1 Story
You probably have one somewhere.
An old journal entry. A note in your phone. A vision board. A list of goals you wrote when you were absolutely certain you knew what you wanted your life to look like.
And then life happened. You got busy. And maybe, like me, you forgot you ever wrote it down.
I was looking for something completely different when I found mine.
I’ve been going through my Apple Notes for The 3-31, trying to see what I had already written and what might fit into the structure I’m building now.
There are a lot of drafts.
Apparently, I have never met a reflection exercise I did not want to complete, save somewhere, and then completely forget existed.
That is how I found one from December 26, 2022.
At the top, I had written: FUTURE SELF.
The exercise asked me to imagine the next five years.
What do I see?
Where do I want to be?
Who will I be?
And I answered.
I wrote about Me Power. Speaking. Launching an audiobook. Selling books in bulk. Moving to Santa Fe. Hiring a full-time assistant. Creating a second book. Spending a month in Paris with my children. I even wrote down what grades my boys would be starting in 2026.
And then I realized something.
It is 2026.
The future I was writing about had arrived.
And I had not looked at this document in years.
That struck me because we spend so much time imagining the future.
Where do you want to be in five years?
What are your goals?
What does success look like?
Who are you becoming?
But we don’t spend nearly as much time going back once that future arrives.
What happens when you actually get there? Not necessarily to the exact life you imagined, but to the year you once called someday.
What do you see differently now?
Reading my list, I noticed that my most significant life-changing event had already happened
Surviving a sudden cardiac arrest.
And there it was in my writing: getting well and prioritizing my health.
That hit differently now.
In 2022, my ejection fraction was 15%. Today, it is around 50%. I am taking one less heart medication every day. And just recently, I had the best cardiology appointment I have had since all of this began.
So I was not reading a generic wellness goal.
I was seeing evidence that I had been living it.
Right beside that were all the other things I wanted: the work, the travel, the money, the accomplishments.
Most of it happened. Some of it did not. And some of it matters far less to me now than it did when I wrote it.
That is what caught me.
We use future-self exercises to imagine where we are going, but I had never really thought about what happens when you arrive and look back at the person who did the imagining.
What did she know?
What did she get wrong?
What mattered then that no longer matters now?
What was she already trying to tell me?
Further down the page, I had written GET REAL, followed by the things I knew I needed to work on:
Saying no to projects that do not generate revenue and taking on one community engagement instead of three.
Getting well.
Prioritizing my health.
Living more in the present.
Whew.
Four years later, I am less interested in whether I accomplished everything on that page than I am in what the page reveals.
Because 2022 me knew some things.
She knew I was doing too much. She knew my health needed to become a priority. She knew I needed to be more present, even while imagining everything I wanted to do next.
Now I get to read those words knowing what happened afterward.
That is the strange gift of finding something your past self wrote.
You know things now that you could not have known then.
And the person you were may have noticed things about you that are worth remembering now.
1 Question
When the future you once imagined becomes your present, what can the person you were teach you about the person you are becoming now?
1 Challenge
Write one sentence to the person you were a few years ago:
“You were right about ______.”
Then choose one small decision this week that honors what you already knew.
For example:
You were right about needing more rest.
Decision: I’m saying no to one thing I do not have capacity for.
You were right about getting well and prioritizing my health.
Decision: I’m scheduling the appointment for my latest labs, even though I hate the blood draw.
You were right about wanting to write a second book.
Decision: I’m scheduling at least two 30-minute writing sessions every week and treating that time like it matters.
Three ⚡️ in 31 Seconds
⚡️ I cannot stop thinking about the fact that 2026 used to feel far away. Now I am living in a year I once had to imagine.
⚡️ Sometimes the clearest evidence of growth is realizing that something you once hoped for has quietly become part of your life.
⚡️ Knowing yourself is not a one-time discovery. The person you are today gets to reconsider what success means, what matters now, and what you no longer need to carry forward.