Line up your birthday photos and you can watch a face change one year at a time. Nobody notices it while they’re living it.

Change is invisible at the speed it actually happens. Day to day you look exactly the same to yourself, and the difference only appears when two points a few years apart get set side by side. The same blindness covers improvement, since you cannot feel yourself getting better at something while you are in the middle of it.

Build a crude record of yourself: one photo a year on the same date, or a recording of you playing or talking once a season. In three years that small archive will tell you things about your own progress that memory simply cannot.