Journalled on Tuesday, 7 April 2026 | Santo Cristo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: 28 degrees, hot, sunny, but slightly overcast.

Today is proving to be productive; however, something has caught my attention regarding my ex and time.

Over the past two days, I have been drafting blog posts and preparing them for publication at any time. I had had 30 drafted posts that could be posted at any time, basically a bank of posts, and then it decreased to 20 due to posting. In the last couple of days, I have been focusing on bringing it back up to almost 30 again.

The main foundation of my blog posts is drawn from my journal entries. Until recently, I was organising them chronologically by date, transferring and converting journal entries into blog posts, but then I decided to select entries at random from my journals over the past few years.

At this very moment, I have seven journal notebooks, from which I select a journal entry on a rotational basis, transcribe it into Microsoft Word, edit it, and then finally draft it into a blog post.

Once that journal entry has been transcribed and transferred to the blog, that journal notebook goes to the bottom of the pile of journals. Then I repeat the procedure with the next journal book on top, and so on.

As I mentioned earlier, I have only recently adopted this process, and, like any small change, I implemented it to improve the blog and make it more engaging for its readers, if anybody is really reading them or if they are being helpful to anyone in any way or form.

However, I have realised through this new process how much my ex has been so present in my life, both directly and indirectly, over the past two years since we met in November 2023 and started dating in March 2024.

It has truly impressed and even shocked me to realise how much she has been part of my life. Even when we were not together, separated, or hadn’t spoken for quite some time, she had always remained in my mind, my thoughts, and my journal entries 24/7.

It is as if she has been part of my life all this time; I had thought about her constantly, and that is a lot of energy!

And this is what has stunned me even more: the amount of energy I have spent, even wasted, on her and our late relationship that didn’t work.

When I pick up one of my journals and browse through it to select an entry for a blog post, it is more than difficult, nearly impossible to find an entry without her name mentioned, written about, or read about my heart being bled out, the impossibility of the situation, revealing my dissatisfaction with what I wanted but was never able to attain.

Pursuing an impossible goal for which I am solely responsible!

I never saw nor imagined this until now. In hindsight, even though I believe I have a good memory for details over a short period, and over a longer, more detailed timescale, it is impossible to grasp how deeply involved I was with this woman. Maybe in a way, she was involved with me, but even so, it didn’t work out.

I don’t know

Only now, by rereading and, to some extent, reliving part of what I had experienced in the past, can I see how important she was to me.

Many times, men downplay their feelings, emotions, and even their hurt because it is what is expected from us, especially by the society and culture we live in. We often suppress, undervalue and unappreciate or even hide our feelings and thoughts because we have been told, brainwashed, and convinced that they are unimportant and that is what we should do.

What also caught my attention, given the time frame, intensity, and even obsession, was asking myself whether I had been insisting on something that had been broken for the past two years, since the start, and I didn’t want to see or read the signs. Maybe I have, and why?

Is it because we see and hold on to a future possibility, a projection, like holding a little piece of gold in our hands, thinking it is all we need to be happy? Or is it because of my ego that I accepted the waste, the waste of time and energy, insisting on something that had been broken from the beginning and that included my time? And if so, how crazy would that be?

All I know is that I am surprised by how important she had been to me over the past two years. If we had been together until today in a normal, healthy relationship, it would have been truly wonderful, but unfortunately, we are not, and far from it. Because of that, it feels like a complete waste of two years.

In bed by 10 p.m.