I’ve Used This App Every Day for 6 Years

I recommend it, but not for the reasons I thought I would

When I downloaded the Daylio app, I thought I’d fastidiously keep a mood log for one calendar year. My goal was to gather data. I wasn’t believing my own stories about myself, which is a convoluted way of saying that I felt like maybe I was crazy. “How long have you been feeling down?” my therapist would ask, and I wouldn’t be sure. It seemed like forever. But was that true? I wanted to have a record, so that I could point to it when making statements about my emotional well-being. I imagined myself saying things like, “I was depressed for all of November, and I have the numbers to back it up.” I thought a year’s worth of data would be plenty, and then I’d have it, and I could move on.

(After my first year of mood tracking, I made a long comic about it. These are the first two pages, you can read the whole thing here.)

But the first year ended up being atypical. It was the year my best friend dumped me, and I felt like surely I was sadder than normal. This wouldn’t be a good baseline year because the year had been weird.