Years From Now

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a fan of journal writing prompts. Today, I found a self-exploration journal on Amazon and, since it’s free, I didn’t hesitate to download it. It’s called The Self-Exploration Journal: 90 Days of Writing, Discovery and Reflection. The first prompt is to write down why you want to embark on this journey of self-discovery. I’m not even sure. I mean, I just write for the sake of writing. I don’t even commonly reread my blog entries, though I did often reread my diary entries when I still faithfully kept an offline diary in the first three years of secondary school. I loved that. Maybe I should make a habit out of rereading some of my blog entries too. But since I currently don’t, I don’t even know that blogging is going to help me discover myself.

I mean, who am I, myself? I see myself in so many fragmented aspects that I’m not even sure who “Astrid” is. All these aspects, parts or identities usually listen to that name, but even as I write this, I don’t feel “whole”. I’m just a part among parts that somehow, in an abstract kind of reality, make up the mind belonging to one body. We have just two hands, both of which we currently use for typing up this journal/blog entry. Which, I might say, is going nowhere.

The second question in the 90-day series asks me to write about how I want to look back on my life ten years from now. Well, I honestly have no idea. Four years ago, I wrote a lettr to my 38-year-old self. I think I may reread it today. Already nearly half of those ten years have passed, but I have no clue at the time what I dreamed about. I mean, three years ago, I did a post as if I was 79 already and looking back at the past fifty years. The only thing I remember that would-be-flashback including was that we’d still live in our current house. Now we’re not even three years on and my husband and I are already thinking of moving.

What does it say of me that I don’t envision that much progress even in fifty years? Does this lack of a truly progressive vision of the future impair my actual progress? Or is it the other way around? That I’ve learned not to expect positive change because the past taught me I’d always fail anyway?

The first time I did a “___ years from now” post was in September of 2006. A psychologist my staff were consulting had asked me where I saw myself in three years. There were, or so I thought, two possible scenarios: one in which I lived successfully fully independently or with just a person reading my mail once a week and was at university and the other in which I needed substantial support. I explicitly wrote that this “black” scenario didn’t have to mean I needed 24-hour care, but that I needed support beyond that which is normal for a blind person.

Three years later, in September of 2009, I had almost two years in a psychiatric hospital behind my belt, of which I’d spent sixteen months on a locked ward. I wrote a flashback then and remarked kind of cynically that stuff couldn’t get much worse than they were now in three more years, or I’d have to be in a homeless shelter or prison. Then, I reasoned, I wouldn’t have Internet access so the whole wide world wouldn’t know. As it turned out, in September of 2012, I was still on the same ward I was on in 2009.

I finally left the hospital in 2017 and live fairly independently with my husband. I guess at this point, I’m pretty content with my life. That doesn’t mean I have absolutley no dreams, but I must admit I don’t generally see these as realistic indeed.