is goal setting a form of escapism? if not, why is “now” so undesirable?
musings on the perception, anticipation, and defiance of time -- and the compulsion to domesticate it
I go on Etsy and I spend days shopping for the perfect planner. By day three, I get so frustrated I start to contemplate how long it would take me to learn Photoshop or InDesign or Procreate well enough to just make my own instead. I compare templates. None of them are right. I skim pages and pages of listings and they’re all the same. I consider buying a physical planner with 100% customization and scanning the pages one by one. I consider emailing customer service of the physical company and asking if they can just skip the printing and send me the digital files directly, just the PDF. But then I’d have to hyperlink it manually and god, how long would that take? Ugh.
I check the IG account of the creator I usually purchase my planner from, of whom I’ve been a diligent patron for two years in a row (2023, 2024) but now it’s three days after Christmas and another three till New Years yet she still hasn’t updated her online store?! Does she not like money?? Her most recent post is an apology, a coming soon placeholder. She’s getting married and she’s been really busy lately and blah blah blah. I’m happy for her, yeah, but I’m growing impatient. I go on Reddit and see if anyone has shared any cool links on r/DigitalPlanners or r/GoodNotes. They haven’t. I get desperate and search Twitter hashtags. To my surprise, there’s some good stuff on there.
In the end, the planner I buy is from Etsy after all. It is December 28th. I am satisfied with my purchase. I spend another day arranging the PDF pages in the perfect order. This is necessary. All of it matters. Someone asks me if I’m free next week and I have no choice but to say, “I don’t know” because I don’t know because nothing is written down yet and so nothing is real yet as in: time hasn’t solidified and isn’t true or absolute as far as I can tell and it must first be measured and contained and qualified before I can even pretend to conceive of a future in which I am not only in it, but “free.”
My memories—the very layers of me—are not anchors. I carry them with me because that’s what diaries are for: to store the parts of the past that resonated with me, that changed me the most, that kept me up at night. The version I keep is the version I lived, and when I look at it I can remember that I lived, which is easy to forget when you’re in the future, where I often reside. In the future, my living present is already outdated. My days wilt into wasted potential halfway through or sometimes sooner, seemingly doomed to forever lag ten steps behind.
I am a girl who keeps diaries. I’m down to just the one now, and it’s digital too. Pretty much everything for me is digital. I love my devices. I am disillusioned of the belief that removing myself from these platforms would save me. Save me from what, anyway? I am not afraid of the world. I step into it with reluctance lately, but that’s got nothing to do with the phones or the pictures or the people on the screens. It’s just me, circling in on myself and sinking, and it’s my own fault, so there’s no need in my mind to vilify the phone, or “detox” from it. As far as I can tell, it’s all there is to keep me afloat.
All this is more or less what I write in my diary. I write about my love life and how doomed it all feels, and the peace I’ve made with that. Then I write about how my family is falling apart—more than usual—and I write about what I want to do next year, what I hope to accomplish, how many books I should have read by the end of it, how much money I should’ve saved if I don’t stupidly spend it all, how long would it take me to go far, far away from home—but not too far, in case I want to come back. I make a list next. It is ten years long.
I am a girl prone to anxiety. For those of you lucky enough not to know: anxiety is irrational fear. It’s a fear that generally fixates on what hasn’t yet happened, or what might’ve happened, or what did happen, what might happen again. It’s a thing that is not rooted at all in the present. The breathing exercises they give you in therapy are all about gently coaxing yourself back to the here and now of it all. The color of the walls, the fives of your fingers, the soft ridges of the roof of your mouth, the sound of a car driving by—a police siren, a humming phone. Real things, tangible things, things that are not tomorrow and not last week but undoubtedly and empirically Today.
Anxiety isn’t interested in any of that, but it doesn’t have much counterargument for it either. So if you can stay Here long enough, if you can settle into Now and stay there; you can see your life for what it is. Maybe what is in front of you will make you cry. Or, maybe it will console you. Maybe you will want to run from it all over again, if you find you are not yet ready to confront it. But that’s the thing about Now—it’s real. The past isn’t real anymore, not in a way you can hold. The colors of it all fade over time. The consequences of it are real, yes, but they are part of Now which is really where you should stay. And the future? The future is the least real of all, but it’s shiny. And that’s what I like.
I decide I don’t like The Ways Things Are now. Now what? I decide to dream. I dream within reason, because I cannot bear the heartache of wanting and waiting—I dream strategically. I do the math of what it would take to close the gap. I estimate how long it would take, how many Unsatisfactory Nows would I have to endure to get there. I negotiate with myself. We dream frantically, feverishly, but smartly. We can transcend time, we can conquer it, we can make use of it.
Somewhere in the days I can carve out a little purpose for myself. I can lean into something, towards something. I could grasp a day in which I am happy, one I will remember as happy, one that will not slip away into the amorphous ambiguity of my memory, an archive prone to overwriting and sinking.
I can’t trust myself to remember. Someone asks me what the color of yesterday’s shirt was and I have to close my eyes and think. The days blur into each other. I only know what day it is because I have a calendar; I keep a planner. Because I made a list. Because I took a picture. Because I wrote it down.
My mother pulls out an album of my baby photos and I look at the child as one would a stranger. I “know” it is me because she says so, and who would lie? But I fail to see a resemblance between my Now nose and her Then nose, and I can’t easily follow the trajectory of how the 1994 of her eyes will gradually morph into the 2025 of mine. I do not know this child. She is far away and unfamiliar. But I also know I forget things. I know I can and do forget how much things hurt, I know I forget the things that happened, including (and especially) to me. Sometimes it seems like the only way I can go forward.
If I can’t remember naturally, then I know I must do it manually.
I keep a digital scrapbook.
I used to keep a physical one. But it gets tiring, all the cutting and pasting. It is laborious. I know myself to be lazy, and in acceptance of that fact, I decided to digitize my memories. Every month I compile all the best photos into a big collage. Some months are stuffed with pictures. Others are sparse. Those are the months I know I stayed home, didn’t go out as much, probably spent my evenings binging Netflix. They’re not all like that, of course. I’m still a girl of the world; I still wish to be in it. But sometimes I fall into myself, and I stay for awhile like that, and after I re-emerge there is just less to remember.

I’m very proud of the Scrapbook.1 It makes me feel like I had a real life. I went places. I ate food! I watched movies! I lived! I was in the Now, at one point. Back then. I can enjoy it most through the distance of time. I struggle with why that is. But I can look at the breadth of everything I did and see that I was here, and I was real, and that it matters.
Last summer, I decided to play a game.
We were standing in the pool, two of us, and I said, “I’m going to hold my breath and go underwater. Will you time me? Let’s see who lasts longest.” When it was my turn, first I expelled all the air in my body. Then, I inhaled. Slowly, very slowly. I lowered myself into the blue, eyes closed, body completely still. Tried not to even think too much, so as not to unnecessarily exert any extra energy. I waited. Floated. There was a peacefulness in it. I was reminded of that time, as a child, when I almost drowned in a pool at Disneyland. Is it strange to say I think of it fondly? I was six. I remember the blue, and the quiet of it, the floating. It was only after they pulled me out that the noise returned, and my poor pregnant mother was crying, so then I started crying, and then I coughed up blood and they took me away.
Anyway, I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, and I felt a bit pathetic for it, but finally I came up for air. I took a small gulp of it, tacitly, as if I didn’t want to be greedy. “How long was that?” I asked, grinning. “Only like thirty seconds, right?”
“No, actually. It’s been ninety.”
I frowned. “What? I was down there for a minute and a half? That can’t be right. It only felt like ten seconds!” I offered to try it again, so we did, but the second attempt was not much different.
I have a thing called Time Blindness.
Like a lot of people, I have an Adderall prescription.2 I’m lazy, so I have my meds delivered, and the pills come in a fat, little orange bottle every month. They don’t cure me of the Time Blindness thing, but they help to keep me In The Now long enough to do all my silly little errands, because when I’m not anxious and fearful of the future, I am impatient of its arrival, and thinking too much about what I will do and want to do—but not actually doing any Doing.
The Time Blindness thing is about how Time gets away from you, how you can be too Now, and unable to realize it, unable to pull away to move on to the next thing. People with Time Blindness are supposed to set lots of alarms. Lots of bells to remind you that time is still moving along, with or without you. Little dings so that you pull yourself into the next thing and the next thing and then the thing after that. Never too still. I hear regular people don’t live like this. They want to do something, and then they…Do It. With no added preservatives. They can tell the difference between thirty seconds and ninety. And you know what? Good for them.
Good for them.
In 2025, I want to:
Read at least ten books and watch at least ten movies.
Find a trauma therapist.
Travel to one new country and one new state.
Apply to grad school
Get a second job
Lose weight (I won’t say how much)
Improve at a few hobbies
Progress with my poetry (writing, revising, and publishing it)
Host an event
Spend less money (and save more of it).
These goals, even if accomplished, will not save me. The outcome of achieving any or all of these things is hard to determine at the onset. Likely, my life will remain unchanged, though I can’t be sure. It’s all so hypothetical, and so far away. I probably could’ve dreamed bigger, but every time I do, I wake up small, so I downsized this year.
If I disappoint myself, it won’t be the first time, but if I win, it would feel new and hopeful. And new and hopeful is how I think I would like to feel.
Now I am reminded of all the cliches people say: “We all have the same twenty-four hours.” “Time is money.” “Better late than never.” “All wounds heal with time.”
Do you have a favorite one of these? I think today, mine is: Only time will tell.
To create the scrapbook I used: GoodNotes, Canva and an app called Paper. It took me several days, but it was a labor of love. Isn’t it just ADORABLE? Ask me about it if you want.
The shortage sucks, but it’s been less of a headache lately.