My Welcome Doppelganger,

Did you know that depressive states evoke seemingly effortless and beautiful poetry from you? It's as if your language was specifically created to elegantly capture the melancholy that Voltaire spoke of.

The pattern of starting new chapters, making breaks with old lives and starting new ones... This is something I'm all too familiar with. I wonder if we've experienced that particular kind of change in the same way (yes? no? probably both, says the ExtraTerrestrial). Recently, I resolved to attempt a new kind of break. Usually, the break is with people, with a place, with a habit, with an obsession over a psychological theory (or theorist, ahem) that I now realize is fake or subpar. This time, the break is with myself: specifically, the deluge of journal entries I've poured out over the last 5+ years.

Since my freshman year, I've been writing in the same journal. I've accumulated over 1500 entries since then. I've written so much, at so many different moments, in so many different states, that I've written about just about everything in my static experience, from just about every perspective. Until a few days ago, I felt comforted by that huge wealth of self data, and proud. I liked being able to flip back to my 2004 or 2006 self at whim, to search this catalog of Me for any and all dreams I'd ever recorded. When depressed, I would look for other entries that confirmed that particular experience. But I realized, finally, how destructive it is to have the last 6 years so accessible. Because that accessibility of past selves has started to define me. When I'm on the brink, and in desperate need of a fresh pair of eyes, I don't look for novel solutions, or to the future. Instead, I drown in the past.

So I started a fresh journal two days ago. It sounds like such a negligible change, but it's felt monumental for me. Because it was painful, for one, letting go of all of that history. But two, it finally feels like I can start something based on the goals that I currently value, based on my ideal self...it finally feels like I'm in a position to do that. And I no longer feel like I have to justify everything I write by saying "I know this is incongruous with what I've said before, but..." and "I know that saying it's incongruous is something I've said before, but..." and so on. I've given myself a chance to experience my life anew without self-consciousness.

For the first time since I started graduate school, I'm excited--and more importantly I'm curious--about the future.

--Self Explanatory