I stopped keeping score of my failures

My brain keeps a private cinema. It shows one film: everything I have ever done wrong, remastered in high definition, with surround sound.

The win from Tuesday morning gets deleted by Wednesday. The awkward thing I said in 2016 is preserved in the national archive, available on demand at 2am, with director's commentary.

The cinema only takes reservations for one genre: catastrophe. Everyone else's highlight reel plays in the lobby, free of charge.

For years I treated this as honesty. Surely the failures were the real data and the wins were rounding errors.

But memory is not a neutral record — mine is an archivist with an agenda. It tags failures “important” and files wins under “luck, temporary, does not count.”

Keeping score against myself felt rigorous. It was actually just rigged: the scoreboard had one column, so of course the failures always won, season after season.

So I stopped trusting the internal archive and built an external one. A boring folder: every thank-you message, every finished thing, every “that actually helped” gets a screenshot or a line.

• No entry is too small. “Replied to the scary email” counts.
• No curation. The file is not allowed to judge the evidence.
• Five minutes on Sunday to drop things in.

It took a month before the file had enough entries to argue with. Past-me had to build the case file that present-me would someday need, entry by unglamorous entry.

The file exists for one moment: the day my brain announces I have never done anything right. On those days I don't argue with the announcement — I open the folder.

Feelings are terrible at arithmetic. The file is not. It just sits there being true until the screening room loses power.

I don't read it top to bottom. Three random entries are usually enough to break the spell and get me back to the day in front of me, which is rarely as catastrophic as advertised.