> Something that helped was re-connecting with the past version of myself by going through some truly ancient computer backups. To some extent it put me back in

> Something that helped was re-connecting with the past version of myself by going through some truly ancient computer backups. To some extent it put me back into my prior mindset, and so now at least I’m doing things explicitly because I want to and find doing them enjoyable. Heh, this is so poignant for me, but for me, it's going back and reading old journals/writings - I write a lot, so much that most people don't want to read it all, so a lot of it when I was younger went into journals. One entry in particular was after I had just lost my father, in front of my eyes, in kind of a violent/traumatic way - I was in my early early 20's and had no idea what I had been experiencing was some kind of PTSD, but knew enough to know something weird was happening to me, so I wrote everything down in a little journal by hand. Recently, in a fit of frustration, I picked it up (this is now 15 or so years ago) and I found an entry I had forgotten about - a wildly delusional (at that time, if you had known me, you would have considered it delusional) passage where I aspired to lift myself out of my situation and said I wanted to study CS, or as I put it that time, "something with computers," and even named my dream university I ended up transferring to in the end. This was many years before any of it ended up becoming reality, and I became proud of my past self, and I felt that connection a little bit of what you are describing. Until I read that I had no idea that where I ended up was exactly where I intended, I had lost sight of that.