000023 — March 10
“...What would it take, what would you have to let go to know you are great? ... How different would your life be if you could focus on what is instead of what was or what could be? ...”
- Darryl Kelly, March 10, 2021
I pulled this from a journal entry on this day five years ago, and it was tender to read all the way through. I found myself stopping at different moments and feeling deeply for the emotional place I was in when I wrote those words, the hundreds before them, and the thousands after. It was a long entry, and what I can see now is that I was wrestling with identity.
It was tender because I saw a man with great intent and real awareness, and I also saw how much tension he was carrying. What followed the question, “What would it take ... to know you are great?” was a long account of the regrettable and shameful choices I had made throughout my life. And even then, buried inside all that self-indictment, I could see myself recognizing something important: what was keeping me from a positive view of my identity wasn’t only the choices I had made. It was also the outcomes I thought had to materialize before I could believe anything good about myself.
Today, I have no other word for the place I was in than hell, the kind of in-between where I was no longer the boy I had been and not yet the man I longed to become. So I beat myself up for everything I had done, and I couldn’t yet see who I actually was in that moment, a man sitting for hours examining and processing his emotions and actions until he could arrive at a different question: “...How different would your life be if you could focus on what is instead of what was or what could be ...”
I didn’t know how to answer that question then, so what followed was a list, and now I can see it as a list of who I was. I answered the question indirectly. I focused on what was true, even if I didn’t yet know how to trust it.
And all these years later, I know myself with a steadiness and love I don’t think I would have found if it were not for those hard moments, for challenging myself then and continuing on. There are nine “on this day” journal entries for March 10, and when I read last year’s entry, four years after the entry I randomly found, one anchoring line stopped me: “I can see you fully owning your value, you’re no longer adapting or lowering yourself to your environment, instead you know who you are in any environment.”
What gets me is how much of me was already there. The man in 2021 couldn’t see himself clearly, and he was still doing the work that would eventually let him. He was already practicing a form of honesty that would become love later. He was already sitting with himself long enough to stop confusing what he felt with who he was.
That’s what made the entry so tender. I wasn’t only reading pain. I was seeing someone I love, someone I happen to be, trying to tell the truth before he had the language for what was changing.
And that’s what feels so revealing about today. I wasn’t only revisiting an old entry. The day kept stacking itself. A question from 2021. A line from last year. And then, before I ever sat down on the plane to work on this note, I had already written this morning’s entry:
“Regret is also starting to loosen its grip... I am able to more clearly see these emotions for what they are: information, temporary states, not who I am.”
- Darryl Kelly, March 10, 2026
I used to think the man in those older entries was behind. Now I think he was telling the truth with the tools he had.
