When I retrospect my life and delve into the things that didn't go my way, I often attribute the error to this one single moment when things changed. For example — the one moment when my relationship with Y fell apart or this one moment when my interview started to go downhill or so on... But more often than not, things aren't as clear as in my memory. (And as I've mentioned before, I don't trust my memory too much because memory is tangible)... Now that I journal more frequently, I realised things were always going downhill in these situations and I probably was always optimistic that things will turn around. But the moment I recall is usually the moment when things became apparent to me, and to put into words, the abstract sum of all moments is too difficult to recall or explain with ease.
So memory does this pattern, to save space and maybe even reduce the melancholy.
But ironically, the same goes for looking at things which were always going in my favour. I never knew this interview was going well, or whether this podcast I recorded actually had good content. It just happened to be received better than I expected. So in a way, then too I was hitting further from reality and lowballing myself. In a way, trying not to let overconfidence overcome me.
But now that I know the highs and the lows, maybe the next time I will benchmark it better.
Its true.
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