The plan I made for myself six months ago and where I actually am
Six months ago I wrote down what I wanted this creative project to look like by February. February is here. Let me look at the list.
My desk lamp has been on since lunchtime. It's one of those February afternoons where the grey outside is so steady and total that you forget there was ever another kind of sky, and the lamp makes a warm circle on the desk and everything outside that circle feels slightly theoretical. I've had tea going cold beside me for the last half hour because I've been too absorbed in this to remember to drink it.
The document I'm looking at is a note I wrote to myself in mid-August. I remember writing it — the summer was winding down and I'd been creating content for about two months and I was feeling the specific mix of excitement and low-grade terror that comes from being very new at something you care about. I wanted to make a plan. Not because I naturally plan that way, but because having something to aim at felt less frightening than pure open water.
The nervousness of those early months feels both very close and very distant at the same time. I can recall exactly how it felt to post something and then close the app and not look at it for two hours because looking felt too exposing. The way I second-guessed every decision: the caption, the lighting, the choice to say the honest thing out loud at all. Change was terrifying then in a particular way — not the dramatic change but the slow accumulation of small, visible changes that meant the project was real and the person who'd started it was now accountable to it.
I called the document "by February." February is here. Let me look at the list.
What past-me wrote down
The original list is both more specific and more naive than I remembered. I'd written down numbers — a follower count I wanted to reach, a video frequency I intended to maintain, a posting rhythm that was ambitious by any reasonable standard. I'd described the kind of content I imagined making: calm and considered, visually cohesive, the sort of thing that aged well rather than riding trends. I'd written something about wanting to feel "settled" in the work by winter. Which is a strange and lovely thing to want.
Reading it back feels a little like finding a note from a younger sibling. Not naive, exactly — there's real intentionality in there. But innocent in that first-chapter way. She (past-me) had no idea what she was actually signing up for. The learning curve she was about to encounter. The weeks that would feel like dragging. The weeks that would feel like flight. She just wrote down what she wanted, which took a kind of courage I sometimes forget about.
Change can be scary, she probably knew, even as she wrote the list. She wrote it anyway. There's something in that — in the act of writing the plan at all, not as a contract with yourself but as a statement of direction, a flag planted in the possible — that I find more moving now than I did at the time. August-Sophia was brave in a quiet, unglamorous way. She didn't feel brave. She was just frightened and trying anyway, which is the only kind of bravery I know anything about.
The audit: where I matched it, where I missed it, where reality was better
The numbers. I didn't hit the follower target. I got to roughly two-thirds of it, which sounds like underperformance but actually feels fine when I sit with it honestly. The number was pulled from the air in August without any real data behind it. What I did hit was a consistency I'm genuinely proud of — I've missed very few weeks since I started this diary. That matters more to me now than the count did then.
The frequency. I posted less often than I planned. I was brutal about this for a while, treating it as failure. But I also posted better — more carefully considered, more distinctively me — than I would have if I'd kept the original pace. I traded volume for quality somewhere in October and didn't even notice I was making the trade until November. I don't regret it.
The visual coherence I wanted. This one I exceeded. The look of the content now — the particular warm light, the pace of the editing, the way the written posts feel — all of it coheres in a way I couldn't have engineered deliberately back in August. It just happened through the accumulation of small, consistent choices. Showing up with the same lamp and the same mug and the same voice, again and again.
Feeling "settled" in the work by winter. Somehow, yes. Not every day — there are still mornings when everything feels uncertain and the work feels fragile. But there's an underlying settledness that wasn't there in August. A sense that this is mine now, that it belongs to me in a way that can't be undone just because one video underperforms or one week is hard.
Settling into creative work, I've found, doesn't feel the way I thought it would. I imagined it as a kind of confidence that descended — a morning when you wake up and feel qualified rather than questionable. It doesn't happen like that. It's more like a gradual accumulation of evidence that you're still here. That you showed up last Tuesday and the Tuesday before that, and however imperfect the work, you kept going. The settledness is in the showing up, not in any single piece of it.
The surprise: something that wasn't on the list
Here's what I didn't anticipate and couldn't have: the writing. When I started this, I thought the videos were the work and the blog posts were the supporting documentation — the SEO scaffolding around the content that really mattered. I was wrong about that in a way that delights me.
The writing became its own thing. These diary entries became the place where I think most clearly, where I'm most fully myself, where the reflection actually happens rather than being performed. People write to me specifically about things I've written here and I've realised that there's an audience for this version of things — the slower, wordier, more meandering version — that I didn't know to plan for.
A few months ago when I started this diary, I thought I was just making notes alongside a video project. I'm increasingly sure the diary is the project.
The plan is never the point. The discipline of returning to it is — the habit of asking yourself where you are, what you wanted, what still fits.
What I'm adjusting for the next six months
The goals that evolved: I'm formally releasing myself from the follower number. I'm replacing it with an engagement quality measure — something less quantifiable but more honest. I want the people who read this to feel genuinely accompanied. That's the new metric, untrackable as it is.
The posting rhythm: I'm keeping what I've landed on. Less frequent than August-Sophia planned, more intentional than she could have managed. It turns out your future self is often wiser about pace than your past self wants to be.
The goal I'm letting go: I had a note in the August document about wanting to feel "professionally confident" by February, which I think meant something like not feeling like an impostor, not waiting to be found out. I'm releasing that one — not because I've achieved it but because I've stopped believing it's a destination. The uncertainty is structural. It belongs to the work. Trying to eliminate it was always the wrong project.
I've come to think that the creators who seem most confident aren't the ones who've resolved the doubt. They're the ones who've made peace with its presence. They've learned to post before it feels perfect, to offer the work before it feels finished, to exist in public while still being privately uncertain about all of it. That's the version of confidence that seems actually available to me. I'm working toward it. I think I'm getting there.
What I'm adding: I want to be more deliberate about writing the longer pieces. The ones that take a whole afternoon and a pot of tea and the lamp on and the grey February outside — those ones. They're the work I'm most proud of and I've been treating them as optional. They're not optional. They're the point.
The intimacy of sitting with past-self's hopes
There's something tender about this kind of review that I didn't expect. The document I wrote in August is a small time capsule. It has the fingerprints of who I was then — what I was worried about, what I most wanted, what I was hoping would become true.
Sitting with it on a February afternoon while the lamp makes its circle and the tea goes cold — it's not sad, exactly. It's more like meeting someone you know well and noticing how much they've grown without being aware of it. Past-Sophia didn't know what was coming. Present-Sophia got through all of it and made something in the process that she's proud of.
That feels worth recording. It feels worth sitting still with for a while before moving on to whatever the next six months will bring. Because the plan will change again — it always does — and future-Sophia is already writing her own version of the August document in her head. I hope she writes it down.
This is worth doing. Even when it doesn't look like what you planned. Especially then. 🤍