By Jane Sonnenschein · March 16, 2026

More and more, I feel that it is important to record the things that have happened to us, the thoughts we had at the time, and the questions that kept circling in our minds during a certain period of life.

Not simply because they might later become material for an essay, or because I want to leave behind some kind of “archive.” What matters more is that I have become increasingly afraid of something else: one day, when I am sixty and look back over the decades behind me, I may know that I went through a great deal, endured a great deal, and thought about many things—yet when I actually try to remember, all that remains is a vague fog. Nothing is clear enough to hold on to. Nothing can quite be put into words.

There is something deeply unsettling about that.

It would be as if you had lived for many years, and yet somehow had not fully lived them at all.

I used to feel quite often that I had nothing to write about.

My days seemed almost identical. I sat at the computer most of the time, rarely went out, and did not have much contact with other people. On the surface, life was so quiet that it almost felt monotonous. Meals, my child, housework, work, anxiety, tiredness—the same things, over and over again.

And when I finally sat down to write, I would wonder: What is there to write about?

What could possibly be worth writing down?

The pressure of everyday life felt impossible to describe. So did the numbness. Eventually, what remained was the illusion that nothing much had ever happened in my life.

But now I am beginning to see that the problem was never that life contained nothing worth writing about.

The question was whether I had learned how to notice it.

I was actually struck by this idea a long time ago.

Years ago, when I read Cognitive Awakening, there was a passage in the introduction that stayed with me. The author described a state that could be called “being asleep while awake”—a person appears to be living, going through the motions of everyday life, but for a long time has never really woken up. They do not truly understand themselves, they have little sense of how they want to live, and they rarely feel they are making choices about their own fate.

Later, two close friends of his went through major changes in their lives. When he looked back over the previous ten or twenty years of his own life, he suddenly realized that his memory of them was almost blank.

It was not that he had not lived through those years. Of course he had.

But all those hours spent scrolling through short videos, sleeping through afternoons, and passing time in casual conversation had simply flowed away like water.

Twenty years had passed, yet very little seemed to have left a clear trace.

I still remember how that passage stung when I first read it.

Because many people have probably lived through periods like that.

Today repeats yesterday. Tomorrow becomes a copy of today. One day looks much like another, and little by little, you slip into a kind of numbness.

It is not that you do not know time is passing.

You simply rarely stop to notice what that time is leaving behind in you.

That is why I can understand why so many people on Xiaohongshu (a Chinese lifestyle and social media platform often compared loosely to a mix of Instagram and Pinterest) were inspired when they saw the writer Ma Boyong talking about keeping a diary. Some of them immediately wanted to try it themselves, even if all they wrote was a simple record of everyday events.

They just wanted to leave something behind from each day.

Because a human life is not really that long.

Thirty thousand days sounds like a lot. But when we look back, so many of those days have already slipped away quietly in repetition.

We cannot change the length of our lives very much.

But perhaps we can do something about their depth and breadth.

You can live through a day attentively, or you can drift through it half-awake. On the calendar, both count as one day.

But the weight they leave inside a life can be completely different.

And that, in essence, is what recording does.

It helps us hold on, just a little, to things that would otherwise disappear.

A thought from a particular day. A question that troubled you for months. The feeling after a conversation that left you unsettled long afterward. A moment that seemed completely ordinary at the time but, years later, might turn out to have been the beginning of a turning point.

At the time, these things may seem tiny, hardly worth mentioning.

But what gives a life its texture is often not the dramatic events. It is these small, repeated, ordinary shifts that truly happened to us.

I found myself thinking about this again today because of another small thing that moved me.

Some time ago, a reader left a comment under my essay Putting the Fallen Leaves Back on the Tree: The Way of Writing I Only Learned Later.

He thanked me for what I had written and said that something in the essay had suddenly made everything click for him. He felt that he, too, might have found his own tree.

For him, the loess land where he was born and raised could become an endless source of material: the contrast between past and present, the thoughts that grew from those differences, and the way one story could echo another.

I have remembered that comment ever since.

Because when I started writing, I already knew that my essays would never be for everyone.

Not every piece needs to resonate with a large number of people.

What matters more to me is whether, at a particular moment, one person happens to come across a sentence that touches something in them and makes them stop for a moment to think about their own life.

That is enough.

There are already so many anxious people in the world. If someone finishes one of my essays feeling even slightly less panicked, even just a little, then I do not feel that I wrote it for nothing.

Later, that reader followed me and we exchanged a few messages. He suggested that we follow each other because he also writes.

So I clicked into his profile and read some of his recent work.

A few days ago, he published a new piece about his childhood on the loess plateau. He wrote about his family, the yaodong¹ where they lived, and the little dog they had at home.

The whole piece was gentle.

There was no deliberate attempt to make the reader emotional, no sense of trying too hard. It simply unfolded in a calm, unhurried way. As I read, I could feel something moving quietly through the words. Nothing rushed, and yet it was deeply touching.

One passage in particular stayed with me.

He wrote, roughly, that many memories had already begun to blur. If even the photographs were gone, it sometimes felt as though time itself had quietly stolen part of those years away.

He remembered the first half of his childhood. He remembered Lingling. He remembered the dog that had once been part of their lives.

But what happened during the later years of that dog’s life had become difficult to recall.

Perhaps he had not completely forgotten.

Perhaps some part of him simply did not want to remember.

Or perhaps those later years happened to coincide with the period when everyone became overwhelmed by school, decisions about the future, and all the things that left little room for emotion.

When I reached that part, something in me was suddenly touched.

Because in that moment, I understood that writing is not only about “expression.”

It is not only about putting your opinions into words.

Writing has another meaning that is much simpler, and at the same time much deeper:

It is a way of trying to take something back from time.

To recover memories that would otherwise blur.

To recover emotions that, years later, we may no longer know how to explain.

To recover people, events, scenes, and voices we once believed we would never forget, but which slowly fade anyway.

And it is also a way of leaving a path for our future selves—a path that might still lead us back.

I later left him a comment and told him how much I liked the quiet, unhurried way he wrote.

I said that perhaps this was one of the meanings of writing:

to leave ourselves a path we can follow when we want to look back.

And in truth, I was saying that to myself as well.

More and more, I realize how fortunate it is to find the form of expression that feels most natural to you.

Not everyone needs to write in the same way.

Not everyone needs to have powerful arguments or an intense voice.

Some people are naturally sharp. Others are quiet.

Some are good at analysis. Others are good at storytelling.

Some people can take one question apart until they have understood it completely. Others use a calm, unhurried voice to lead the reader gently back toward life itself.

Finding your own way is already a kind of arrival.

And once you find it, you begin to realize that life is not empty of things to write about.

Quite the opposite.

There is almost too much.

Even if you sit at a computer every day, even if your life feels dull, repetitive, and uneventful, once you begin to look carefully and feel things more fully, life no longer feels like an empty shell.

You begin to see that no day was entirely wasted.

A single thought can grow into an essay.

A sentence from an ordinary conversation can stay with you for a long time.

A reader’s comment can gently push you forward on a day when you are tired.

Even a long period of numbness, or a strange sense of emptiness you cannot quite explain, can itself be something worth writing down.

That is why I now want to record all of these things.

Not because I have suddenly become especially productive.

Not because I have suddenly learned how to write exceptionally well.

I simply do not want to watch my own life slip past me, section by section, without leaving anything behind.

When I am old and look back, I hope I will still be able to see what troubled me in a particular year, when I slowly began to understand certain things, the day I suddenly realized that life was not really empty of things to write about, and the tiny moment from which a particular essay began to grow.

And I hope that one day, when my daughter reads these words, she will not see only a vague figure called “Mom.”

I hope she will see a living person.

Someone who was confused, who struggled, who went numb sometimes, who was moved by things, and who slowly tried to pull herself out of that half-awake way of living.

Someone who tried to leave herself a line she could one day follow back.

Living is not only about moving forward.

Sometimes, while we are still walking ahead, it is also worth leaving a few markers behind us.

A little evidence.

A few traces that say:

I was here.

I lived like this.

That, in itself, is something precious.

And by the time I reach the end of this essay, I feel even more certain of one thing.

Why do we write?

Because memories blur. Time wears things away. And if we leave nothing behind, so many things really can begin to feel as though they never happened at all.

Writing may not be able to stop time.

But perhaps it can keep us from losing ourselves completely while time keeps pushing us forward.

It allows us, one day in the future, to turn around and still recognize the person we once were.

And through these words, to find our way back.

To leave ourselves a path to return along. 

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Notes

1. Yaodong (窑洞)
A yaodong is a traditional cave dwelling commonly found on China’s Loess Plateau, especially in parts of northern and northwestern China. Some are carved directly into hillsides, while others are built as arched structures using the same architectural form. Because the thick earth provides natural insulation, these homes stay relatively cool in summer and warm in winter. Beyond being a type of housing, yaodong are also closely connected with the landscape, family memories, and rural life of the Loess Plateau.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 写作，给自己留一条回望的路

German version: Schreiben – mir selbst einen Weg zurücklassen