your vision board is the reason you feel stuck
why aesthetic imagery won't make you become your ideal self
Dear Reader,
Did you become everything you wanted this year? Did you finally do it? Faced your fears and made your dreams come true? Crossed off all those To-Do’s?
As 2025 takes its final few breaths we’re all faced with the promises we made suspended in that naive, hopeful beginning-of-year haze with no regard for the real world. We plummet from the clouds, back to the earth below our feet, trembling at the realization that another year has passed us by.
I feel like I have been living the same year on a seemingly endless, repeating loop, like some cruel rendition of groundhog day. I crumble apart sometime around May and spend the remainder of the year helplessly trying to piece myself back together. It feels like whenever I’ve finally got the steering wheel fast in my grip it evades me, slips just out of reach again and I’m left to desperately fish around in the dark to gain back an inch of control. I look in the mirror and all I see is everything I didn’t become staring back at me.
December to January is rebirth. It’s a chance at reinvention presented with a bow on top. A clean slate, a New You.
This will be your year. So, you put on some good music. You dim the lights and you get to work. You sit there, while everybody else is asleep, plotting your rebrand, restlessly scheming and planning who you’re going to be from now on, frantically collecting motivational pictures and quotes like evidence, a detective finally about to crack the big case. Your pupils dilate, your head starts buzzing at the thought of your unlimited potential as you scour the internet for the perfect image of a salad to represent your new habit of keeping a healthy diet. It’s finally happening. Get back into working out - eat healthier - start getting up early for real - stop being on your phone so much - try acting - learn french - go on a big trip - move out - get a car - you scribble, goal after goal, page after page. You can nearly taste it on your tongue, this new life that’s headed your way. This person you are about to become so close, almost warm to the touch. It all seems so obvious all of a sudden. You are convinced of your imminent success. It’s inevitable. You will be reborn, create who you are anew again. You laugh to yourself. Why is it that you keep forgetting you can do anything, be anything—
You embody this shiny new persona for three, maybe eight weeks if you’re lucky. You’ve got a B.N.A. (brand new attitude, try to keep up). You're unstoppable. And then slowly but surely—life kicks back in. The glimmer wears off, revealing the truth of your foolish naivety. Some time has passed and you realize your reality still looks nothing like the pictures you have printed out and plastered all over your bedroom walls. The house you built for yourself was one of cardboard, leaking and breaking apart with the first rain. That perfect body, that dream apartment in the photos—it’s not you. It never will be you either because, well, it isn’t. you. It’s a bunch of strangers. You let yourself get cocooned into the false comfort of other peoples successes. Hungrily you have leeched onto other people’s realities, seeing their lives through rose colored glasses, feeding off of their wins as if they were your own. You can almost reach out and grab it, the life you see, the life that’s meant for you. But you never quite seem to grip on. Your vision board, it’s nothing but a farce.
By the time seasons change to fall you’re ripped awake of the vicarious stupor you were lulled into, realizing in cold and utter panic all the time you’ve wasted, manically picking up the pieces of the persona you left scattered, piecing them together hectically in a desperate attempt at making up for lost time.
Once winter comes back around the cycle repeats. The next will finally be your year.
I have created in my head, over and over, a million different versions of myself only to let them wither and die.
Now am I saying that making a vision board for the new year will inevitably stunt your growth and make you give up on all your goals? No. I’m sure for most people it’s entirely possible to innocently curate a vibe for the new year without ruining your own sense of accomplishment.
But ask yourself this: Is all of this aesthetic imagery really bringing you closer to the life you wish to live or merely providing an escape from your current one? Are you spending more time in other people’s realities than your own? My case against the vision board is that it’s manifestation without effect. It’s basking in the fruit of trees you’re too afraid to plant. It’s living vicariously through images of the lives of other people. You are subconsciously setting yourself up for failure by building a ridiculous and unattainable ideal for what your life should look like. How could you possibly be satisfied with your identity when it is based entirely upon images of other people? How will you ever be enough? How shall you ever compare to this perfectly posed and propped up ideal you’re presented on Pinterest? You can’t.
I have always found that when I look back at my year and back at my vision board it feels like a punch to the stomach. My accomplishments feel watered down, cheapened, lesser than. Cause yeah, sure, I did move out, but my apartment’s not as pretty as the ones in the pictures and yeah I may have managed to make some new friends, but our dates don’t look quite as fun and perfect as those on my bedroom wall, so was it all just for nothing? Why doesn’t it feel rewarding?
Because you are not a moodboard. You are a person. And you have bad days and good days and you’re not gonna magically wake up in your Pinterest board every day just because you’ve been preparing to start learning a new language and going to the gym from now on. With every “failed” vision board tucked away beneath my bedframe I have convinced myself further and further that I am simply incapable of achieving my goals. But I’m not, I just have impossible standards and a completely warped image of accomplishment.
What you see when on another Pinterest scrolling frenzy is a digital, finished and glazed product. Posed to perfection. You see the toned bodies, the big broadway career, the college degree, the friend group, and it is nothing but an image, a mere suggestion of events. You draw conclusions when you haven’t seen the equation that lies beneath.
It’s time to stop living in other people’s stories and figure out your own.
Our brains physically cannot distinguish vicarious successes from our own.1 We watch people accomplish our dreams and imagine ourselves in their place, thus feeling no more sense of urgency, no more need to improve, to try at all. We’re glamorizing the final result when we should be celebrating the process. Being a beginner is rarely pretty or admirable, but it’s the one thing you physically have to be at some point in order to get literally anywhere in life. Still, nobody’s putting a picture of a bad drawing or a person sweating and wheezing on the treadmill on their vision board.
It’s so tempting, making another near identical collage with another year of the same identical goals I have been chasing for years. Dowsing in that mirage of success for a little while, forgetting about myself. I have always preferred living in fiction, glamorizing the potential I know I have and making up stories about who I could be. But it’s the easy way out and it doesn’t work for me and I’m aware of that now. I want real, lasting change. I want to stop borrowing accomplishments from other people and feel good about my own progress. I want to be able to look at my own pictures and the things I made with my own hands and feel good about myself without the constant need to look left and right at some reference image I chose as my standard of success. I want to finally break free of this hellish cycle of self sabotage so I don’t end up dreaming my life away instead of living it. Reality is hard and it’s not always pretty but it’s real and that’s what counts. I promise, you are more than capable of building a nice life for yourself despite it all.
My new years resolution for 2026 is to allow myself to play and explore the world around me freely and without holding back. To simply suck at stuff, be a beginner without any shame, actually do things instead of wasting away “preparing” for my life to begin, create without the need for it to look like the pictures. To live for the experience, not the aesthetic.
It is within myself that I must find the strength to build a life I deem worthy of living.
˚ ✦ . . ˚ . . ✦ ˚ . ★⋆.
. ˚ * ✦ . . ✦ ˚ ˚ .˚ . . ˚ . ✦
the official Libra Rising soundtrack:
lately I’ve shifted to making physical collages of photos in my own camera roll which remind me of joy or are emblematic of the kind of life I want to lead. I find that this is actually beneficial as it both shows what values and experiences I want to curate in my own life and reminds me that I’m already, at times, living that life. and I can remember that this is me, this is not some distant ideal of a perfect person, that I’m messy and I fuck up and I have bad days, but I ALSO have fantastic, lovely, healthy days already and can seek to cultivate those even more. 💚
this is so true! i've always hated new years' resolutions because nobody ever sticks to them and it only leads to disappointment. last year, mine was to excersise more and read 50 books- neither of them really worked out (terrible pun, but bear with me). next year, i want to just be more present and conscious. that's all. whatever that means. but i'm not going to drive myself insane over it, i'll take it one day at a time <3