Marking the Days
I've always struggled with maintaining a daily routine, both in remembering to and in finding a reason to bother. Over the past couple of years, I've come to realize that I've needed some kind of ritual to bring meaning to not just the routine but the passage of time. Both of which are things that I haven't had much luck with.
I've tried a few things, like setting a semi-strict schedule, setting "hours after" I wake up for tasks, and using things like daily video releases as starting points for my routine. But they always fall apart for one reason or another. I get sick, I miss the "deadline", or I just forget that I had a time limit. None of the things I set actually meant anything to me, they were just arbitrary things that happened whether or not I did what I needed to do.
The first thing that had some success was holding off my first energy drink of the day until I'd completed my routine, restricting myself to water/Gatorade until I had. That was something I wanted, it was a nice dopamine hit, and it actually made my mornings feel better as I wasn't as reliant on caffeine to get out of bed.
But it still wasn't enough for when I got depressed or sick. To pull me through the periods of time when I'd fall out of cycle and needed just a bit of extra effort to get back on track, or ideally to stay on track.
I managed to stumble on the answer by picking up journaling again. Just like with my blogs, I mark my journal entries with my "HRT Day offset", which is just the number of days since I started HRT. As of writing this, it's HRT Day 944. When I started journaling again, I remembered how annoying it was to figure out the offset every time. I have a website for it, but having to pull that up every time I want to make an entry is kind of a pain. So I made a script that displays the current offset on my topbar for my Linux desktop, and then I remembered something from a book that I'd always loved the idea of (see below), where one of the characters would write a countdown to a specific day on their hand.
Then there's the magic answer. A thing that means something to me, that changes every day, and a singular moment in which I recognize that it has changed. I can use that to be my ritual, and better yet, the absence of the number on my hand is my reminder that I haven't done it yet.
It's even more perfect than that because the symbolism behind why I track my HRT Day lines up with why I should have a daily routine in the first place, or at least I can justify it to myself, which is the important part.
- I owe it to every day I've spent since and before starting HRT to continue to take care of my body.
- Taking my medication, HRT and others, is part of the continuous process of my transition.
- Bettering myself physically makes coming out more worthwhile and every day so far better spent.
- Watching the numbers change, and seeing my life in relation to that date, gives me context that I've lacked as someone with nearly lifelong depression.
It's really hard to describe how easy it is for me to lose track of time, especially now that I've worked from home with my own hours for over three years. Before that, most of my reference for time passing came from work or school. As a result, my life was a blur of preparation for the next time I'd be whisked away to the next place.
I have so little reference for the order and timeline of my life before I turned 20, and that's largely because I spent so much of it just not caring. When I did care about something, it was only a matter of time before everything would fall apart because of some disaster that would distract my family and me long enough for us all to forget about it. Finding something to care about and then remembering that I care about it has been really hard.
It's like if I don't focus on my identity, it just slips away into a fog again, while I just wait for the next disaster. But I don't have those kinds of disasters anymore, so I need to remember what I care about, and I'm starting with caring for myself.
Bonus facts, the book
The book I stole the idea from is Beautiful Creatures Book 1, where Lena writes the date until her impending birthday on her hand in Sharpie. I've always loved the way they use both the countdown and her writing on walls/her journal as a way to gauge her state of mind. Not only was it a beautiful part of her character, and something that fits right into the rest of her aesthetic, but it was an amazing way to allow Ethan to see what was going on both before they were able to Kelt and when she locked him out.
For reference, Kelting was something she and Ethan were able to do where they could share thoughts and dreams at any distance. That made their communication very open, for the most part. As with any book focused on a relationship, there was drama and there were multiple times where that line of communication was closed, and how Lena's writing habits presented as tells for her mood and state of mind were very well done.
There's even a constant throughline comparing Lena's change in habits to Ethan's father's, where his father is grieving Ethan's mom who recently died in a car accident. Without spoiling too much, Ethan's father is a published author and has become a shut-in since Ethan's mom's death, focusing entirely on writing his next book. There's a reveal partway through Book 1 about his father's state of mind that scares Ethan and is called back to later as Lena grapples with the darker side of her powers in later books.