Today Still Counts

September 2, 2026

I’ve been thinking about how I manage my own mental health now that life looks so different than it did a year ago. I am home most days. I rarely see people in person. There is no office to get ready for, no meeting to walk into, no reason I technically need to do much of anything before coffee. Which means I could very easily stop getting dressed altogether. No shower, no makeup, no clothes beyond whatever I slept in. I am not even convinced anyone would challenge it right away. I have made enough unconventional choices in my life that my family might just assume this was another one. Warren would probably notice first and then spend an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out how to ask if I had considered bathing without actually asking if I had considered bathing.

The funny part is that I know myself well enough to know this would not be harmless for me. One day in pajamas means nothing. Two probably means nothing either. But I also know how small choices can quietly build. It can go from I don’t feel like getting dressed today to why bother if nobody sees me anyway, and then maybe I stay in bed longer, maybe I stop doing my makeup, maybe I stop taking the photo, maybe I stop doing a few other things too. That sounds dramatic when you put it all together, but mental health does not always arrive dramatically. Sometimes it sneaks in through tiny decisions that seem completely reasonable on their own.

I learned that a long time ago after I had my first baby. I had postpartum depression and I intentionally got up every day, showered, got dressed and took her for a walk. Some days that was the accomplishment. I had showered, I had left the house, I had walked. That was enough. What I remember most is that once I left the house, the day had the chance to become something different than how it felt when I woke up. Staying home would have removed that possibility entirely. I have carried that with me ever since.

There have been plenty of days in my adult life when I had to show up for the outside world and I was not at my best. Work still happened. Life still happened. I got dressed, left the house and went anyway. Some of those days became some of my greatest successes, not because they started well but because I was there when something good had the chance to happen. That matters to me now because I do not have that same external structure anymore. Nobody is making me get up. Nobody is expecting me somewhere every morning. So I have to create some of that accountability for myself.

I get ready because I know I feel better when I do. I get dressed, I do my makeup if I feel like it, I take the photo. The photo is not about external validation. It truly is for me. It is part of how I know I showed up that day. Sometimes it is just jeans, glasses, hair doing whatever it has decided to do, thirty seconds in front of the mirror, and that is it. But once I take it, the day feels marked somehow. Complete in a small way. This was me today. I was here. I participated in my own life.

The irony is that documenting myself like this has created a record I did not really understand I was building. My phone throws old photos back at me and suddenly I can see where I was and where I am now. Day to day, I do not notice the changes. They are too small. Then a photo from a year ago appears and the difference is obvious. Different hair, different clothes, different face somehow, different energy. The visual change is easy to see, but so is the mental one.

In my quieter moments I can see how much life has changed. Most of those changes have happened organically despite the circumstances that contributed to where I am now. I am not interested in turning that into some everything happens for a reason philosophy because that is not where my mind goes. What I do find interesting is how much I have gone through to end up feeling more like myself than I have through most of my adult life.

I also do not think I became the person I was before in some dramatic way. That happened slowly too. Life was full. Meetings, work, training for hours, things that had to be done, places I had to be. A lot of must do. I probably was not spending much time examining whether everything still fit because I was busy working from whatever was most accessible.

It is like cupboards. You keep putting things in them. Something gets pushed to the back, something else gets put in front, and eventually you are just reaching for what is easiest to get to. You know there is more shit back there somewhere, but unless something forces you to pull everything out, you probably are not going looking. Then one day the whole cupboard gets emptied onto the floor and you are standing there actually seeing what you have been carrying around.

That is a little what this last year has felt like. Not everything from before was wrong. A lot of it mattered. A lot of it was me. Some of it was just what had accumulated while I was busy living. Having so much stripped back has made me more aware of what I choose now, what I miss, what I do not, what still feels like mine and what I am perfectly happy leaving in the past.

And somehow, after all of that, I feel more familiar to myself now. The outside feels much closer to the person I know inside. I notice it in the photos. I notice it in the way I get dressed. I notice it in how I move through the day when nobody is asking me to be anywhere.

That is probably why the picture matters more than it looks like it should.

It is not for anyone else.

It is for me.

A record that I got up, got dressed and showed up for myself.

Today still counts.