(1) My First Entry ✧.*❀

September 6th, 2025 [12:xx pm]

I've been dabbling in becoming "a better me" for a while now, the pipeline starting most significantly when I was in 9th grade, that's 2.75 years now. I spent much time picking a skill develop, getting motivated, grinding, losing steam, then quitting. I found motivation once more; and made another attempt at training new habits and regulating my emotions starting around late May of this year—around the time where my final exams were coming to a close. It was then that I discovered Habitica from my lovely best friend, and ever since, I've been making progress towards 6 habits which I found that I wanted to incorporate into my life the most. They are: Drawing, Exercising, Stretching, Studying, Typing Practice; and most importantly, Practicing a more positive, calm and open mindset. So far, I've been at it for about 3 months.

I've since developed a different mindset about building habits + a different approach. I don't expect myself to be consistently doing high amounts of work each day. Ya gotta keep the ball rolIing by simply doing something each day, no matter how small. I allowed myself to do two minutes of work on each of my habits each day, and more recently I have gotten comfortable with lowering my standards even more if ever I feel like I'm fighting brain to even do 2 minutes of stuff. That all lead to me frequently doing bonus work on many habits. There are certainly days where I've missed practicing every habit, very many at that, but there extremely few days where I've done nothing I actually wanted to. That in itself is something to be extremely proud of.

On another note, I've found that it is very important to try not to feel too frustrated with yourself when you don't complete everything you set out to that day. Few times does that ever actually motivate me and it can lead to discouragement if you keep feeling dissatisfied with yourself when you're already low. The last things I felt whenever I started falling off after huge productivity sprees (during that two-year span) were frustration and disappointment, then finally, complacency—the nail in the coffin that makes you quit when you're fed up with your own dissatisfaction.

[It's okay to miss days, and it's okay to not like that. You don't have to be warding off negative emotions like they're evil spirits. Just try to think about your progress, calm yourself down, and give yourself reassurance. Never try to use your frustration as your fuel or make yourself do more out of spite.]

I've been at these habits mostly consistently, however after crossing my most significant rut (sorta?) during this timeframe (lasting 2-3 weeks), I came to realize that—despite having journalled quite a bit during this time and recording my progress in habitica discord servers—I don't really have a solid idea of where I started or how much I've progress progressed since I started. That made it a bit harder to get back some steam when I was low on it. That's why I just decided to start writing on this site. I'll do it whenever the heck I feel like brain dumping, and I will have this writing as a compass for whenever I'm lost.

--Okay I'm tired of writing on this ha... it's been about three hours trying to word this all nicely and fancy sounding so i can reread this in the future for motivation (ts sounds straight out of a self-help video 😭)