Evidence of Effort

This year, I’ve found myself thinking about the growth mindset a lot. In Carol S. Dweck’s book, Mindset, there’s an anecdote about students with depression, where she characterizes the depressed people with growth mindsets in the following way: “The worse they felt, the more determined they became!”

And so, despite being depressed, they took necessary actions, so their lives wouldn't fall completely apart. I think this might seem like the obvious, simple, and expected thing to do, for people who haven’t experienced depression, and aren’t familiar with the heaviness of waking up in the morning and not wanting to do life. The energy, the will, the motivation, and ability to just get up and go about your normal day when you don’t feel like a person anymore, feels beyond out of reach. At least that’s how I’ve often experienced it.

She mentions one student who was even told he wasn’t depressed because he was still going about his days and getting help for class. He was depressed, but unlike someone with a fixed mindset, he wasn’t robbed of his coping resources. So, he could take steps to solve his problems. It’s like effort seems more accessible, worthwhile, and necessary when your mindset is bent towards growth. And I think you can access the bigger picture a bit more, or maybe, you can at least know it exists, it’s somewhere in your awareness, which you need, so you’re not stuck only zooming in on your pain, and circumstances.

I think this is why doing little things that are tangible is extremely valuable. It might sound silly, but the little things you do become your evidence to prove something different can happen and is happening. It’s concrete. You can see that despite your circumstances, something is happening because of you making helpful choices. You can see that by doing an action, you can impact something.

That’s why I love doing little things like these posts. To me, it’s evidence for myself. When I can see that I’m doing something, like externalizing a thought, and essentially, making something exist that wasn’t there before, whether it’s significant to anyone else or not, and especially if it's messy, and imperfect, I’m reminded that it’s me doing the work. That’s something that’s important to me, particularly if I’m in depression mode. It helps me find my way back to some kind of bigger picture, or at least not completely lose some sight of it. I need to see my evidence of effort. When I can look at it, I can tell myself that I’ve done this before, and I can do it again. Eventually, that extends elsewhere.

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Leave me feedback, thoughts, questions, whatever, etc.

These daily posts aren’t polished essays, but an experiment in taking one thing that’s lingering with me and publicly executing on trying to develop and articulate my thinking about it, especially when my thoughts are incomplete.

I think of everything on my entire Substack as something I can come back to and iterate & expand on later, including these posts! So, if anyone leaves a comment that sparks anything for me, I’ll consider exploring it further sometime. Here’s a link to a Google doc. of the above post:

→Right Here!!←

If you have any specific thoughts that came up for you while reading, feel free to just jump in the doc. and leave comments on those moments, or all over throughout; leave thoughts on whatever you want, and ask questions, or share reactions to specific things. What stands out? What are you curious to know more about?

— Sandra