Back in 2023 I read somewhere that it takes about 18 months for your mindset to fundamentally shift about something. I had been thinking about my relationship with mistakes, making mistakes and how if I let myself make more mistakes, I would probably make more space for growth.
I’ve always known that I am someone who works well with volume, and that producing things in a large amount doesn’t bring me misery, rather sometimes it is the pursuit of a singular piece of work that makes things a lot harder to finish for me. So, at that time, on a whim I decided that I will start writing a bug log, a mistake everyday that I have made, and post it on the internet. Since 18 months is about 550 days, I thought, why not just do a 500 day project, and that was the genesis of my bug logs. This past Saturday was the 500th day.
A fun thing I was doing the whole time was asking GPT to analyze my posts, 100 posts at a time. At the end of the whole series, I asked what’s the big change, and it said “You’ve gone from fixing yourself to trusting yourself”. And that is a monumental self transformation if I ever saw/felt one.
I know my collaborators and people close to me have also felt that change in me. It is interesting, because when I started doing this project, I didn’t think that I would end up there. Mostly because I never really felt like I didn’t trust myself. I have taken many paths and decisions in life which are very self trust oriented, and when I started this project out, I really was trying to do it as a way to better myself, I just didn’t know that the bettering will be in learning that growth can be incidental, and I don’t have to police and force myself into it.
The writing
I know often before a project begins, I am thinking a lot about how challenging some parts of a project might be, like how drawing 200 pages in a comic might feel like a lot or writing the words in a book will be a lot, and often that calculation is a critical part of deciding to do something or not. After all, I want to know what I will learn at the end of the project and will the pain be worth it. But this project turned that learning on its head. It really wasn’t that challenging to come up the 500 posts, probably took me less than 5 mins each day. At the end of the day I’d just ask myself “what would I change if I could live today again” and that was all I needed to find a bug.
What was hard was showing up and owning my mistakes. Somewhere when I was a month or so in, I discovered that I am always self critical, almost like a helicopter parent, a part of me always trying to figure out what is wrong with whatever I am doing. And that it wasn’t that I didn't know how to make mistakes, but the shame that came from the critical voice that was a roadblock in me making mistakes. While I did not know it at that point, it was this which became the seed of exploring why I didn’t trust myself with anything and why I was constantly monitoring myself. Learning #1
The sharing
Sharing things is hard, being vulnerable is harder, and being vulnerable about when I am wrong is the hardest. I think its a mix of a fear of rejection and a fear of being misunderstood. It was a few months into the whole thing, and an acquaintance brought up something that I had shared in a log. My first reaction was “Oh my god! what! now practical strangers know what is wrong with me??”. But as that emotional spike calmed down, I realized that it had given them a way to chat with me about something that was meaningful to me, and clearly to them also.
Vulnerability is experiential, can’t learn by reading, only by doing. As I had conversations with people, both those who were close to me who would check up on me after a particularly brutal log, and those who were slightly further away offering me suggestions and solutions, and commiserating, I kept learning that connection forms when I put myself out there, even in my imperfections. It helped me trust the relationships and the people around me just a tad bit more, and rather than trying to show up as a perfect individual with no flaws or defensiveness, opened up a path to be human. Learning #2
The repetition
Some where around the half way point, I started noticing a shift in my internal dialogue. I realized that the self critical voice that always had a running commentary on my each and every action had silenced. Maybe it got exhausted having to actually do the work every day. There is this beautiful poem by Phil Kaye about repetition, and how when you repeat a word, it loses its potency, and some of its meaning.
Repeating “I slept poorly” for the 10th time on a public forum only has so much strength in shame before it just become something that sometimes happens. I sometimes don’t sleep well, or eat perfectly, or workout, sometimes my todo lists are too long and when I am tired of them being too long I run away from them, sometimes I struggle with communicating with the people who matter to me, and sometimes I just mess up my schedules because I can. Those just became facts about me, not value judgements of myself.
Regardless that voice has almost completely silenced itself, and its an interesting feeling. When I make a mistake the first response being “Oh what can we do better next time.” rather than “What an idiot”(or some other variant). Learning #3
The discipline
You know what’s a super power? Discipline. I’ve never really seen myself as someone who is disciplined. Possibly because I saw discipline as something forced and rigid, and not something I had especially as a creative person. After all the popular fiction about creative folks is that they run on whims and inspiration. And the dictionary defines discipline as “the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience”. And I don’t wanna punish myself. But, I was doing that wasn’t I? The strong self critical voice was a punisher. I don’t think I really even knew how discipline could work without the punishment part.
But showing up every day, fulfilling this promise that I made to myself, made me realize that yea, actually if I say I will do something I will do it. It gave me access to self discipline “the ability to control one's feelings and overcome one's weaknesses”. I think self discipline is closer to knowing and learning how to regulate your emotions, without letting them control your actions. And I know that I can do that. It feels like finding a super power I never knew I had. Learning #4
The patience
It has been quite a journey to slowly write one thing at a time. As I reflect back on it, one of the main things I notice is that most of the times when I am learning I have a sense of rush, like I must “get it now” so that I can move on to the next thing. There isn’t a sense of rest or space, and learning does require some space. Having a timeline of 500 days really made it so that my mind didn’t need to rush to solve the thing right away, because of course even after 100 days, one is only 20% of the way through.
And that taught me the most important thing of all. Learning to have patience and grace for myself. Holding my high standard, because I am still able to face my flaws, but not having to blame and shame myself every time I make one. Learning #5
There are two kinds of trusts, practical trust and emotional trust. Practical trust is, if I have asked you to do something, I can trust that you will do it to the best of your ability, the trust of showing up. Emotional trust is, if I am stuck I know I can come to you and you will help me and not take advantage of me.
Therapists say that how people’s internal wounds heal is by having corrective experiences, and there is probably no wound greater than broken trust with self.
Slowly over the last year and half, I have given myself 500 opportunities to have space to build those corrective experiences, and its not that each day seemed grand, but overtime, when I looked back at each batch of 100 I could clearly see the changes. And I can surely say that I have gone from wanting to fix my flaws to trusting that I can meet life’s challenges, whatever they may be.
You can see a list of all the logs here : https://divyatakart.notion.site/All-bugs-fc04dc18c8484741a6008d7f28e175d3?pvs=4
As always thank you for reading. This specific piece was a very personal one, but one of the most valuable thing that has come out of this project is that several of my friends have said they want to do something like this for themselves also, and that is super precious.
Of course not all of us work in a way where we wanna consciously spent 500 days learning to trust ourselves, but I’d love to hear what caused those shifts for you. What were the moments where you learned to trust yourself?