Write yourself a few years from now, in the life where things went as well as they could - not a fantasy, the reasonable best. It is the most studied exercise in positive writing, and the one whose benefit is best established. The road only appears once the destination has been written.
This is the most tested exercise in the whole literature of positive writing: imagine yourself at a point ahead - a year, five years - in the life where things went as well as they could, and write it in detail. The studies repeat the same quiet finding: the people who write this see hope rise and self-criticism fall. Not because wishing works, but because of what the writing turns towards, which is the destination.
The rule in this theme is honesty and realism, and detail in the telling: describe a particular morning and a particular day that you imagine, rather than only saying that you are well. As if you were writing a story about yourself in the future.
This may look like too much optimism, but in truth we carry inside us a great many dark, sad, bad pictures of ourselves in the future. We are seized by anxiety and by severe fear of terrible things that never happened - so why not give a few minutes to the opposite direction?
For instance
A Tuesday in October 2029. I wake in the flat above the bakery, walk twenty minutes to a practice where I know everyone's name, and see six patients before lunch instead of fourteen. Home by five. On Thursdays I teach one evening class and I'm still tired, but it's the good kind of tired.
Three years out: the MSc is finished, the loan is gone, and I'm the one people call when the data doesn't make sense. Mum is round the corner. Saturday mornings are the allotment, and I know the names of the people on either side of me.
Choose a point one to five years from now. Write a day from the life in which things went as well as they realistically could - through effort, and in detail. Name the work, the people, the room. Be there.
