can only dream of seeing. And today is one of the latter. Right as the day snatches me from sleep, I knew.

See? I contradict myself at every opportunity possible. Is it my forgetfulness? How could I have written those paragraphs about my days and, in the end, still feel this way? Why is happiness so fleeting, and why do sadness and emptiness linger? Maybe I just look to others and see more. Maybe I just look and think, wow, they have more, they go out more, they travel more, they eat more, they own more. I take a peek and, oh, look, they are so pretty—oh, so, so much prettier and richer and more accomplished and just have so much more than me, more plentiful than what I have, am, and will ever have and be. And so, like the drop after a fall, on impact, I now have less. I now have nothing. Ground to dust, not a single speck of something. Hollow. I disappear into thin air.

Comparison is the thief of joy. A famous philosopher probably said that, or some dude bro who wrote some book about stoicism, I could not care less, but they are not wrong.

Maybe my life is measured in laughs shared with people I care about, in playlists looped through the day, in grocery runs, in pages after pages of books read, in movies watched—in cinemas or pirated, who cares?—in meals particularly craved and prepared, in sweet treats shared between husband and wife, so highly anticipated after a long day of work. In that case, I can undoubtedly say that I have truly lived, and I have so much to show for it. And I will drink all the vitamin B in the world to never again forget.