october 8, 2025; 8:31pm
Yesterday, I told someone that this point in my life is the most consistently happy that I’ve possibly ever felt. Today, I cried onto a slice of frozen pizza.
I think this is what they mean when they say progress isn’t linear.
I have gone through a tremendous amount of therapy over the past two years. One of the common recurring themes that comes up in the majority of my sessions is my self-worth. (Mostly, the recent discovery that I should probably have some? Crazy.)
For the greater part of my life, I did not give much care to how I was treated and I became very accustomed to my lack of self-worth. (Again, I did not realize that I was supposed to have any.)
This obviously lead to a plethora of mental health issues over my lifetime. In my darkest times, I turned to writing as a form of release. It worked for years, so well in fact that I have a mountain of journals to prove it, full of the secrets I could never bring myself to share. My artistic hobby served as my sole emotional outlet for a very long time.
That is, until last summer.
In June and July of 2024, I was deep in trauma therapy. All of the sudden, holding a pen felt like looking my demons in the eyes. I wasn’t quite ready to handle that level of processing yet and it caused me to quit writing altogether. I couldn’t so much as open a journal for almost a year.
Now, things have changed. Although I was no longer processing such heavy experiences, I still couldn’t bring myself to pick up a pen even for months afterward.
That is, until today.
Today, while crying onto my cardboard-like pizza crust, I was internally dealing with a situation that has caused me to question my self worth – the very thing that I have spent many, many sessions working on. And don’t get me wrong, it has substantially improved!
So today, amidst that minor mental breakdown, I decided to write about how I was feeling. And God does it feel good to have this back, even in such a small way.
While it’s not my favorite saying, it gets the job done: “Progress isn’t linear.”
During this aforementioned “tremendous amount of therapy”, one takeaway I’ve learned that I try to remind myself of is:
baby steps are still steps.
As a recovering black-and-white thinker, I used to feel like if I was not improving at a fast pace, I wasn’t improving at all. This same manner of thinking is what has caused my report cards to contain entirely A’s and F’s, but nothing in between.
It has taken such a long time for writing to feel like second nature again and quite frankly, it has been bothering me to not do it.
This post is a baby step.
Is this the most deep or heartfelt thing I’ve ever written? Hell no – and that’s why I needed to publish it.
I wrote this! I finally wrote something! These thoughts I’m retelling lack depth, but they’re MY thoughts!
A year ago, I would not have even tried to write anything at risk of sounding like I’ve lost my touch. Well, you know what? I did lose my touch. I lost the will to write anything at all, but I got it back.
Man, am I glad to have this part of myself back.
This phase of my life is truly the most consistently happy that I have ever felt… and even so, I still have moments where I question if and why I’m worth loving.
As my friend Emily would say, “We contain multitudes.”
Today, I had a day that was less than perfect and consciously chose to write about it. It feels good to be back.
I’ll tell you more soon. Baby steps.
Love always,
Kristin M.
love always, kristin 
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