Today is one of those days when I don't particularly feel good about myself.

Maybe it's just everything piling up lately. Recovery, work, the weather, and that familiar habagat anxiety that has me mentally preparing for floods every time the rain gets a little too serious. Nothing catastrophic. Just enough little things happening at once to make me feel... off.

Then something completely random happened.

A notification led me to someone's profile. I started scrolling through her posts, not really looking for anything, until somehow I ended up almost ten years back.

And there I was. She had written a post about me.

I honestly didn’t remember it. For a second, I even wondered if I was assuming too much by thinking it was about me, until I saw that I had commented on it myself. Apparently, 2017 me knew about this. 2026 me had completely forgotten.

The post was about something so small that I probably didn’t even think twice about it at the time. She had mentioned something about the food choices at work, and I brought her tinola. That was it.

Except apparently, to her, it wasn’t just tinola.

She wrote about kindness. About appreciation. About how something another person did had made her feel. And almost ten years later, there it was, still sitting on her page while I had long forgotten I’d done it.

Funny how memory works that way. We remember so many of our embarrassing moments. The stupid things we said. The decisions we wish we’d made differently. The times we weren’t as patient, kind, or good as we wanted to be. On days when we’re already not feeling particularly great about ourselves, our brains seem especially talented at finding evidence to support the case.

Meanwhile, somewhere out there, someone may be carrying a completely different memory of us.

A kindness we don’t remember giving. A moment when we showed up. Something we said that mattered more than we knew. Maybe even something as ordinary as bringing someone a container of tinola.

I’m not suddenly feeling 100% better about myself because I found an old Instagram post. Life doesn’t work quite that conveniently.

But I think I needed to see it today. Not as proof that I’m a good person. Not as a reason to pat myself on the back. Just as a reminder that perhaps we’re not always the best judges of the effect we’ve had on other people’s lives.

Sometimes the things we forget about ourselves are the very things somebody else remembers us for.

And if someone is going to remember something I unknowingly did almost ten years later, I’m just glad she remembers me this way.