I’m proud of how I handled my anger over current events.

I got sick of just complaining on the internet and feeling powerless, so I volunteered for town government. It’s an unelected position, unpaid, but it’s in something I’m passionate about. It’s tedious and slow, but we’re making incremental changes to make things better. I have real influence now on my immediate area and it’s helping me keep my sanity(?).

I ate healthy today, exercised and did some cleaning/organizing around the house.

Sounds really small, but I haven’t done all three of those things on the same day in a really long time.

I rode my bike three times today. Once for fun, once to go get groceries (cargo bike), and once to go to the store again because I forgot something. Then I made a nice fire in the firepit with this lovely hardwood we got from a house around the corner who was giving it away and flame grilled some steak and peppers, onions and squash. It was delicious.

How resilient I’ve proven to be. I feel like I’ve been held down all my life but I got a college degree and now I’m going back for another one. I owe a lot of it to new family members.

When I see my friends, coworkers, neighbors, community, etc just being awesome to each other. Just little stuff like letting someone else have the last slice of cake, giving someone the rest of the jug of wiper fluid after filling up, returning their carts, apologizing for interrupting or bumping into someone, preventing someone from getting scammed, etc.

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Fixing something for the first time. From then on I actually own whatever I fixed, and if I need to repeat the same fix it becomes a normal chore. But some things (un)fortunately require many different fixes, so I get to be proud of each one.

Proud of my kid. When he was in high school he wrote a large language model to parse documents for debate prep.

He graduated with his CS degree in 2018 and got his first real job with Intel, then Oracle, and is now a respected data scientist in the AI field, his papers are cited, he presents at big AI conferences…

I mean, he’s actively helping make all our lives demonstrably worse… but I’m still proud of him. :)

Right now, my first grade reading so well. They’re a reading machine & they love doing it. I want to foster that love of reading as much as I can.

Still happy to make it to work.

38 years on the “boo boo bus” (ambulance). I’m hoping to last until I make it 50 years.

Still alive!

My transition progress, my friend circle and my veganism.

Half marathon every week

Writing free software that makes people happy, cooking food for free that makes people happy, helping people to preserve their freedom through privacy, using their rights, getting away from harmful relationships.

In short, helping people does.

I’m going through some really awful stuff at the moment, and it’s hard to feel proud of anything when I absolutely despise myself, but these are things I managed to convince myself are okay:

• Surviving this. I’m working very hard to get better, I have lots of regrets and getting better isn’t for the reason I want it to be, but I will succeed
• I helped start a transgender solidarity network, our first rally was the proudest moment of my life
• That time I tried to stop a coal ship from leaving port (it didn’t work but it did do a lot of other important things for the rest of the protest)
• I make a really mean creamed cauliflower and I always feel super proud when I get to make it and hear all these strangers say how good it is (it’s the easiest dish in the world, people are just addicted to salt)