I’ve always had a thing for lists. Not the neat, colour-coded versions you’d show anyone. Mine live in pockets, glove boxes, notebooks I misplace for months — back-of-the-envelope instructions to myself. A few words, a few lines, just enough to jog the memory.

Maybe it comes from a life that’s rarely stayed still. When you spend decades moving from one postcode to the next — new communities, new roles, new expectations — you look for something that doesn’t need unpacking. Lists gave me that. A little order when everything else was shifting.

A list is supposed to tell you what to do. But more often than not, mine turned into something else entirely — a snapshot of who I was that day. The intentions, the hopes, the “right, let’s get this sorted” moments. Even the crossed-out bits say something: proof I meant well, even when life didn’t follow instructions.

Looking back, I think lists became my way of keeping track of myself. Other people have photo albums full of celebrations and milestones. I have lists of things that mattered at the time — a record of what I was trying to hold onto. They tell their own story, if you’re willing to read between the bullet points.

There’s a surprising continuity hidden in them. When everything around me changed — town, job, familiar faces — the lists kept showing up. Same handwriting. Same stubborn belief that tomorrow might just cooperate. I didn’t plan for them to become a thread through my life, but that’s what they are: a quiet line running underneath all the reinventions.

And there’s satisfaction too — a tiny spark every time something gets ticked off. In a world where control can be a rare commodity, one small box gets crossed and the balance tilts, just a little, in your favour. Ridiculous how much that can help.

Some lists stick around longer. They get rewritten again and again: the promises made, the people who matter, the places I swore I’d go back to. Those ones don’t disappear. They just change shape with time.

What’s surprised me most, reading back through all these scattered notes, is how much they actually reveal. When you’re living short-term — always on the move, always adjusting — you don’t notice patterns forming. Everything is urgent. Everything is about the next step forward.

But set the lists side by side, and a picture starts to emerge. Certain priorities that kept resurfacing. Old worries that never grew as big as they felt at the time. Reminders that I wasn’t just reacting to life — I was shaping it, quietly, through all those scribbles.

It’s strange and grounding to recognise yourself in hindsight. To see evidence of persistence hiding inside ordinary to-do lists. To realise that even when I felt completely unanchored, the person I was becoming still had a direction.

That might be what I value most about them now. They’ve given me the chance to step back and look at a longer arc — something I rarely did when I was focused on the next house, the next job, the next fresh start. The lists connect the younger version of me to the older one I’m becoming. For all the shifts and detours, there’s been a through-line after all.

A life on the move still leaves a trail — sometimes it’s just written down in bullet points