The Slow Build: Unexpected Life Lessons From a Younger Self

One of my New Year's resolutions is to read my old journals. It's been like being in conversation with my younger self. What I didn't see coming was what she would have to teach me.

Photo by Vitalij Sova

If you'd rather listen than read, find the audio at, Sound Insight, Season 3, ep. 1

One of my resolutions this year is to read the stacks of my old journals collected in my closet. I’ve been journaling since I was about 15 years old.

In my teen years, entries were sporadic and brief. Usually, one or two sentences. They had two modes – drama and gossip. All “he said, she said.” Zero self-reflection.

In my 20s and 30s, the entries reveal the exhausting and repeated failures (sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking) of raising two boys, while immersing myself in the frenzied and soul crushing experience of trying “to advance” in a career I didn’t really like.

50 goals to the perfect life.

By the mid-nineties, I’m fully absorbed in the endlessly futile quest of self-perfection. Becoming someone better, slimmer, more accomplished – someone my inner critic could feel good about. I was 39 and the clock was ticking. I had begun to glimpse the slippery and ever accelerating slope that was to be the second half of my life. I had a LOT of work to do!

In 1995, I wrote down about 50 goals for the rest of my life and then another 25 resolutions for that year alone.

While most of the 25 resolutions were recycled to future years, I was pleasantly surprised at the number of “life goals” I had achieved, though not in the way or on the scale and grandeur I had envisioned.  

Here are some examples:

• Ocean front retirement home with jacuzzi.

  • How about a rented apartment on the harbor with a bathtub?

• Retire at 55.

  • I did that for a couple of months but I didn't like it. I went back to work.

• Successful entrepreneur.

  • Fortunately, I did not articulate specific metrics to define success, so I can say YES, NAILED IT!

• Lose 30 pounds and get fitter.

  • Yes! It took 20 years, total burnout, a daily exercise habit, and a vicious intestinal bug, but hey, I can check it off.

• Look superb in leathers!

  • Really, that’s a life goal? That would have required a completely different body than the one gifted to me by my mother. I still haven’t forgiven her.

• Swim 60 lengths of the pool in one stretch.

  • Not even close. Problem is, I can’t swim and I don't like getting wet. At the time I wrote that, I could dog-paddle one length of a pool without stopping. Now I can dog-paddle one width of a pool.

• Develop and maintain a daily yoga and meditation practice.

  • Again, nailed it, after many, many false starts.

• New career by age 40.

  • More like age 48, but yes.

• Yacht.

  • Nope. We seriously considered buying a canoe once.

• Backyard pool.

  • Does my grandkids’ above ground pool that looks like a big barrel count?

• Porsche for Ralph paid for out of the proceeds of my writing.

  • Excuse me while I fall on the floor laughing. Still working on it. Maybe in our next life.

I also found important goals I have not met. The most significant of these, was “write and publish a book.” What book, you ask? There have been many. All miscarriages, most dying after the first three chapters. Currently I’m thinking of an idea for a self-help book for aspiring writers called “Why it took 40 years to write this book and how you can write yours in half the time!” Can you spell “BEST SELLER?”

The book goal humbles and saddens me a little. I see how I let fear and doubt and life keep me from achieving it. I apologized to my past self for making her wait so long. I promised her that I have not given up.  

I’ve been reading these journal entries with a mixture of exasperation, eye-rolling, laughter, and compassion. Occasionally, I find an entry that makes me a little proud of the younger me. I find a glimmer of a young woman growing into herself, cracking the shell of a wiser, more expansive, and compassionate human being.

Here’s an excerpt from November 27, 1989. I am 33 years old. My children are one and four.

Tonight, as I was leaving Zellers, I took stock of my life.

It seemed as if fatigue had settled into the marrow of my bones. I listened to the din of the shopping cart as its wheels struck the grout in the tiles leading to the exit. I emerged into a blast of dark cold night. 

It was 9:58 p.m. I could hear the clang of shuttering shop doors behind me. The pavement was covered in slush and a thin film of frost covered a small scattering of cars. Exhaust sputtered from tailpipes as people loaded bags from their shopping carts into their trunks.

It was a night that normally made me rage against Christmas – the rush, the crowded stores with aisles too small, toys too expensive. I would rant about the exploitation, the commercialism.

Instead, I took stock. I thought of home. The babies would be sleeping, their skin dewy, eyes closed, their breathing soft and rhythmic. I thought of Ralph, puttering, finishing up the chores of the day.

I took stock and I was grateful. I felt joy in being alive, in being loved, in loving. And I thanked God, not for my good fortune, but for the eyes to see it, the spirit to know it, and rejoice.

I promised myself that I would go home and write. I would say to my journal, on Monday, November 27, 1989, I looked out into the cold night and felt grateful to be alive, to be living this life exactly as I’m living it. To be sharing it with the ones who matter most to me.

The greatest gift of being faithful to journaling has been the opportunity to time travel, to be in a kind of conversation with my past self. Not to be fooled by a selective and unreliable memory, but to actually listen to the voice of my younger self and what she has to teach me.

This visit to the 1980s and 90s revealed two things.

1. A fully developed human being is not a set of resolutions met. It is a long, slow build.

I’m a little shocked and dismayed at how little has changed and how much is still left undone. And, paradoxically, I am a much different version of all of that. Kind of like a Cathy 4.0.

I spent years flailing in the illusive and self-recriminating project of self-improvement. This year, I would lose weight. I would be fit and buff. I would be rich and famous. This year, I would finally live up to my potential.

So many of my entries are about getting to a perfect future, and a perfect future me.

In many ways, I am new and improved – older, wiser, more at ease with myself. And in many ways, due to time and the aging process, I am a diminished version of that striving, relentless, adorably serious younger self. Who I am now isn’t who I expected to become or even who I sought to become. Who I became is a surprise, both in how I have changed and how I haven’t.

I’ve been a slow build, and this version is more interesting than perfect, I think. A little wiser, gentler with the world, and more content. At the same time, I feel unfinished. There is still so much to learn, to grow into, so much of me to be shaped and sanded.

2. There is no future called perfection.

There is, however, a present called misery if it is rooted in habitual dissatisfaction with who and where I am now. My drive to improve myself is useful and has served me to stay healthy and resilient. It supports an essential instinct to grow and evolve. The project perfect me, however, is a waste of precious time.

What she taught me was that on November 27^th, 1989, and every day after, I was already whole and complete. I had already arrived at the only place I needed to be. The place called here and now, having this experience in this moment with “the eyes to see it and the spirit to know it and rejoice.”