As a Christian, I must confess my discomfort. This essay is the surest sign of my complex faith; despite what the Bible teaches, I haven’t been able to cast my anxieties onto the Lord. In fact, I’m riddled with anxiety and fear, both rational and irrational. There is a chance that when I eventually write about Christianity and Performativity, I will be a central subject. A prospect I find compelling and narcissistic in equal measure. That said, I’ve spent much of my writing career interrogating the intersection between Christianity and the human experience. Perhaps readers will be generous enough to consider this admission a necessary addition to my oeuvre.

2026 has brought with it a wealth of blessings, all of which I attribute to God and am deeply grateful for. However, it’s here, within the dichotomy between God’s faithfulness and my own sense of scarcity, that my trepidation resides. As a chronic over-thinker and, candidly, someone diagnosed with anxiety, I’m in constant battle with my own mind. What I have in front of me, this beautiful, artfully structured life, exists alongside the countless fears my mind conjures about what could become of it.

This way of thinking is something I’ve struggled with throughout my life. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have an anxious mind, just as I can’t remember whatever terrible thing happened to make it so. I’ve since curated strategies for managing it and have been blessed with a community that supports me when things become particularly difficult. Consistent therapy is one of the strategies that keeps me grounded, though it took years, countless sessions and multiple therapists for me to recognise its value. There is something pathetically human, yet freeing, about telling an impartial stranger your deepest, darkest fears. Perhaps I’ll find a similar cathartic release in sharing this declaration with the digital abyss, or perhaps I’ll experience the crippling discomfort that comes with being vulnerable online. Who knows.

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I’m particularly precious about my own humanness. The texture of my emotions, the distinct ways they make themselves felt inside this incredibly human, malleable body. Learning to name and explain these feelings without shame or self-judgement has taken the better part of my life. So, when I speak of fear, more specifically, anxiety, I’m not referring to the quality of my life as it appears from the outside. I’m talking about feeling afraid. Am I allowed to admit that?

There was a time when being a Christian stood in opposition to this. Innumerable nights spent questioning my spiritual shortcomings. Constant compunction for my inability to just not feel. The sensation of failing to be even in my own body. A less emotionally intelligible time, and a less emotionally intelligent version of me, I admit. Where I stand (or sit, writing this) today, this fear is the very reason I continually return to God. Within this fear, I’ve recognised more and more of my own humanity, and within that, I’ve discovered more and more of God.

Fear is another feeling burdened by moral judgement. The same goes for sadness, lust, jealousy, resentment and the long list of emotions that Christians often deny in an effort to maintain righteousness. I’ve felt them all, some more than others, and each one carries its own unease. Just last week, I experienced such sadness that it compressed my chest and made my ankles physically hurt. As a human being, even one as deconstructed as myself, I wanted to escape my own form. I haven’t felt that uncomfortable in such a long time, and the fact that everything was going right made it all the more unbearable.

By the time I brought it to God, I was a resigned mess, blubbering in prayer. In that moment, consumed by feeling and confronted by the intensity of my own powerlessness, I felt tragically human. And that’s just how it is. I’m flesh and blood, subject to the whims of life and a forever-shifting hormone cycle, and God is, well... God. Being alive, being afraid, simply being, it makes our dynamic incredibly clear.

God is the ultimate strategist btw.

Using myself as an example, I can confirm that self-awareness extends far beyond having a favourite colour or being able to name an attachment style. It’s recognising the ugliest parts of yourself and still, somehow, finding beauty in what is reflected back. This isn't the easiest of tasks, and not everyone is given the conditions to undertake it. I am a woman living in the West, and by virtue of those two facts, I've been granted far more permission to explore and articulate my emotional life than many people ever will. That doesn’t mean every woman in the West chooses to know herself, only that many of us have at least been invited to.

I’ve found myself thinking about that invitation in relation to men. More specifically, wondering how many have ever been given it. Within the confines of patriarchy, male emotional restraint became the price of admission to masculinity, and depth became something to compress. Perhaps that's why I've become so interested in the stories we're taught about one another, particularly the ones passed down within heterosexual relationships. Men are often told that women are difficult to understand, while women bequeath a very different narrative altogether: we're told that men are simple.

Recently, I've found myself measuring this claim of male simplicity against my own complexity. Truthfully, age and self-understanding have made it harder to believe that men don't possess the same layers I've had the privilege to uncover. The phrase "men are simple" is one I've heard throughout my life. Like many women, I absorbed it without much resistance. I'm almost ashamed to admit that now.
It embedded itself into my understanding of men, and shaped how I moved through relationship with them. It wasn't until much later that I began to question what the phrase was actually doing. Rather than helping me understand men, it often seemed to help me explain away the disappointments I experienced at their hands.

The asymmetry bothered me more than I expected. Why had women become synonymous with emotional complexity while men had become synonymous with emotional simplicity? The more interesting question, I realised, was who benefits from believing that. Around two months ago, I encountered Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and found language for something I had already begun to suspect. Butler argues that gender is less an innate identity than a series of repeated performances that eventually come to feel natural. If that's true, then possibly what we recognise as masculinity is not personality at all, but the performance itself.

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The stories I've been told about boys and men strike me for how often they revolve around responsibility rather than personhood. The emphasis has almost always been on what a man is expected to do, not who he is beneath it all. Because of these narratives, I spent much of my life unable to acknowledge men beyond their relationship to me as a woman. I would go as far as to admit that I didn’t always see them as people in their own right.

Growing up, I was certain that I wanted to marry a man who could provide for and protect me. This wasn't something I'd stopped to examine until I developed the language to interrogate it much later in life. Men were the white knights destined to save us, and women, in turn, learned to wait for saving. The longer I've thought about these roles and performed them, the more I've realised that I'm not a woman who needs or wants to be saved. This is where Butler's theory feels most tangible to me. Perhaps the problem with gendered performance is not only that we become trapped inside the parts assigned to us, but that we begin relating to the performance as though it were the person.

Interrogating gender eventually became an interrogation of myself. Questioning the roles I adopted meant recognising the part I'd cast men in. I had spent years evaluating them according to function before I had ever considered who they were beneath it. If I no longer needed a provider or a protector, then who exactly were men to me? For the first time, I tried to answer without relying on the language of traditional gender. It should have been simple, but it wasn't. Not because I still doubted that men were people in their own right, but because so much of what I'd learned about them had been filtered through warning or expectation. I knew the stories women told one another about what men could do to us; in some cases, I'd experienced it firsthand. I knew the harm men had caused. Yet none of that explained the contradiction I kept returning to. If men are supposedly so simple, why do they remain so difficult to understand?

In accepting the invitation to know myself as a person first, I’ve come to acknowledge my own complicated makeup. Through therapy, a deconstructed Christian faith, and a deeper understanding of the history of female liberation, I've gradually come to see myself as more than the ideas I'd accepted about who I should be. What that looks like is remarkably different from what I once believed womanhood to be. This transformation has been made possible partly by circumstance, but also by the deliberate effort I’ve poured into knowing myself more deeply. In the process, I discovered that there are many worlds turning on their axes within me, each shaping the person I present to others. The more I came to understand my own contradictions and, less comfortably, my own sinister capabilities, the less willing I became to accept simple explanations for anyone else. If I could contain such depth, couldn’t others? Men included.

I’ve realised that many of the men I'd encountered acknowledged their own idiosyncrasies and even recognised that they stood in direct contrast to the version of masculinity they'd been taught to embody. Yet very few seemed willing, or even able, to follow that recognition any further. That struck me because it was the very invitation that had transformed my own life. I can concede that women, collectively, have had far more practice questioning the narratives society hands us. Whether that's because we've had to claw ourselves out of greater oppression, I'm still undecided. What seems clearer to me is that many men don't yet recognise that the very structures that have constrained women have also constrained them.

The more I reflected on this, the less I believed that men lacked depth. Instead, I began to wonder whether they had simply been oversimplified to such an extent that any meaningful interrogation of themselves would require tools they had never heard of, much less knew how to use. If patriarchy has long framed men as finished, perhaps many have never been encouraged to believe there was anything more to uncover. Women, on the other hand, have spent generations questioning what it means to be women, partly because we have had to. I struggle to think of an equivalent reckoning that has asked men to question what it means to be men. Yet, in speaking with men, and in witnessing the despair that surfaces through loneliness, rising suicide rates, and communities like the incel movement, it's difficult to believe that nothing is amiss. Rather than confirming male simplicity, these realities make me suspect the opposite.

I think of the last man I dated, someone I cared for deeply. One day, without warning, he admitted that he had never really liked the women he’d chosen. He’d chosen them, he said, because it was what he believed a man was supposed to do; not out of desire, or even genuine feeling, but from a sense of obligation. More startling still, he confessed that he wasn’t sure he’d ever really known himself outside that version of masculinity. I remember sitting opposite him, trying to reconcile the conversation we were having with the man I thought I’d known. What scared me wasn’t what he’d said about his past relationships. It was the possibility that someone could spend years living according to a narrative without ever asking whether it reflected who they truly were. He had spent more than two years with one woman before me. The idea that a performance could be sustained for so long forced me to confront the possibility that our relationship had not only been experienced differently, but that we had been relating to ourselves in fundamentally different ways.

In truth, that conversation has remained with me. It is one of the few encounters with a man that has left me genuinely afraid.

This fear pushed me further into research and interrogation. bell hooks examines this idea in The Will to Change. She argues that reducing men to labels, particularly that of oppressor, leaves us unable to “give voice to the gaps in our understanding or to talk about maleness in complex ways.” For years, men existed within binary categories for me. If he wasn't a family member, he was the man I related to through traditional romantic expectations; if he was neither, he was nothing. In seeing myself more clearly, I was forced to see others in the same way. For me, that meant viewing men through a more human lens: as people who existed alongside me, both free and bound, or more accurately, somewhere between the two.

I wish I could confidently claim that this led to a deeper understanding of men, or of how to connect with them. Instead, it left me with a greater sense of fear. In place of their oversimplification, I was confronted with their complexity, much of it suppressed by the very systems that had shaped them. Here, I have a significantly different expectation of men. Not to provide for or protect me, but to have a deeper understanding of themselves, so that they might one day meet me in this depth. In the chapter 'Wanted: Men Who Love,' bell hooks discusses the romantic desires of both heterosexual women and men. She argues that, within patriarchy and the labels it assigns, both are left dissatisfied with the way male love has been defined. What unites these experiences is that many men have themselves been denied the love of the male figures in their own lives, particularly their fathers.

“They learn to pretend that it is love. They learn how not to speak the truth about men and love. They learn to live the lie.”

After everything I’ve written, and all that I’ve read in order to write, I wonder what conclusion follows from the claims I’ve made. I was invited to know myself by the women who came before me, those who fought for women to know themselves outside patriarchal boxes, if they choose. I was invited to further depth by the literature I stumbled into from a very young age. Every decision I’ve made since has grown from the belief that there was always more of myself, and of life, to uncover. Womanhood has always presented itself to me as layered, contradictory, and expansive, even while constrained by oppression. That is the privilege I inherited. I was never sold the lie that freedom already belonged to me; I was taught that women had to fight to claim it.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for men. When you’re told that power already belongs to you, I imagine it rarely occurs to you that there is anything left to seek. Yet, from my experience of men, the very qualities they are taught to suppress in order to preserve their masculinity are the ones they seem to crave most deeply: love, vulnerability, and the freedom to know themselves beyond what they have been told a man should be. Within patriarchy, men aren’t simple; they’re oversimplified, and that is exactly what serves the system best.

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In trying to earn acceptance through perfection, I rejected myself more times than anyone else ever has. I spent most of my early to mid-twenties in and out of therapy, and during that time, all I seemed to talk about was wanting to be accepted. Perfection, or at least the perception of it, felt like the vehicle that made that acceptance more attainable.

No one rejects what’s completely flawless. Right?

It’s almost funny that this belief sat at the root of my neurosis, because I knew, intellectually, it wasn’t true. Jesus Christ is widely regarded as the most perfect human being to have walked the earth; part man, part God, and still he was rejected in the worst possible ways. But intellectual understanding can only take you so far when you’re a real person with real, complex emotions. Naming a feeling is not the same as experiencing it.

Like most people, my understanding of the world, and of myself, can be traced back to childhood, then reinforced by every experience that suggested perfection was the only way to be accepted. The message throughout my life was that being the best and having the most would cure this insatiable hunger. When you add being a Black woman into the mix, perfection begins to look less like a preference and more like a strategy. In trying to be perfect, I created the least authentic version of myself. I became deeply attached to performance, to the point where my life no longer felt like my own. I was always someone else for someone else, and no matter what I achieved, it never felt like enough.

Perfection is as much a cage as conformity. Both keep you aspiring to something or someone that isn’t real, or even aligned with who you know yourself to be. I was taught, both explicitly and implicitly, that excellence would be rewarded. That if I worked hard enough, achieved highly enough, I would arrive at a place of security, recognition, and ultimately, acceptance. However, we currently live in an economy where hard work and high attainment no longer guarantee stability, let alone fulfilment. The rules shift, the goalposts move, and still the expectation remains that if you haven’t “made it,” the failure is personal. In that way, perfectionism becomes useful. Not to us, but to the systems we exist within. It keeps us striving, self-correcting, and competing, even when the reward is unclear or unattainable. I internalised that logic early on, mistaking constant improvement for safety, and excellence for acceptance.

In 2023, I read The Perfectionism Trap by Josh Cohen, which led me to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story The Birthmark. Both works explore the origin and cost of perfectionism, and both left me unsettled in ways I didn’t expect. Cohen writes about an exceptional student who becomes so consumed by the need to produce perfect work that his natural talent becomes secondary to his anxiety. Eventually, the pressure overwhelms him, and he drops out. In The Birthmark, Hawthorne tells the story of a scientist who becomes obsessed with removing a small mark from his wife’s face, convinced it is her only flaw. In his pursuit of perfection, he destroys the very thing he loves. As Hawthorne writes, “Blinded by a meaningless imperfection and an impossible goal, Aylmer had thrown away her life and with it his chance for happiness. In trying to improve his lovely wife, he had failed to realize she had been perfect all along.” In both cases, the desire to be flawless becomes the very thing that prevents them from having what they truly want.

I would be dishonest if I said I’ve moved away from wanting to be perfect entirely. After years of conditioning, I suspect it will take just as long, if not longer, to unlearn it. During the early stages of writing my first novel, I struggled with the expectation that my first draft should also be my best. When it wasn’t, I felt like a failure. Not just in the work, but in myself. I compared myself constantly to writers I admired and to people I imagined were more disciplined, talented, and certain.

In The Perfectionism Trap, Cohen describes this kind of thinking as a form of self-laceration, “usually amplified by the belief that someone else they know—a colleague, sibling or friend—would, in their place, have mustered the necessary effort or guile to succeed.” That line stayed with me. The truth is, the lengths to which perfectionism has extended in my life are immeasurable. I’ve spent years assessing myself against other people, even when I was just as good, just in a completely different way.

Cohen also explores how perfection, in the religious sense, can be understood as a kind of blasphemy. As a baptised Christian, this is a perspective I find myself agreeing with more and more. The error of being human was never something I was meant to correct. It was the very reason Jesus Christ came. Over time, I’ve begun to recognise my attachment to perfection, and the anxiety that accompanies it, as a rejection of that belief. A refusal to accept that I am, and have always been, allowed to be imperfect.

It’s in my relationship with God that I’ve found the acceptance I once craved. An acceptance that doesn’t require performance or perfection. As it is written, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Quite imperfectly, I’m learning to understand that I am not required to be perfect to be accepted. Not in my work, nor in my relationships, or even within myself.

Ironically, life has shown me that true acceptance rarely looks like perfection. It looks like being known and, within that, being loved. I have the privilege of knowing some of the most imperfect, yet deeply good, people. Not broken or beyond repair, just human. In loving them, I’ve learned something I struggled to offer myself for years: grace. In extending that grace outward, I’ve slowly learned how to extend it inward. To sit with the parts of myself I once found unacceptable, to question the standards I inherited, and to loosen my grip on the idea that I need to be anything more than what I already am.

Being imperfect is not a failure; it is a condition of being alive. And perhaps more than that, it is a gift. It frees you from becoming something unattainable and allows you to exist as you are. I can’t remember the first time I came across John Steinbeck’s words in East of Eden, but I know they’ve stayed with me:

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”

And frankly, good is good enough.

I spent much of my late teens and early twenties in cycles of anxiety and low mood. In retrospect, those periods of poor mental health were the result of being completely unprepared for the reality of adulthood. No one teaches you the importance of fulfilment and fun during your academic career, and my immigrant family certainly didn’t teach me much about it either.

By the time I became an adult, I had turned into exactly what I thought I was supposed to be: highly intelligent, highly ambitious, and serious about absolutely everything. Looking back, I laugh at how uptight and pretentious I believed I had to be. Still, I’m not sure I would change much. While I hit an abrupt and destabilising burnout at twenty-five, I also achieved a great deal during that time. It proved to me that I’m capable of far more than I once believed.

Burnout, however, forced me to confront something uncomfortable: a life without fun is honestly a waste. At twenty-five, my life looked very different from how it does now. According to society’s standards, I had more, yet I was deeply miserable. That era, what I now call my quarter-life crisis, was the most confused I’ve ever been. I had just left the publishing industry and spent many days crying in bed, anxious and feeling extremely sorry for myself. I had worked so hard for a life that turned out to be unfulfilling and entirely void of fun. All I did was work. And when I wasn’t working, I was hustling.

Fun wasn’t even on my radar. In the years that followed, I struggled to detach myself from productivity long enough to actually enjoy the life I was building. I’m not entirely sure when the tides changed, but somewhere between twenty-six and twenty-nine I went from hardly having any fun to becoming the embodiment of it.

You might ask what embodying fun actually looks like. As I’ve come to understand it, fun is less of a look and more of a feeling. It isn’t about having a hundred interesting hobbies, taking the fanciest trips, or curating the perfect lifestyle. Though I’m fortunate enough to experience some of those things, the fun in my life comes from the simple fact that I wake up as myself, and everything I do, even the most mundane tasks, feels aligned with the life I’m supposed to be living.

If you've been subscribed for some time, you'll know that I've always wanted to be a writer and that I've always loved reading. Now, I get to do both for a living. The life I've built reflects the things I hold closest to my heart, but it is also shaped by the things I've chosen to reject. I grew up in a very chaotic household, and quite early on I decided I didn't want the life I built to mirror the things that trigger my nervous system.

The world can be unkind, and people who are products of it even more so. Still, I’ve been fortunate enough to build a life filled with love, kindness, and consideration. Whenever I encounter things that go against that, I try to filter them out. I think this is the first step to living a fun life. Everything flows from there.

A couple of years ago, I decided to start my own Christmas tradition. I now host an annual Christmas party. One of the few perks of adulthood is freedom, and making fun, even indulgent choices (results may vary) should be just as important as the sensible ones we make for futures that may never come. It started as a small idea: a few friends, too much food, music playing far too loudly in my kitchen. Over time it became something bigger. A reminder that fun rarely appears on its own. You have to build it.

Writing these Substacks has become another version of that for me. They are small acts of joy and reflection, moments where I pause long enough to notice the life I’m living rather than rushing through it. And the best thing? I get to write them in my very own library.

Of course, fun looks different for everyone. The life I’ve built is my version of it, shaped by what I love, what I’ve survived, and what I’ve chosen to protect. Making a fun life is often about the details. The big moments come with an intense dopamine high, but there is always a comedown. When you’re finally back in reality, the life you’ve built should still feel good. Not louder or more exciting, just fun in its own way.

That said, I’m aware that having fun is a privilege, and I don’t take it for granted. The fact that I can step off the conventional path and prioritise enjoyment has a lot to do with luck, geography, resources, and timing. For many people, fun isn’t even an option. In fact, it is probably not even a thought.

There are many questions that come to mind in these exchanges, but asking whether someone is single, and why, if they are, rarely makes the list. I know better than to flatten a conversation that way. In my mind, there are countless things that make a person interesting aside from their relationship status. And if this isn’t the case, I’d advise they work on being less so.

But this courtesy isn’t always extended to me.

The question comes up everywhere. At work events, dinner parties, the gym, even casual run-ins at the coffee shop. It doesn’t matter that I’ve just held an engaging conversation or demonstrated that my life is full and purposeful. Somehow, that only makes my singleness more perplexing. You’re so [insert compliment here], why are you single? And just like that, the ease dissolves. I’m no longer a person having a conversation. I’m someone who needs to explain herself.

It took me a while to understand what was really happening in these moments. The question isn’t about my relationship status; it’s about being evaluated in public. About the expectation, placed most heavily on women, that our lives should be immediately legible. That we should be easy to understand, easy to place, easy to justify. Why are you single? becomes a shorthand for that impulse, a way of checking whether my life makes sense according to someone else’s framework.

If I were humble, I’d lie and say I don’t know why this question follows me. But I’ve spent much of my time being single building a fabulous and interesting life. I’m also an attractive woman with a lot going for herself. I understand why the idea of me being single might be puzzling. It confused me for years, too. However, in a bid not to be defined by an area of life I cannot control, I’ve applied myself to the parts that I can.

I haven’t rejected romantic relationships. I’m a hopeless romantic, actually, waiting to meet someone worth my time. I understand how deeply love and partnership are woven into the human experience. But in the absence of it, I’ve chosen to invest in my singleness as how I navigate it now will shape the kind of relationship I eventually enter.

I wish I could say I’ve always been this cool, the girl who never stressed about boys or boyfriends. But as women, we’re socialised to make our proximity to men central to our identity. It’s taken years of unlearning those expectations and actually getting to know myself to arrive here. Even now, I still have moments of despair over the absence of romantic love in my life. In embracing my singleness, I’ve categorically rejected something that’s hardwired into most of us. And as a chronically-overthinking human being, I’ve often questioned whether that makes me less, or more, desirable.

I’ve been asked why I’m single more times than I can count. Despite my familiarity with the question, I’m still struck by how deeply ashamed it can make me feel about a life I’m otherwise unashamedly in love with. I’ve come to the conclusion that being asked why I’m single is worse than being single itself, because it forces me to confront a perceived lack, one that will only resolve itself when luck, timing, and another human being aligned.

When I was younger, I didn’t understand the complications of finding love or sustaining a long-lasting, meaningful relationship. I knew these things only as they were portrayed in films and other forms of art. I never considered that they might be difficult to attain. I’ve had my share of failed relationships. If they’ve taught me anything, it’s that the relationship you have with yourself is the most important one you’ll ever have.

Because finding love is a matter of luck and timing, but finding yourself is an achievement that requires a level of skill that many don’t possess. And I’ve found me.

Singleness has become my time to know myself deeply and pursue every wild dream I’ve ever had. That’s why I love it so much. I’m showing myself the dedication that someone else, when the time is right, will need to show me too. And when that time comes, I’ll know how to identify what is and isn’t for me.

There was a time when being asked why I was single made me scramble for an explanation. Sitting here now, writing this, all I feel is the urge to shrug. I’m single because I’m single. As a true conversationalist, I’ve learned how to pivot the question into something worth discussing. And when people follow up with, I can’t believe you’re single, you’re great, I now respond simply: I know. And one day, someone special will see that too.

Over time, though, I’ve come to understand the strange neurological mechanics of my part-anxious, part-anal, part-chaotic brain. Truth be told, I cannot do more than one thing at once, simply because I’d execute it poorly. And as a recovering perfectionist, doing anything poorly does nothing for my self-esteem, even if it technically counts as exposure therapy.

I’m not entirely sure when I started vision boarding, but the safest bet is sometime in 2020, when we were all scrambling for purpose in an otherwise bleak reality. Since then, I’ve created quite a few; elaborate, expressive, visual manifestations of the life I imagined myself living in the possible near future. Hours — sometimes days — spent collating images of absolutely everything I wanted over the course of what I am certain will be a long and interesting life. And at the end of every vision board session, I’d do what I suspect many others have done: make it my screensaver, or, if you’re a little extra like me, get it professionally printed and hung above my bed.

For a long time, the thrill of vision boarding worked. I loved waking up and staring at my pending dream life. Future Hena J. Bryan was, frankly, exceptional. Not in reality, of course, but in theory and visual manifestation. She lived well, had the credentials, and was booked, busy, and fulfilled.

One of my lifelong dreams is to be an author. I know many Substackers probably say this, but I deeply mean it. I’ve dedicated most of my life to literature, both as an art form and as a career. It has shown up everywhere: in teenage blogs (shoutout to youngblackfemininity.com), writing competitions, an English and American Literature degree, a devastating early career at a top-five publisher, an independent publishing venture, and hundreds — truly hundreds — of books read.

So naturally, authorship made its way onto every vision board I created. An image of a publishing deal. The International Booker Prize logo. A cut-out of Carrie Bradshaw running through New York, laptop in hand. No Mr Big, thanks.

These images appeared on my 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 vision boards. Each year, they were slightly rearranged, but always slotted somewhere between finding love and getting married, travelling the world, clearing my debt, achieving my dream body and glass skin, rewiring my nervous system, buying a house, working a high-paying job in an intense, challenging industry, and becoming a better Christian.

The list went on, and on, and on. My entire imagined life compressed into a single year’s worth of productivity, discipline, and, if we’re being honest, divine favour.

The fantasy collapsed when I sat down to write my first novel.

As someone who is terrible at multitasking, my writing process required self-isolation, slowness, and sitting with time in a way that rejected capitalist standards. Before that, I lived a life of compulsory busyness. It didn’t matter that I was burnt out, chronically anxious, and deeply misaligned. Doing everything at once, even if poorly, made me feel like I was the woman I’d manifested. Well, almost.

I won’t detail everything I had to give up to write my book. If I were to, you’d be reading a very long, possibly manic essay. But imagine this: one day, you’re doing several things at once. According to your vision board, you’re on track. The glass skin is glassing, but only when work isn’t completely draining you, which is rare. The body is shaping up, but your weight fluctuates constantly, responding to cycles of anxiety and low mood. You’re able to save and spend as you please, but life feels strangely hollow. You haven’t met the love of your life yet, but that’s not your fault, the crush economy has simply plummeted. Life isn’t joyful, exactly, but you’re alive. And in a strange way, that passes for living. Now imagine choosing to pursue something that makes you feel full, but that demands your best efforts, full attention, and a great deal of time. Suddenly, you have nothing left to give the other things.

In theory, you should feel peaceful as you chase a dream. Instead, I felt dread as that dream pulled me in a completely different direction. For me, everything shifted. To complete this one meaningful thing, I had to choose between it and almost everything else.

Frankly, this essay isn’t about writing a novel specifically. It’s about the emotional, mental, and financial cost of doing deep work. Something that vision boards don’t account for. They operate on the logic of abundance: you can have everything, all at once, in a single year, if you just work hard enough. But meaningful work operates on a different timeline.

As Wes Kao writes:

Everything takes longer than you think.

The problem isn’t that you’re not working fast enough — it’s that your expectations were never realistic to begin with.

Why does this matter? Because every day, we have to estimate how long things will take. Tasks, errands, projects, etc.

Especially if you’re doing something new, give yourself more time to figure it out.

…

Build in time to fix the things you didn’t even know you had to worry about until they happened.

When you adjust your own expectations about how long work actually takes, you can make more realistic plans.

And when you have more realistic plans, you’ll be less stressed in all areas of life.

Learning that some things — often the best ones — take time was deeply humbling. I spent two years writing my book, three if you count the year I spent saying “I’m writing a book” while doing everything but that. To get to where I am now — polishing my draft, represented by a reputable literary agency, on the cusp of submission — I had to turn my back on my vision board and everything on it.

Despite how proud I am of chasing this dream, every time I glance at my last vision board, I feel anxious about everything else I haven’t done. Towards the end of 2024, I told a friend that my vision board was making me feel behind. Unsurprisingly, she felt the same. By the time 2025 rolled around, I decided to unsubscribe from vision boards altogether and opt for something more realistic.

Time.

Around the same period, as my relationship with God deepened, I became obsessed with books about Christianity. One of them was The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, a book I chose when I realised how much I resented my vision board. I wasn’t moving fast enough. I was stuck doing one thing. And although it was meaningful, it made me feel terrible about everything else.

Comer writes about stepping away from building a megachurch to pursue slower, quieter ministry. His work reframed my thinking. Yes, writing a book meant there were many things I couldn’t do. However, that didn’t mean they would never happen, only that they would happen later. A concept yearly vision boards simply cannot compute.

As I end this piece, I want to be clear: vision boarding isn’t bad. Had I not chosen to chase this particular dream, perhaps I’d still be using them. But yearly vision boards can set us up for disappointment, because the most meaningful things take time. And time is the one thing vision boards rarely allow for.

I took down the vision board that hung over my bed at the end of 2024. In its place are two gaping holes in the wall that still make me want to scream. I’ll get them filled eventually, but there’s no rush. I’m learning to do one thing at a time, and to do each thing as well as I can. And despite everything I didn’t achieve in 2024 and 2025, I’ve almost finished editing a novel that I’m beyond proud of. Yes, partly because it’s well-written, but mostly because it taught me that vision boards don't account for time.

Only the work does.