Instead of setting goals that I will probably fail (lol), I’m setting the tone for September that still gives that ‘new school’ vibe without putting more on my plate by creating The Curriculum:

WHAT I’M READING

I’ll be putting down my Emily Henry until next Summer and venturing into a new genre with dark academia. I’ve chosen two books that are very similar and while reviews have been mixed online, I’m treating this as an experiment to see if I enjoy the idea of old universities, secrets and mystery:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

I’ve also been saving these Substack articles as they’ve come across my feed over the last few months and can’t wait for a rainy Sunday to read in bed:

How to bet on yourself without telling anyone

If No One Is Coming to Save You, No One Is Coming to Stop You Either

Aliveness and where to find it

WHAT I’M WATCHING

September is traditionally the month I start my annual The Vampire Diaries rewatch, but after barely watching any TV in August, I’m keen to cosy up and watch something new. Sticking to the academia theme, I have three options:

Legacies

One of Us is Lying

Wednesday

WHAT I’M CREATING

Now that my busy summer of European travel is over, I can finally start the three projects I have been dreaming about for the last couple of months:

Making a Seasonal House Menu

Influenced by Shelby over at Pretty in The Pines, I’ve started to pull together delicious autumn inspired recipes to start cooking as soon as the autumn equinox arrives. While this may seem like a lofty and unrealistic project to some, I love cooking and this allows me to gamify the age-old question ‘what’s for dinner tonight?’ without needing to have UberEats on speed dial

Revamping our Bedding

After five years of living in our new build apartment, it is time for us to start making the place feel like ours and this month, I’m starting with the bedding. Our current bedding situation is simple, we have a pillow each and the duvet but for autumn, I’m looking to play with seasonal colour combinations and textures. Here are some inspiration ideas from Pinterest:

Successful on Paper

Obviously. After months of back-and-forth, I’ve finally figured out what Successful on Paper will look like moving forward. ICYMI, the shift in direction covers expanding beyond just work, ambition and success and into topics across self, wellness and life. After speaking with other ambitious women this summer, I’ve recognised that these topics are just as, if not more important to being Successful on Paper and this article is just an example of some of the content coming up.

Regardless of whether you are still riding the summer coattails hard or you’re sipping a PSL whenever you get the chance, I hope you agree the September can be a reset without needing a full reinvention. You can borrowing the energy of September without turning yourself into a project again.

Now I want to know what’s on your September curriculum. What are you reading, watching, making or cooking? Leave yours in the comments, I’m always looking to be inspired by others.

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The irony is that as a certified Integrated Nutrition Health Coach, I should know better. I understand that wellness isn’t one-dimensional and yet I still found myself believing there was a particular set of metrics I needed to hit in order to feel well.

And that’s when I realised this wasn’t really about my Oura ring. I’d somehow turned wellbeing into something I had to achieve.

Wellness culture has turned wellbeing into a scorecard

We’ve taken something inherently nuanced and turned it into a scorecard. There’s an enormous amount of information out there telling us what wellbeing is supposed to be. Hitting 130g+ protein, fibremaxxing, 10k steps, zone 2 cardio and 7-8 hours of sleep. Each individual recommendation might be perfectly reasonable but collectively they’ve created this impression that there is a correct way of being well.

The more metrics we have to measure ourselves against, the more opportunities there are to feel like we’re failing. Instead of experiencing wellbeing, it becomes something we have to achieve.

Ambitious women already know how to play the scorecard game

She’s used to knowing what success looks like and being rewarded for going beyond her targets, especially when it comes to her career. At work, hitting the target gives her something tangible: a promotion, a client, more money, a fancy title. She’s learned how to turn vague ambitions into measurable outcomes.

The exact skills she’s learnt at work now apply to wellbeing. She turns the metrics into goals, tracks them, optimises them and judges herself against them. And with that begins the all-or-nothing approach.

We’ve taken the achievement mindset that makes us successful in our careers and applied it to looking after ourselves, then wondered why we feel like we’ve failed.

On a high-capacity week, she does everything. But during a busy or stressful week, she can’t and instead of adjusting the standard, she decides she’s failed. She’s planning her wellbeing around a version of life that doesn’t actually exist. The same black-and-white thinking that can make you successful at work doesn’t work when you apply it to your wellbeing.

I didn’t need more data. I needed to trust myself.

Which brings me back to me obsessively checking my Oura ring every morning. After years of pushing beyond my limits, I knew that I needed to start looking after myself and I needed reassurance that I was doing okay because I didn’t trust my body anymore.

As a chronic overachiever, failing at something as important as my wellbeing hit me hard because it changed how I perceived myself. How could I nail every part of my life but fail at looking after myself? That’s exactly how I ended up trusting the algorithm more than I trusted myself.

It wasn’t until I went on a business trip where I was so busy that I didn’t have a chance to check my app every morning that the illusion started to wear off. As I got into bed that night, I looked at my stats from earlier in the day, which showed I was stressed, when in fact I felt fine.

That’s the thing about optimisation culture, it doesn’t give us more things to do. It can make us outsource our own authority. It’s the belief that there is a correct score we need to hit in order to be doing wellbeing properly.

Your body isn’t a performance review

There is no perfect wellness scorecard and no single routine that you should execute every week. As your capacity changes every week, so should your approach to wellbeing so it can flex with your actual life.

Psst… don’t scroll past this bit.

For less than the price of one reformer Pilates class, you get access to the practical side of what I write about here, not just my opinions on what we’re doing wrong.

Here’s what you unlock:

• Steal the exact framework I used to overcome my all-or-nothing approach, so you can prioritise the things that genuinely move the needle instead of trying to do everything.

• The entire paid archive, instantly unlocked, including every paid post I’ve already written and everything that comes next.

• Subscribers-only chat, so you can join the conversation and talk through the ideas with other paid subscribers.

Basically, I give you the perspective. Paid gets you the tools to do something with it.

Everything below is the practical stuff from this week’s post. If you’re paid, keep scrolling.

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What should have been a simple 20-minute walk back from the venue ended up as a two-hour journey, as one side quest led to another after leaving a club we had no idea how we got into.

The passport might be saying 40, but that night I felt like I was in my 20s again. And in the middle of it, I realised something slightly embarrassing: I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made a fun memory with my friends.

Which got me thinking: have adult friendships just become another admin task?

It seems like we are constantly catching up. Over dinner, coffee, WhatsApp or Instagram. Catching up often means finding a weekend that works for everyone, sometimes a month in advance. We have normalised this so much that I wonder if we’ve confused knowing what’s happening in someone’s life with actually being a part of it. You can know exactly what is happening in someone’s life and still not actually be living any of it with them.

We used to build friendships through shared life experiences

Being friends in your 20s happens quite naturally because you’re sharing so much of your life together. University, first jobs, terrible housemates, nights out, first heartbreaks, even being broke and trying to figure it all out. You don’t need to schedule “friendship time” because you’re living alongside your friends, and memories happen almost accidentally.

But as your 20s turn into your 30s and beyond, adulthood fragments everyone into different life paths. The conditions that naturally created those shared memories are replaced by high-pressure careers, caring for children, romantic relationships and, in some cases, completely new geographic locations.

We have become very good at staying in touch

Whether it’s double tapping on holiday pics on Instagram or sending a 4-minute voice note on WhatsApp, you can go days, even weeks without needing to physically see someone, and yet you know exactly what’s happening in their life. You’ve gone from being a character in your friend’s life to becoming an observer of it, watching from the sidelines through whatever they choose to share online.

In my case, this has been genuinely life changing, allowing my friendships to survive not only the busyness of our lives but also the distance. Yet the sobering realisation is that I’ve become very good at maintaining friendships without actually creating much new life inside them.

When did catching up become the default?

There’s nothing wrong with catching up over dinner, drinks or even a coffee. But when every interaction starts to feel like an update meeting with your line manager, friendships can start to feel like admin again. You exchange updates, discuss what’s happened since you last caught up and promise to do it again soon.

A friendship can survive on contact. I’m not convinced it can thrive on it.

Paris showed me what I was missing all along

My 40th birthday celebrations spilled over three months, and yet that night in Paris will be the memory I hold closest to my heart. Because somewhere between the dancing, the side quests and the two-hour walk home, I realised how long it had been since I’d done something with my friends that wasn’t just catching up. That night, I was actually living something with them.

Shared experiences don’t have to mean expensive trips

In my case, shared experiences do often mean hopping on a flight, as the friends I made when I lived in Barcelona have spread across Europe. But for you, that might not be the case. You don’t need everyone to fly to Paris or plan an elaborate girls’ weekend in the South of France. Your next ‘catch up’ could be something small and slightly different from the default.

A themed dinner for a film you’ve been looking forward to or even doing a progressive dinner à la Desperate Housewives, where you go to a different location for each course. Anything that creates the possibility of a future ‘remember when we...’ conversation. Because maybe we don’t need more time with our friends. Maybe we need more life with them.

Maybe next time we say, ‘we really need to catch up’, we can ask, ‘what should we do together?’

When was the last time you made a genuinely new memory with your friends?