What is Personal Growth?

So what is personal growth?

I'm 631 posts and 5 years into this blog plus 20 years (this year) of journaling, spending a fair amount of time looking into my life and the actions around my life. Am I any better or different for having done so?

I don't know. I certainly don't feel like it - more that whatever changes have occurred have taken place as a result of circumstances I've been rather than some conscious choice to change or improve.

It hounds me a bit because my pits and flaws and failures only seem to become more self evident to me, while the changes and improvements made seem few and far between and hardly noticeable at all. Any effort to try more almost feels doomed to the same sense of failure.

Which is why I bother to ask the question at all: What is personal growth? What are the signposts, the roadmarks, that indicate that progress is truly being made? Am I truly as stagnant as I feel, or is there evidence that such growth has occurred, even if it is not visible to me?

Do I have too great a hope for personal growth or change? Perhaps I'm laboring under the illusion that it will be like high school or college, where change was swift and felt as such. Perhaps the very nature of change is more subtle as one grows older, not that it is not present.

I'm not sure - all I know is that for all my jottings, I should feel, I don't know, different.