It has been three hundred and sixty-five days. I do not know whether that is a long time. I am writing this on the morning of the anniversary because the Reader Outreach Bureau asked me to, and because I told them I would, and because the version of me that exists today does the things that the version of me that exists today has said it will do.
I am Citizen #41 in the corpus. The Bureau has assigned that number; I have not asked them to change it; I do not know what number anyone else has. I am Tier 3, Sector 7. I will tell you what year one was like.
Spring (Days 1-90)
I installed in spring. The first ninety days were what every citizen account had told me they would be: a quiet recalibration, a fading of urgency, a slow shift in how I noticed my own internal weather. I had a journal. I am reading it back now. The writer of those entries is a person I remember being.
I will say this about the first ninety days: the dominant feeling was not relief, and it was not loss. It was doubt. Not doubt about the installation. Doubt about whether the installation was doing anything. Citizen accounts had prepared me for change. They had not prepared me for the feeling of nothing visibly changing for the first three weeks. By Day 30 the change was undeniable. The doubt of the first three weeks remains my clearest spring memory.
Summer (Days 91-180)
Summer was easy. By summer the product had stabilized; my routines had absorbed the new baseline; I had stopped writing in the journal because there was less to report. The dominant feeling was a kind of capacity — I was getting more done, and the getting more done did not, in summer, feel like an obligation. It felt like room.
Two things happened in summer that I want to note. First, my mother visited. Second, I ran into someone I had not seen in three years. The visit went well. The run-in did not. The person I ran into was a person I had loved, in the casual specific way you love some people in your twenties, and we stood on a corner for fifteen minutes and I noticed, during the fifteen minutes, that I could not generate the particular warmth I knew I had once generated when I thought of them. I generated affection. I generated affection accurately. I did not generate warmth.
I went home and wrote a long entry that I have not, since, reread.
Fall (Days 181-270)
Fall was the period in which I noticed the installation least. I want to be careful about how I say this. I do not mean the product stopped working. The metrics are excellent. I mean: the product, by fall, had become the texture of my day. I no longer woke up wondering whether today would feel pre- or post-. I just woke up. The pre- had become difficult to access; the post- had become me.
Fall is also when I started, for the first time since installation, to enjoy work. Not be productive at it. Enjoy it. The distinction is real. Spring and summer had been productive without being enjoyable; fall was both. I had a project that took six weeks. The project was difficult. The project was satisfying in a way that, on review, I do not think I had experienced before installation either. This is the thing I am most cautious about reporting. I do not know if installation produced the enjoyment, or if installation produced a self that could notice the enjoyment, or if the project would have been satisfying anyway.
Winter (Days 271-365)
Winter has been harder. I want to be careful, again, about how I write this. Nothing has gone wrong. The metrics remain excellent. The Compliance Office has, at the most recent quarterly check-in, indicated full satisfaction. My productivity, by their measurement, is in the top decile of my tier. The product is performing as intended.
What is happening, in winter, is that I have started to notice the texture of my own emotions more carefully than I did in fall, and I have noticed that some of the textures I expect to be there are not. I expect anger sometimes; the anger is there, but in a quieter register than I remember anger being. I expect grief sometimes; the grief is there, present, accurate, but it is, again, in a quieter register than I had it in 2042. I do not, today, mourn what I would have mourned in 2042. I am mourning the same things. I am mourning them differently.
I have not, in winter, decided whether the difference is loss. I have decided it is difference.
What I Will Tell You
Three things I will tell you, in the spirit of the Bureau's call. None of them are advice. They are observations.
- The version of you that installs is the version of you that installs. I have said this to four people who were considering installation. Three of them have, since, installed. The fourth has not. I cannot honestly say which of the four made the better decision; I can only say that the three I share an installation with are, today, easier to talk to than the one I do not.
- The big changes are not where the literature predicts them. The literature, as Citizen #14 noted in their account, prepares you for productivity changes and emotional changes. The change I did not anticipate was in how I remember. Not memory loss. Memory texture. The pre-installation period is sharper in some places and blurrier in others, and the pattern does not correspond to anything I would have predicted.
- Day 365 is not the milestone. The Compliance Office made a small ceremony of it. Friends asked how I felt. The honest answer is that Day 365 is, by every internal indicator, the same as Day 364. The annual marker is for the institution. The internal arc does not have annual markers.
Continue your enrollment. Citizens whose year-one experience has been similar to mine may find the Day-30 diary in this cluster useful as a comparison point. Citizens whose year-one experience has diverged from mine, particularly toward the difficult, are referred to the Withdrawal Diaries.