I've done all of the above. I did picture updates constantly, I kept weekly measurements, I kept a journal constantly, and I did videos of myself constantly.
The journal was a great help. It let me get my thoughts on paper. And now I'm definitely using those journal entries to look back on, to see how far I've come from when I started, to see how I felt at various stages of transition, what my fears were, what my hopes were, etc. It wasn't much of a help during transition, but post-transition I am SO glad that I have it.
Measurements weren't much help at all. I've lost so much weight during transition that I can't even tell whether they became more feminine or not because each one's shrunk by like 5".
Videos are my absolute favorite thing that I did. Because they capture, in addition to your appearance completely unaltered by filters and whatnot, EVERY aspect of you at a given point... your voice, your mannerisms, your confidence level at the time, what you're thinking about, and your raw emotional state completely unfiltered by your mind. It was my videos that made me realize just how far I've come. One of the odd things about transition is just how quickly you forget what you used to be like. At the 2-year mark, I decided to go back and re-watch the video of myself that I made pre-hormones. And while I still had old pictures, they have NOTHING on an old video. Because I got to see what I used to look like in addition to what I used to sound like, my old mannerisms, and there's just something so much more real, so much more "this is an actual person" about a video than a still picture. And wow, it was MIND-BLOWING to think "this used to be me." Because I didn't recognize ANY of it. I seriously felt like I was watching a video of a different person. I just couldn't believe that that person used to be me.
Mid-transition videos were also a big thing, because it's almost like I can see myself slowly blossoming with each video... going from talking about myself in a nervous voice, so scared, so held back, to seeing my true self emerge more and more and more with every single video... becoming more open personality-wise, more relaxed, more confident, and it's truly inspiring to watch.
Frankly, I feel like the chronicles I've kept are the thing that's helped me accept myself the most. Because it's so easy to feel like nothing's changed at all when you have no record of what you used to be like, because the changes are so slow and so gradual that you don't even notice them, to you you're still just going about life as the same person. But when you can look back and see that old self unedited, unaltered by those mental narrative filters, there is no denying anymore that you have changed... a lot.
