I Don't Want to Visualize My Future Anymore

I think we have become way too damn good at having a future.

Read that again.

Not building one, having one.

We have the Pinterest board. The vision board. The Notes app full of journal prompts. The screenshots. The saved apartment with the impossible windows. The imaginary morning routine. The playlist. The perfume. The linen bedding. The vague but extremely confident belief that by some point next year we will simply become the kind of woman who wakes up at 5:30, drinks green juice, owns exactly three pairs of perfectly tailored jeans, and has never once forgotten to return an email.

We know what she looks like, what her house looks like, what she wears, what she says, how much she weighs, what she even smells like.

But ask us what she does when plans falls apart and the shit hits the fan and we suddenly get very, very quiet.

This is the weirdest thing about modern manifestation culture to me. We’ve managed to turn imagining your life into a lifestyle in and of itself. And it’s brilliant for the hellscape of society we’re currently living in.

You can buy the journal. You can make the moodboard. You can light the candle. You can write the affirmation. You can spend 45 minutes deciding whether the future version of yourself feels more like old money autumn or severe Japanese minimalism. (Ask me how I know.)

You can do all of this without taking a single fucking risk. And that’s where it gets interesting.

Because your fantasy self is incredibly easy to maintain. She never disappoints you. She never gets rejected. She never finds out she was wrong. She never realizes the thing she desperately wanted is actually not what she wants at all. She never sends the email and gets no response. She never launches something and watches it flop. She never asks for more money and gets told no. She never has the profoundly humbling experience of trying something she is supposed to be “aligned” with and discovering she is, at present, kind of shit at it.

She is perfect because she has never been tested. She is perfect because she is staying small, malleable, suggestible. (She is also incredibly easy to sell to.)

Because we don’t just romanticize our future, sometimes we fetishize it. We become more emotionally attached to the image of our potential than to the deeply boring, occasionally humiliating process of actually becoming someone different.

We collect evidence of the life without collecting evidence from the life. We pin the house but never touch the down payment. We save the quote about boundaries and set exactly none of them. We save the “how I became the woman I always knew I could be” post, but we don’t do the one thing that would make it true.

To be clear, I don’t think this means you should throw away your vision board and go become a joyless productivity robot, quite the opposite. I love a fantasy. I think you should want things so specifically that your future feels almost embarrassingly personal. I think you should imagine the house, the clothes, the work, the location, the life, all the weird little details no one else understands. But the vision is supposed to be a compass, not the end goal. At some point, you have to come back.

There is a very specific kind of procrastination that looks exactly like self-development. You research. You reflect. You journal. You “get clear.” You make a plan to make a plan. You consume 700 pieces of content about the woman you are becoming. And then, somehow, six months pass and the only measurable change is that your Notion dashboard is now absolutely fucking gorgeous.

I know this because I have done versions of it, time and time again, probably because there is something incredibly seductive about potential. Potential is infinite. Reality is specific, and reality has notes. Potential says you could have this. Reality says okay, show me.

Identity doesn’t change because you imagined yourself as confident. It changes because you sent the email while your hands were shaking. It’s not the abundance you journaled about, it’s the invoice you finally sent for what the work is actually worth, sitting there with your jaw clenched waiting to see if anyone pushes back. Discernment isn’t a moodboard word. It’s looking at the opportunity you desperately wanted six months ago and hearing yourself say, out loud, actually, no, this isn’t for me. Nobody photographs the version of you that kept a promise to herself when nobody else was watching. That’s the one that counts.

Confidence isn’t something you think yourself into, it’s something you accumulate evidence for. Same with courage. Same with self-respect. You don’t just wake up one morning and discover that poof! you’ve finally arrived. You wake up one morning and realize you’ve been doing the work and collecting the receipts for years.

That’s the part I find much more interesting than the fantasy - the receipts. The tiny, almost offensively unglamorous evidence that says:

Oh, I actually am different now. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t tolerate that anymore. I don’t need that anymore. I handled that differently. I made the decision faster. I recovered faster. I trusted myself sooner. I asked for more. I stopped explaining.

I started.

Again.

And again.

And again.

That is manifestation I can get behind. Not “think about it hard enough and the universe will eventually send you a package tied up in a bow.” An experiment. Hypothesis, evidence, pattern, revision, repeat.

And once I started thinking about manifestation this way, I realized something: I don’t actually need another system for imagining the woman I could be. I need a system for becoming her.

So that’s what I’ve been building.

A system for keeping the vision, yes, but also the evidence, experiments, decisions, and tiny moves. The shit that worked and the shit that didn’t. The moments where I thought I was stuck and then realized I’d been making strides the whole time.

At first, I called it the Manifestation Machine. (Yes, I know, I can sense your eye roll from here, but all y’all manifestation girlies love this shit, and cringe has never once stopped me from doing something rad.)

And then, true to form, as I kept building it I realized I was making something bigger than a manifestation system. I was making a place to bring the question, to test the idea, to notice patterns, to figure out what’s aligned and what’s not.

If you’ve been here for a while that description might jog a memory. Because you know what that sounds like? The Black Altar. She’s officially coming back, and better than ever! Because the Manifestation Machine is going inside The Black Altar.

I’m opening access again on August 21, and I CAN’T WAIT. 🪩

And if you already have The Black Altar? The new updates will get pushed in the next couple of days, so test it out and let me know what you think!

Now, paid subscribers, keep reading. I want you to try something.