A Secret Note I Left Myself. Is It Also for You?

Sometimes I write a secret note to myself in my own writing. And sometimes I get lucky and catch it.

Trying to understand one’s own mind is like trying to see the whole entire horizon from the beach. Broad Cove Beach, Cape Breton Highlands, July 2025.

I wrote an observation a few months ago about the nature of memory, and how, as I age and slowly detach myself from the idea that life is linear, I’ve come to see life more as a “memory lasagna,” layers that refer to and recall each other, conjuring a past moment and bringing 20 or more years ago to life so freshly I can smell what I was cooking (in that case, a poussin pot pie).

This was a huge and vitally important transition for me to make, as a former ambition addict. But let me be clear: pursuing ambition wasn’t the core problem — it was the ill-fated pursuit of certainty that was misguided. (I thought ambition would eventually offer up to me stability, security, as its prize. Go ahead and chuckle a little with me at that one, friends.)

I know less and less each year I am alive, but I do believe that we humans basically experience our lives as mostly constructed by the external facts of it: where we live, whom we live with, whom we love, what kind of work we do. But the older I get, the more I understand that the internal construct — what I’ve come to think of as my operating system — is what ultimately decides whether things are going well or not well.

And my operating system is slightly suspect. Or, as I’ve described in to friends in the past, “My brain is not always my friend.” It can be a dark and scary neighborhood up there if I haven’t been tending the weeds, you know?

So I became a student of myself — something I highly recommend we all do — to try to keep the brain free of weeds or self-deceptions or pointless stories that add weight to how I see the world and my place in it.

Through therapy, I learned to identify the really sneaky ways that I can pull on a couple threads in my life and braid together a burden. This is why I never thought I would stop therapy, truly: I needed someone to calmly say, “Do you hear what you just said?” And then hear anew a slightly askew statement I’d just made about me or life or me and life, small deceptions or misrepresentations that sometimes kept me from internalizing key information I needed to know to move myself toward my goals, away from harm, however minor.

But in that practice, in therapy I also learned that in my statements I leave myself postcards, little notes and flags in how I speak about myself and my life that are like the yellow penalty flags the soccer umpires throw down on the field: pay attention to this.

Unsurprisingly, I find a lot of those flags in my writing. Not in the core story I’m telling, usually — there I’m being very conscious and deliberate, more often than not — but more the breezy things I just fire off from my fingertips as I’m connecting points or wrapping up an anecdote.

And I found one of those in the piece I penned about memory, a bright-yellow flag flapping in the wind, waiting for my attention. I was talking about making that elaborate poussin pot pie and how strongly that memory remains within me — but it’s the second half of the sentence that grabbed me by the collar weeks later when I re-read the post:

These kind of efforts, I’ve come to understand over the years, are a way of inviting myself to be really, truly present and set aside whatever central agony I am currently building my life around.

Whooee! That’s a piece of truth-telling right there. I might have missed it, but fortunately I caught the flash of yellow.

Let me explain. I mean, who builds their life around a central agony? Intentionally? Well, I do.

I’m a project person. I know this about myself. I have to constantly be working on something, to keep the howling wolves inside my mind at bay. I stay busy: I always have about three different craft projects going, I have demanding gardens — flowers, fruit, vegetables, always a few new trees which need nursing along — which I adore and fear in equal measure, cooking dinner is an opportunity for art, I do about a dozen or more puzzles a day. I’m not comfortable with just being, unless I am in a kayak. (And in that case, yes, I’m kayaking, but it is the quietest my mind gets for some reason.)

At heart, I am a project person and problem-solver. Keeping my mind busy with questions and wonderments both great and small: how to treat the fungal infection on the tomatoes? how to get a better pattern from a photograph for cross-stitching? how to amp up the flavor in my bruschetta topping?

But there’s a darker side to all that energy and creative focus, which is that I can unwittingly find myself in a self-created tunnel of “PROBLEM” and make that — say it with me! — the central agony I build my life around.

I do it. Me does it. I, Stacy, do it to myself. I find a wee pick in the sweater, and I have the sweater all unraveled in a pile in my lap in an attempt to make it better before I realize: oh, wait, that pick is just nothing, just a minor flaw, just a hiccup, a blip, a bobble, that is very much not improved or fixed by my attention.

My life, in general, is going just fine. But I don’t trust that, ever. Fortunately, I don’t feel that orientation in a daily way. I don’t have anxiety, worries, ulcers. So I forget that my operating system is wired that way.

So my “project person” personality sometimes gets the best of me, spinning up ideas for Important, Intractable Things You Must Try to Fix (a classic), or worse, How to Make This Perfectly Nice Person Your Latest Project.

Fortunately, therapy really did work (because I had a very amazing therapist who made me do the work), though, so those two options I cite above are not currently in rotation in Stacy’s Little Shop of Horrors.

But I must be ever-so-slightly aware that my lovely, beloved mind will take small things (the ever-encroaching crabgrass on my property, for example), or even big things (my perpetually unstable work life), and make them the fulcrum, the center, the focus of my life’s energy and the driver of my mood.

And that simply won’t do, dear reader.

I want my life to be based on ephemera, gossamer, wonder, awe.

Those experiences are fleeting, sure, not meant to be clutched tightly in one’s palm. But for me, that is where the reward lies. In being able to marvel that I am even here, regardless of — in defiance of — the chaos and heartbreak that is everywhere in these dark times where sense and civility seem to be leaving us behind as a communal experience.

So I’ll take a second to thank myself for leaving myself these little postcards — a perfectly adaptive habit born out of my slightly maladaptive operating system — so I can keep reminding myself not to build my experience of my life around collecting agonies in the recesses of my mind.

Instead, I have learned to turn outward, quite literally: take a walk, stand in the garden listening to bumblebees, think about how old mountains are, feel the breeze waft through my office, hear the rooster down the street sing his (seemingly) dying notes for the hundredth time today, remember to be present enough to know this is all fleeting, and the fleeting is the promise, not the threat. Nothing lasts. Not agonies. Not joys. But the being here, we get to have for ourselves, right now. Or at least I can leave myself a yellow-flag reminder to see it that way at least some of the time, and to do the happy fool’s work of building my life around spun sugar rather than the overthinker’s choice to build it around dread.

Sending you all love. Thanks for being here, however your operating system runs.

xo