In early September, I found myself in an emotional slump. For the first time since late 2019, I was overcome by crippling anxiety and disheartenment. It’s not that I hadn’t experienced anxiety since 2019, but I had never reached this level of intensity (which isn’t a bad accomplishment considering I had to navigate a global pandemic).

Fortunately, I have some experience with these situations, so I was able to regain control in a week instead of the three months it used to take.

I know, I am late, but I have a good excuse: I was on a short holiday break in my nearby town of Terracina. I had also planned to publish this article on one of those lazy afternoons. However, when I arrived, I noticed that the mobile connection was practically non-existent (I hadn’t seen 1kbps since the early 2000s), so I gave up.

No real damage, I suppose. I guess nobody lost any sleep over it. 😅

Notwithstanding the Sud-European heatwave, I survived.

This is already a good result for July, per se. Hailstorms and high-speed winds scourged Northern Italy, while forest fires tormented Southern Italy. I, in the middle, only had to endure 45°C. If you look at this in perspective, it is not so bad.

However, surviving was not enough. While the world slowed down, burdened by the sluggish progression of an overheated July, I felt more in tune with myself.

June was fine. I wish I could express more positive sentiments, but that’s how I feel. It was, however, a big step forward compared to May. Not because I resolved anything (on the contrary, my frustrations grew stronger) but rather because I put a certain emotional scar tissue around my problems so that they interfere less with my intentions.

June was also the month in which I was supposed to get the new car I ordered back in January. But no. No luck. I must continue with my old garbage-car for a bit (if she doesn’t fail me first).

In the previous issue of the Changelog, I mentioned that May is my apathy month: a time when my motivation plummets, my mood darkens, and I become more introverted than usual.

Unfortunately, I was right. Over the past 30 days, I have felt myself slowly sliding to the bottom of my emotional pit. Moreover, my “preventive care trip” to Ferrara got canceled due to the extensive and destructive floods in the region, so I had no other option but to accept the sliding.

They say that to err is human, but to persist is diabolical. If that’s the case, then I must be the devil himself.

April has been grossly underwhelming; I had little motivation, energy, and found myself in a persistent state of low-level anxiety.

Unfortunately, this has dramatically impacted my ability to mentally organize my things. For example, I usually follow a seasonal schedule where I reevaluate the previous three months at the end of each quarter to see what worked and what didn’t, and plan for the next quarter. It’s kinda like having a “new year” every 12 weeks.

This damn month. It went fast. It went weird. It went backward but also kinda forward. So it went technically sideways, in the Cambridge Dictionary sense of “something went wrong or didn’t go as planned,” but also in the more precise feeling that I don’t know if I made any progress on anything or not.

With a quick statistical exploration of my diary, “kitchen” was the third most used word, followed only by “things” and “do.” I don’t need GPT-4. Even this stupidly simple stat nails the two main issues this month: finding it very hard to do anything and fighting with my damn kitchen.

There is a little trick I find helpful to get unstuck. Take the one thing you would like to do. Take the smallest related activity that you would consider a goal. Divide that effort by ten.

I wanted to actively come back to fiction writing for a long time, but I never managed to get myself to do anything in that regard. So this month, I followed my own advice and asked myself to write for 30 minutes three days a week. It is really nothing. But it worked, and I wrote the first 2000 words of fiction in a long time. Not much, but still 2000 more words than in the previous 13 months. And even if I continue with this laughable average, I will still have a complete novel in 1 year. Not bad for “getting unstuck.”

The first month of the year is always a month of change. However, the mistake is to make it a month of drastic change. First, for once, the months start with the New Year’s Eve celebrations hangover, so we are already set up for failure. Second, drastic changes are doomed to failure anyway, so we should not put all our hopes on the line with bold new years resolutions.

Is this a good reason to give up? Absolutely not. But if we want to build a tower, we must prepare the terrain first. This is what January is for: not for tracking down goals but for preparing ourselves to veer the boat in the right direction.

I believe nothing describes a person better than looking at the books they read. If that list is empty, you already know that you should reconsider that human interaction (unless, of course, there are good, valid reasons). But if that list is not empty, we can also know what kind of person they are.

So what this list tells about me?

For one, it says that I am a bit disappointed. I ended the year with only 28 books: three less than 2021, even if there are more short books. So, I should look back and see what didn’t work out. For instance, I started too many books in parallel. Another thing is that this tragically eventful year has deeply distracted me. Finally, I only read 7 fiction books (last year, they were 17). 2 of these 7 were really boring bricks that slowed me down a lot. The lesson is that I should learn how to drop a book that is draining the life out of me.