After all the cheers and confetti January marks the first month of the year for many, but what really brings a new year?
Vision boards of expressive future-casts composed of magazine clippings and affirmations has evolved into fun bingo boards, AI-generated strategy readouts, and Notion planners. I've held onto my own vision boards over the year, pulling them out from time to time to review if each carefully cut out piece looks like my life yet. Every year people get more creative and interactive envisioning what a new year holds for them, and it's inspiring to see. However, if you scroll long enough it starts to feel like everyone else has their year figured out. But the truth is: real life is constant and doesn't exactly hand us clarity on a convenient timeline.
Social media has shifted how we move through goal-setting. Not in a bad way—but in a way that prioritizes what will beat an algorithm instead of forming better, sustainable habits. It’s easy to optimize your vision for how it looks instead of how it feels or more conversely, planning so granularly there's little room for missteps or detours. To feel like your goals need to be fully realized, publicly declared, and aesthetically pleasing right out of the gate. What gets lost is the part that matters most: how your everyday habits support (or don’t support) the life you say you want. You’re allowed to start with curiosity. You’re allowed to adjust. You’re allowed to let the vision evolve as you do.
For me, journaling has become my bread and butter. "Write the vision, make it plain..." is what I probably heard on a Sunday.
Vision boards are powerful because they help us name desire. But they can also flatten complex goals into a single image or moment in time. I had always loved the visual aspect of my two dimensional manifestations, but what held me accountable to fulfill them? Instead of focusing on external factors—timing, money, access, or what wasn’t happening yet—journaling gave me space to look inward. To ask, What am I doing consistently? What am I avoiding? What’s actually in alignment?
I’ve had goals on my vision boards that, in hindsight, were less about the thing itself and more about the lifestyle behind it. Scribing my ambitions helped me realize when I was treating those goals as symbols without addressing the behaviors required to sustain them.
When you know better, you do better
One year I placed a magazine cutout of Italy on my vision board. No long awaited plan to actually go, but a simple representation of international travel as I aspire to do at least once a year. As I paid closer attention to my routines, I noticed small gaps that didn't bode well with how I envisioned my life: I was the "late friend", late to everything or always needing more time obstructing time with loved ones. Constantly scrambling from event to event and burned out. I was at happy hour two—sometimes three times a week getting chummy with my favorite bartenders while going over budget. I made determined efforts to change my behavior like setting a series of thirty-minute alarms to arrive at destinations on time, returning to daily handwritten to-do lists to stay on task, and reducing my happy hour attendance to three times a month. The opportunity to take an actual trip to Italy with friends right on the heels of another trip the week prior was an easy 'yes'. I had actualized a lifestyle that didn't make unforeseen travel feel like a burden to finance and plan for. My new habits made room for the flexibility I dreamed of.
I went through a similar realization with my wardrobe (which I explore in ButterFLY Magazine, Issue 4). My closet was stuck in transition and half full of fast-fashion dresses, pants, and crop-tops: cheap, thin sets most familiar from my club-era days—clothes that worked for weekends partying but not the more serious settings I began to find myself in. Getting dressed for business events, more slow-paced evenings with friends, or travel beyond beach trips became harder than it needed to be.
I started by reorganizing my closet by color–albeit impulsively at 3 am–and purging items to donate. I became more attentive to my style, often employing color-blocking, monochromatic, and pattern play techniques. Over time I filtered out what no longer fit my lifestyle, and replaced them with better-quality pieces, invested in tailoring, and visiting a cobbler to extend the life of my most treasured heels. I paid attention to how I actually like to get dressed—layering, boots with skirts, intentional silhouettes.
Getting dressed became so fun again, the energy spilled into my styling content online and supported the fast growth of B. Marie.
In 2025, I committed to shopping only from wishlist items I created with a few of my favorite retailers and unsubscribing from those email lists once my purchases were complete. Now, with grad school ahead and economic uncertainty in the air, I’m entering 2026 with a new focus: shopping my closet first. There's nothing like securing an item I've had my eye on between paychecks, but my life is asking for something different right now. What has made each year feel new for me is a willingness to adjust my habits as my life shifted.
I, not Robot
Vision boards, lists, and planners are all useful. They make our goals feel tangible. But they aren’t contracts, and they don’t need to account for every divine twist ahead of time. And right now, a lot is happening around us. Economically, socially, and emotionally. We are processing uncertainty and change at a pace that no system or template can fully prepare us for.
We are not machines.
Discipline and grace can coexist. Discipline helps you show up for the life you want to live. Grace allows you to stay patient with yourself when things shift, unfold unexpectedly, or move a little slower than planned.
"Going with the flow" here does not mean abandoning your goals. It means staying aligned while allowing life to pan out. It means adjusting your habits over time without losing the plot. Sometimes choosing ourselves in a new way brings clarity to our aspirations.
So envision your life in whatever way works for you! Use the tools that help you see clearly, and give yourself room to be human while you do it.