---
title: 'Thoughts on Personal Progress'
pubDate: '4/9/25'
tags: ['Mental Health']
---

One of the things I've been working on recently in therapy is having a healthier outlook on personal progress. For a lot of my life, for as long as I've thought consciously about my progress as a human being, I've looked at progress as a line graph—the bottom is zero, and the top is whatever the end goal is. Forward progress towards the goal is represented by the plot on the graph heading upwards, while mistakes, failures, or whatever you want to call them, are represented by the plot moving down.

My therapist challenged me to look at progress in a different way and see progress not as a line that goes up and down, but as a journey, and to discover a new image to define my personal progress—one that still recognizes progress isn't always a straight line, but acknowledges that, while the trajectory of the line may change, it's always moving up.

I struggled to think of what that image could be for me. But the other day, while I was working on a particularly tough programming issue, something clicked...

The journey of writing software isn't always a straight line either. But, if it worked the same way as in my image of personal progress, then code would just start deleting itself whenever we hit a roadblock. Imagine if every time you ran into a bug you needed to fix, bits of your software would just disappear. That's how I see personal progress, and when I think about it in those terms, it sounds ridiculous.
Sometimes things will go well; often, there will be stumbling blocks. These may impede progress, but they don't move it backwards, and challenges are just another step in the journey.
