Interesting how being rated lead her to become better in every way but she still hates it.
I have a friend. He’s obsessed with self improvement. And he is good at it. He reads exhaustively about the most effective business people because he says it’s necessary to learn their habits. He gets up at 5:00am every day because sleeping in is wasting time you could spend improving yourself. His weekends are full of planning exercises for how he can most effectively use his week ahead.
He makes good money, is in great shape, has great social connections, etc. but he is deeply unhappy. Because to feel the constant need to improve means you also feel a constant sense of not being good enough.
I think in the context of this story, and really life in general, the only person whose acceptance matters is your own. To be happy with your life, with how you think and how you spend your time, with who you are and who you keep company with.
GF: She shrugged. “I like being real with myself about where I’m at. So I do those sheets. I’m sorry you saw it. (...)
Author: I told her I was sorry she needed that. Then I kissed her cheek like the moon kisses the sun at the end of an eclipse. Then I left. Then I was gone.
Me: Sucks being the girlfriend with ADHD and/or on the spectrum.
What's the moral here? All I can see is, "never ever let others learn of your coping mechanisms - they won't understand".
My honed-over-16-years org-mode config ensures that this would be unlikely, and someone who does figure out how to navigate my notes and journal entries probably wouldn’t judge too hard :)
Less glib, that is a really difficult topic to navigate. Post-diagnosis (at age 36) I tried to be pretty open with the people I love and care about and discovered that many of them were carrying around their own diagnoses in secret. Others didn’t know how to react. No one reacted particularly poorly.
I am blessed with a partner who is almost certainly somewhere on the neurodiverse spectrum in some way (never officially diagnosed) and both her and my families are chock full of various ADHD and Autism diagnoses. In a lot of ways I’m almost certain that that’s why our relationship worked out when past relationships hadn’t; things that I thought were perfectly normal behaviour were often deal-breakers to past partners.
Perhaps the moral of the story is "other people exist and have agency". Sure, you've got coping mechanisms, but if they're emotionally destructive to other people then you might need better coping mechanisms that aren't awful. Maybe you could use the spreadsheet for potential birthday presents and favourite foods instead of deciding to string your partner along but eventually leave.
Or perhaps it's "you're not always the centre of the story". Sometimes the story is about the other person being a complete weirdo. Your chill, or lack thereof, is less important than finding out your partner wants to leave you.
Or perhaps it's "self-improvement gets you out of bad situations". Through the process of getting to 10, the protagonist met her future girlfriend and learned to leave her current emotionally hurtful one in a kinder way.
But is it wrong for the girlfriend to have had those feeling? I don't think so. We don't get to know, as readers, whether their relationship was supposed to have been serious. So maybe the girlfriend was leading the narrator on, or maybe it was just casual.
I also don't think it was wrong for the girlfriend to keep an unfiltered journal, if the purpose of the sheet was just working through her thoughts.
On the other hand, the narrator encounters the document accidentally. She probably should have respected the girlfriend's privacy, but who among us wouldn't have read further? It's not wrong for her to feel devastated.
The basic set up of the story is a conflict between two people, who both have taken understandable actions up to that point. It feels uncomfortable to us, because we want to be able to identify the good guy and bad guy here, but it's not so easy. This desire is deeply rooted in Western culture, or maybe even in our neurology as a species.
I think it's better to assume that most people mean well, but sometimes make suboptimal decisions based on their circumstances and the path dependent development of their personality. Sometimes those decisions can be quite heinous. But for most of us, it's the little ways we unintentionally undermine ourselves and our relationships.
To me, this story is about this exact thing. The narrator goes a bit off the rails as a result of an understandable emotional trigger. Until the end, the narrator barely, if ever, questions her self-righteousness.
It would kind of be cool for the author to write the story from the girlfriend's point of view. But then again, he kind of did. The narrator essentially accepts the worldview of the girlfriend, and reorganizes her life around it. But where did the girlfriend's worldview come from? Maybe we're meant to assume the girlfriend had a similar experience, which drove her to be so top tier, at least superficially.