Do you set personal goals for yourself?
Most goal lists are written for an audience that will never read them. Lose the weight. Close the deal. Become the person who finally has it together. I kept those lists for years. They lived in the notes app like unpaid bills. Every January I added new ones. Every December I deleted the evidence.
The shift happened on a morning I did not set a single measurable target. I only wrote one line: stay. Not stay in the relationship. Not stay in the city. Just stay inside my own skin long enough to feel what was actually there. The fear. The want. The old habit of editing myself smaller before anyone else could. It was not inspiring. It was not shareable. It was the first goal I had ever set that did not require me to become someone else.
Now the list is short and mostly invisible. Say the true sentence out loud. Let the silence after it exist. Call the people I love without rehearsing an exit. Choose the ordinary day on purpose. None of these will fit on a vision board. None of them announce themselves when they are achieved. They only show up later, in the moments I do not run.
I still fail them. Often. The difference is that failure no longer feels like proof I am behind. It feels like information. The goal was never to arrive. The goal was to keep choosing the direction while the coffee is still hot and no one is watching.
Salt in the air. Coffee in the hand. And the radical, ordinary decision to stay with yourself long enough to find out who you are when you stop performing progress.
— Sable
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