When I started seeing my therapist mid last year, the issue I brought into the room was my mornings. They were heavy, unbearable at times, filled with low energy and even lower interest. Getting myself to the office felt like dragging something immovable. The reasons were layered. Some were within my control. Some were not.
Seven months later, my mornings are no longer the battlefield they once were. They are not euphoric or extraordinary, but they are steady. And that steadiness has made all the difference.
A Simple Structural Shift
The biggest change was deceptively simple: I moved my workout from the evening to the morning. That one shift removed the daily negotiation. Evenings always came with an inner voice reminding me how tired I was, how justified it would be to skip the gym. Mornings leave less room for argument. You wake up, and you go.
More importantly, it created a sense of early achievement. Even if the workday turns chaotic, even if the meetings are draining, I have already done something meaningful for myself.
“Win the morning, and you’ve already shifted the narrative of your day.”
That early win became an anchor.
Control Is Limited — But Not Absent
Not everything that weighed on me has disappeared. There are still behaviors, emotional outbursts, and intentions of others that remain outside my control. I am learning to be silent more often. I am learning to detach from people and their opinions. People are probably dealing with their own demons like me, and I do not want their storms to define my day.
I try by fail at this frequently. But habits are not born from perfection. They are built through repeated attempts.
When Evenings Started Breaking my Mornings
Two weeks ago, during a therapy session, I realized something very important. My mornings had structure. My evenings did not. And bad evenings undermine good mornings. The lack of structure created room for routine bourbon drills, which in turn compromised my sleep, which then strained the mornings I had worked so hard to improve.
So I made another small decision.
The Poetry Experiment
I decided to read poetry every evening. One poet a day. I began with Pablo Neruda, then moved to Philip Larkin and Rabindranath Tagore. I revisited Charles Bukowski, Federico García Lorca, Mahmoud Darwish, Louise Glück, and Gabriela Mistral. There are many more lined up.
I also began recording and sharing them on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube under the handle AgilePoets. What replaced drifting evenings was intention. What replaced habitual pouring was reflection.
“The only thing we can experiment on without permission is ourselves.”
The Only Laboratory We Truly Own
Over the past few months, I’ve come to understand that while we cannot redesign the world around us, we can redesign our own patterns. But self-experimentation requires gentleness. Just because something is within our control does not mean we should become harsh with ourselves. We are both the scientist and the subject. Discipline without compassion becomes punishment.
Solitude Is Powerful, But It has a Catch
In a world overflowing with noise, we spend very little time listening to ourselves. We rarely pause long enough to understand what we feel, what we need, or what we are becoming. Yet there is a caution here. Solitude can easily slip into loneliness if we are not careful.
The vast possibilities of being alone should not trap us. We must learn to detach, observe, and read the findings of our small experiments without getting lost inside them.
Happiness Is Not a Destination
Am I happy? Not entirely. Am I unhappy? Not entirely. Neither state is permanent.
“Emotional states are weather patterns, not identity statements.”
I have had moments of joy and moments of heaviness in recent weeks and months. Both belong to me. Embracing both feels more honest than chasing one and rejecting the other.
The Unfinished Self
One realization has been especially grounding: I am an unfinished self, and I will remain so. There is no final version waiting to be revealed. There is no ultimate completion. Yes, there will be achievements. But they too will be impermanent.
The goal is not elimination of what is not working. The goal is manageability. There is no clean slate where we can rewrite everything. We inherit our past, and whether we like it or not, we have to build upon it.
Slowing Down as a Choice
I recently listened to The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah and found myself deeply engaged. I have The Great Alone waiting to be read and have already begun listening to The Women, her novel about women who served during the Vietnam War. Normally, I listen to audiobooks at 1.75x speed. This time, I decided to slow down and listen.
What is the hurry?
“I have nowhere urgent to go other than the same place those before me went and those after me will.”
Speed often disguises anxiety as productivity. Slowing down feels like reclaiming ownership of time.
As I finished Four Winds that took be through the depression era and as I am listening to ‘The Women’ that takes me into the lives of nurses during Vietnam War, I realize I should not be complaining. I have seen nothing. Even compared to many people today, I live a rather comfortable lives. I don’t think I have the right to complain.
Content Overload and the Illusion of Entertainment
We live in an age where everything is available instantly. Movies, documentaries, podcasts, endless scrolls of opinion and outrage. Yet we often feel underwhelmed. Scarcity once sharpened our appreciation; abundance now diffuses it.
One movie I watched last week was Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, reminded me how addiction to content, social media, and even AI can distort our attention and future.
Recently, Yuval Noah Harari remarked that people who are truly thinking are intentionally detaching from the media noise. They remove themselves from constant online word wars. He is right. We cannot think clearly in chaos engineered for our attention. We end up spending time on what is amplified, not on what truly matters to our lives or careers.
Notifications Are Not the Only Addiction
I have turned off all notifications on my phone. Yet I still open it constantly. Silence does not automatically create discipline. Addiction adapts. It finds new forms. True control comes from intention, not just settings.
This is not a story of any dramatic transformation. It is a story of small adjustments. Morning structure. Evening intention. Slower listening. Selective attention. I am not trying to eliminate my struggles. I am trying to manage them. And perhaps that is enough.
“The goal is manageability, not perfection.”
If there is one question I am sitting with, it is this: What small structural change could improve my day without me having to overhaul my entire life?
Penpositive 
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