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You know you know better than to do it, even while you sit there doing it for hours on end: scrolling through social media feeds and marveling at the shiny lives and impressive accomplishments featured in post after post.

Recently this happened to me, but the feed I was scrolling through was my own, and instead of being filled with FOMO, all I felt was wonder, delight, and pride. 

I don’t even remember how I wound up deep in a rabbit hole of my own posts, though I hadn’t set out to sit there vanity surfing. But it woke me up to some realizations I hadn’t paid attention to.

So often we’re busy measuring our lives and our success by the lacks–what we haven’t accomplished yet, our goals that we feel we’ve fallen short of. But what if we flip that around—look not at the empty space in our glass, but how much we’ve managed to fill it?

So often we’re busy measuring our lives and our success by the lacks–what we haven’t accomplished yet, our goals that we feel we’ve fallen short of. This time of year especially it’s easy to fall prey to that, when everyone is busy coming up with resolutions for the coming year.

But what if we flip that around—look not at the empty space in our glass, but how much we’ve managed to fill it?

Read more: “Whose Standards Are You Judging Yourself By?”

What Have You Done for You Lately?

Scrolling through my social media feed for probably much too long and much too far in the past, I got a panoramic view of what I’ve done in the last few years. I published Intuitive Editing almost concurrently with the COVID pandemic, in March of 2020—timing that could have smothered this achievement of a career-long dream amid the chaos.

But somehow it didn’t. In fact the timing may have actually worked in my favor, with so many of us stuck at home and authors turning more of their attention to their writing projects. The book debuted as an Amazon bestseller and has sold steadily since.

The same strange confluence of events unexpectedly launched a new prong of my career: doing more teaching and presenting. Hearing from so many creatives that they were unable to write amid the noise and fears of those early pandemic days, I created my very first course, Analyze Like an Editor (then called How to Train Your Editor Brain) and offered it for free to any writers’ organization that wanted it, to help authors find ways to create and grow as writers even if they weren’t writing.

That first course soon snowballed into more than 20 I have created since then. I’ve started partnering with industry leaders I deeply admire in reaching even more authors. When the world opened back up, I added in more in-person workshops and presentations, and speaking and teaching have become a major focus of my business model as well as a passion I didn’t realize I had.

I started a blog that’s now in its third year, with hundreds of thousands of words written to help authors, and recorded the audiobook for Intuitive Editing. I released two more novels I’d thought were dead after I left my small publishing house—with a major publisher (under my pen name, Phoebe Fox). In my feed I watched the clever publicity videos I’d made for those books as if they were for someone else’s work, and was amused and delighted by my own creativity that I hadn’t fully appreciated then.

Reading through my posts, I was surprised and impressed with all the things I do and have done. I think of myself as a homebody, but here are some things I did over the last few years:

• Took a bungee fitness class
• Went ax throwing
• Learned pickleball
• Met my goal of deadlifting my body weight, and edged ever closer to my chest-press goal of 100 lbs (90 lbs on one rep—but I’m getting there)
• Became an activist, including demonstrating at the Capitol, campaigning to get out the vote, and marching in the Women’s March—twice
• Officiated three weddings
• Made and sent out approximately 50,000 cookies to friends and family in the height of COVID quarantine because cookies make people happy
• Learned to cut my own hair and cobble my own shoes
• Finally made a perfect quiche
• Organized our entire neighborhood to regain control over our HOA
• Spent wonderful time with my husband, family, and friends—playing games, discovering new hangouts, attending concerts and events, vacationing in the Colorado mountains and the Florida gulf coast and Key West.
• Fawned all over my dogs—a LOT.

All of it scrolling past created an enviable retrospective—except there was nothing to envy because I had actually lived all of those experiences. Seeing them all together gave me an appreciation for all that I’ve done with a perspective I didn’t have at the time. And how far I have come since then as well.

But I also know the parts that didn’t make it into the pretty feed, times of creative frustration and dead-ending and doubt. Times where nothing terribly impressive happened, just regular life, a mundane Wednesday. Long gaps of time where I stayed away from social media, which can either mean a fullness of life that leaves no room or need for posting, or its opposite. I don’t remember exactly now what those gaps encompassed, the road between the roadside attractions. But looking back through the whole feed I can see where they all led me.

Read more: “The Right Way to Use Social Media for Authors”

Live the Life You Are Creating

As 2024 looms, with all its expectations and pressures for setting goals and resolutions, amid the specter of what is sure to be a contentious election season that may divide us even further and undercut the foundations of our very democracy, I encourage you to breathe for a moment and let yourself take some time to notice and appreciate what you’ve done, how far you’ve come—to enjoy the symphony of your life, good, bad, and quotidian.

Realize that you’re only seeing the highlights, and as impressive as your life looks on your social media feeds, you know the interstices: the mundane, dull, difficult. Remind yourself that’s what other people’s posts—and lives—are too.

Read some of your past writing and see what loveliness and truth you have managed to put on the page, now that you’re not in the midst of judging it.

Don’t denigrate your older work if it’s less polished than you write now. Look at how far you’ve come! Look at how you’ve grown. Look at your persistence and dedication. Take a moment to respect and enjoy how you continue to learn and practice your craft, how you continue to hone your skills.

Take some time to notice and appreciate what you’ve done, how far you’ve come—to enjoy the symphony of your life, good, bad, and quotidian.

Look at the books and movies and TV shows you’ve posted about and think of the stories you’ve enjoyed, the ones that taught you. Remember your favorite personal moments and memories amid the professional ones, and how all of it is what paints the rich picture of your life.

Sometimes when I look through old pictures, I joke with my husband that if I’d known what I looked like back then I would have been walking around in pasties and a thong, instead of worrying about my weight or my appearance. I didn’t realize the loveliness of youth when I was one.

He always offers the same reply: that in ten years I will look at pictures of myself now and have the same thought.

What experiences, achievements, and enjoyments are you having now that you won’t fully appreciate until you see them in your posts ten years from now? What if we flipped the script and let ourselves enjoy them fully right now, as we are living them? What if we gave ourselves more credit, more kindness, more grace? What if we celebrated every win, however big or small, as worthy and a key piece of what makes life worthwhile?

Learn to Live the Memories You’re Making

I don’t make resolutions. New Year’s seems like an arbitrary change point to set some kind of external expectations for myself. So I’ll make an inverted, internal resolution instead: Rather than setting up a bar I spend 2024 trying to clear, I want to try to be more present in every moment, more mindful of the process of what I’m doing, not the product.

So often when I’m working with an author in edits, it gets bad before it gets better. There’s always the stage when they are in the middle of revisions where they feel as if they’ve torn apart everything good about their story and can’t see how to knit it back together. Frequently authors will even apologize to me when turning in a revised draft for another edit pass, or tell me they have no idea what’s on the page or if it’s any good.

And then when I read it, they’ve closed every hole, tightened every stitch, and made the whole infinitely stronger and more impactful. They just couldn’t see it when they were in the middle of it.

My wish for you and all of us in 2024 and every year beyond is that we learn to see and appreciate where we are, every moment. That even as we look ahead, we can take time to enjoy the path we’re walking. Measure your life and your work by what you are doing and what you have done, not what you plan to do or haven’t managed yet.

Thanks for a great 2023, friends. Thank you for being here. You make my work possible, meaningful, and infinitely rewarding.

If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here.