Everything I do, if I keep doing it, will develop a strength in me. I can’t not get better at it. My brain won’t stop looking for patterns. I will develop a visual library. I will develop a tolerance for some of the problems. I will see patterns where I couldn’t see them before. I give myself too much credit if I retell my story as the hero through great and wise use of will overcame the problems and did what others could not do. That’s not it at all. We are all like this.

The trouble comes when we do things that tear us down. Everything I do, even the negative self-talk and the self-sabotaging actions, I develop a strength to do them better. My brain won’t stop looking for patterns, even the ones that get in the way. It becomes a visual library, seeing the same images flash over and over, a memory come back to haunt me, develop a tolerance that maybe I wasn’t so smart that day I ignored my mother or let my sister play alone on the porch. Maybe I give myself too much credit, that I could have known better. Reliving the same story, I am no hero, but the great cause is before me. Wise or otherwise, I can overcome the self-talk and see what I can do now. That’s not all, but this is who I am.

Whatever I do, trouble or otherwise, I am developing the strength to be this again and again. I am better at it than I’ve ever been, but that’s not my fate. Maybe I crawled today and maybe that’s the best I could do and maybe my brain won’t stop working in its anxious search for patterns, but I’m developing a library of thoughts. I can walk through these aisles and see what I couldn’t see before. Tolerate me here, I have my library card. I collected these memories. I’m telling you this story because it is all of our stories. We are the heroes, whether we want that title or not, because there’s nobody else but us, nobody else—wise or otherwise—that can do what we’re doing. Don’t feel the pressure, it’s not about pressure. It’s not about credit. It’s just the way things have always been. That’s not all, we have always been like this.

Moving forward, time after time, everything I do, I now see what I couldn’t see. Strength to keep going or not, to turn another way or not. My brain keeps track but doesn’t always tell me if I’ve actually been here before or wants me to believe that it’s the same. For everything I notice there were a thousand things my brain didn’t let me see. Is this tolerance I’m developing? Tolerance for myself? For others? There is a problem, some of us acknowledge, when we are intolerant. Give me credit, I’m learning to love me. That’s not all, but it’s how it is.

Every turn, every time I come around, this is what I see: a person taking life on and maybe doing it a little better. We all know people that could have done it better, times when we knew better. Our brain won’t stop. Why stop it? This is the library I am building, as great as any library, and why not? Tolerate it or don’t, these are the problems I saw or created. Maybe I give myself too much credit, but if I don’t retell my story, if I don’t take the next step forward—whatever labels we use—I’ll be here forever. Stuck. This is not all there is, but it is right now.