What I'm actually prioritising right now (an honest check-in)
Every so often I do an honest audit of where my energy is actually going versus where I say it is. This is one of those posts — less inspired, more true.
Every few months I do something I've started calling an energy audit. It's not fancy — no spreadsheet, no system, no five-step framework. Just me and my paper journal and a willingness to sit with the gap between what I say my priorities are and what my actual days look like when I zoom out and read them honestly. Like data. Like evidence of what I've actually been doing rather than what I've been intending to do.
This is one of those posts. Less polished than some. More true than most. Mid-November check-in, unrehearsed, not tidied up for consumption.
Fair warning: this one is for me as much as it's for you. I write these kinds of posts partly to make sense of things out loud, because putting something into words is genuinely how I come to understand what I actually think about it. If any of it resonates — good. If it's too specific to my particular life to be useful — also fine. This is a soft little diary, not a self-improvement programme. I'm not trying to give you a method here. I'm just being honest about what's currently true.
What I said my priorities were in September
Back in September — which feels, honestly, like a different season and almost a different person — I wrote down what I was trying to build. The list included: posting more consistently, getting better at filming, reading more deliberately, moving my body more, and what I vaguely called "working on my morning routine." That last one was doing a lot of heavy lifting as a phrase. It meant: I want to start my days better. I don't quite know how yet. I'll figure it out as I go.
The most important thing to me right now, I wrote, was consistency. Showing up even when I didn't feel like it. Building something that would still be there when motivation dipped — which I knew it would, because motivation dips for everyone and the only thing that outlasts motivation is a habit you've embedded deeply enough that not doing it feels stranger than doing it.
That felt very true in September. September has a particular energy — something renewed and clear about it, something that feels like possibility and the particular optimism of a fresh chapter. I'm always my most ambitious self in September. The list I wrote reflected that.
It's November now. Mid-November. The trees are bare and the heating is on and the mornings are dark by the time I'm awake. When I look at my actual days — the ones that have accumulated quietly while I was busy living them — the September list tells an interesting story.
Posting: genuinely more consistent than I was. Not perfect — there have been gaps, there have been weeks where life got complicated and the camera stayed on the shelf — but the trend is in the right direction and I'm not punishing myself for the gaps. Filming: slightly better, still awkward in some specific ways that I'm making my peace with. Reading: yes. September me was right to flag it as a priority and I've given it real attention this autumn and it has returned that attention many times over. Moving my body: aspirational fiction, as of this writing. Still.
And the morning routine? It has quietly, unremarkably become something. Not the thing I imagined in September — nothing like the structured, intentional, timed and optimised version I was probably picturing when I wrote the words "morning routine." Something smaller and more honest. Tea and fifteen minutes of silence before I look at anything. Most mornings I manage this. It turns out to be the most stabilising thing in my whole day, this almost embarrassingly simple practice of just being awake for a few minutes before the world starts. September me would be slightly underwhelmed by this as an achievement. Current me is genuinely grateful for it.
The goal I've quietly let go
There was something on the September list that isn't on this one. I want to name it specifically, because it represents something I've been doing that I think is worth examining: carrying a goal that wasn't actually mine.
I'd been trying to become a person who exercises consistently and energetically and who experiences genuine, intrinsic joy in physical exertion. Not for health reasons specifically — though those matter and I understand they matter — but because I'd absorbed the idea that this is what functional, thriving people do. The content I'd consumed, the routines I'd admired, the particular lifestyle aesthetic of the morning-run person, the endorphin narrative, the very specific way that exercise is discussed in the spaces I'd been inhabiting online — all of this had planted in me the conviction that I should want this. That wanting this was part of being well.
Reader, I do not want this. I like slow walks. I like stretching in the morning while listening to something nice. I like the occasional meandering wander to the market and back. I find sustained, vigorous exercise genuinely unpleasant in a way that doesn't change with effort or exposure or the motivational content I watched about it at 11pm. I've been performing a relationship with exercise that I don't actually have, to an audience that is primarily me, for reasons that have nothing to do with my actual values.
Letting go of it — actually sitting down and deciding "this is not one of my values, I've been borrowing it from somewhere else, and I'm giving it back" — produced a specific sensation I can only describe as exhale. Like something that had been held slightly too tight releasing at last. The space it vacated has been quietly, usefully occupied by things I actually care about, and the daily quiet failure of not-exercising has simply stopped happening because I've stopped expecting it of myself.
What moved to the top
The thing I didn't expect to prioritise — which has nonetheless shown up at the top of my actual days with increasing frequency and is now the thing I protect most deliberately — is reading in the afternoon.
Not morning reading, which has a productive association for me that gets complicated and effortful. Not evening reading, which competes with the end-of-day wind-down and sometimes loses. Afternoon reading. Specifically: the twenty or forty minutes between the end of the work part of the day and the start of the evening — that gap I used to fill with aimless scrolling, the anxiety-flavoured kind where you're not looking for anything in particular and not finding anything satisfying either.
I moved a book to the table beside the sofa. Just that single physical change. And now, most afternoons, when the light starts going — which in November starts going at about four, that specific amber slant that lasts about twenty minutes before going to blue and then dark — I sit in the small corner I've arranged for reading, and I read. And it has become the most sustaining habit in my week in a way I didn't predict and haven't fully explained.
I don't understand entirely why this particular thing, at this particular time of day, is what it is for me right now. But I've decided to respect the data rather than interrogate it. My actual days are telling me something. I'm listening.
The November afternoon that told me something
Last Thursday. The light was going — that particular November 4pm moment that's not quite the orange of an autumn sunset but not darkness yet either, something in between, something amber and slanted and brief. I was in the window seat with my book and the blanket over my legs and the tea on the little table beside me, still warm this time — I'd remembered to drink it, which is my measure of being present rather than distracted.
The flat was quiet. Outside I could see the tops of the trees — most of the leaves gone now, the branches in their winter architecture, honest and spare — and a stripe of the sky going the particular deep blue that a November sky achieves in those ten minutes before dark. Someone walked past on the street below with a dog; the dog stopped to investigate something at the base of the lamppost and I watched them for a moment with genuine pleasure. Small and contained and warm and specific.
I looked up from my book and thought: I am extremely content. Not happy in the heightened, something-good-happened sense. Content in the quieter, more reliable way. The sense of being exactly where I am, doing exactly what I want to be doing, in a life that feels genuinely mine rather than performed for some imagined standard of what a good life looks like.
It lasted about twelve seconds before my brain moved on to something else. But twelve seconds of genuine noticing is real. Twelve seconds of actual contentment is worth more than an hour of activity that looks right but doesn't feel like anything in particular.
The relief of being honest
The relief of being honest about what I actually want versus what I think I should want is enormous. I'd underestimated it. I'd assumed that the honest list — the things I genuinely care about, stripped of borrowed aspirations and performed priorities — would be disappointing. Smaller. Less impressive. The kind of life that doesn't make for interesting content.
But the honest list isn't smaller. It's just mine. And that turns out to make it feel enormous in a way the aspirational list never did, because the aspirational list was asking me to want things I didn't want and calling that growth.
- Fifteen minutes of morning silence, before anything else.
- Afternoon reading, most days, without guilt.
- Making things that feel true, and posting them before they feel perfect.
- Slow walks. Enough tea. The paper journal.
That's the list. That's what November's audit found at the actual top, underneath the things I'd been telling myself were the priorities.
A life designed around your actual values is lighter than one designed around imagined ones — not because it asks less, but because it asks for things you're actually willing to give.
Energy audit complete. I'll do it again in a few months, when the winter is fully settled and a different kind of honesty will be required. Thanks for reading this one — the honest check-ins are my favourite to write, which probably means they're the right ones to keep writing.