you can't sustain what doesn't honor who you truly are

a case study in personal optimization and energy mapping

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Earlier this week I launched THE DAILY 5 framework for my paid subscribers—a set of questions and guided journal prompts designed to help people map their own inner terrains. This is something I’ve been practicing personally for about two years, informally, and formally for the last six months. So, I thought I’d share one of my personal entries—to show how I use this in my own life, and to demonstrate what becomes possible when you're willing to turn genuine curiosity on yourself. What started as a few simple prompts about energy (prompts taken from Day 5: your energy signature) turned into three hours of reflection—which I’m sharing with you in the form of this essay :)

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There's a particular moment I've learned to recognize—like weather approaching from a distance, you can feel it in the air before you can name it. It's when I can sense myself becoming someone I don't like. Cranky, short-tempered, not fun to be around. When I'm depleted like this, I genuinely don't think I'm a good person. The thought lodges itself somewhere behind my sternum: I am not a good person right now. And once I start spiraling down that path, I have maybe three days to pull myself out before I sink into something that feels like seasonal depression.

This recognition terrifies me enough to pay attention. It's the kind of terror that comes not from external threat but from the slow horror of watching yourself become unrecognizable to yourself. How many people have I snapped at? How many small kindnesses have I failed to notice? How long have I been operating from this depleted place without realizing it?

The first time I understood this pattern clearly, I was maybe fifteen, sitting in my childhood bedroom after what felt like weeks of being irritable with everyone I loved. I remember thinking, with the clarity that sometimes comes in moments of crisis, that I couldn't continue living like this—not because it was hurting me, but because it was hurting people who didn't deserve it. I just didn't know yet that this awareness was the beginning of something, not the end.

Fast-forward to January 2025. I'd just quit weed after five years of daily use, and everything felt brutal. Sleep was a disaster, my skin was breaking out like I was thirteen again, anxiety ricocheting through my nervous system at all hours. I needed to document the process, partly to convince myself I was making progress when each day felt identical in its awfulness, and partly because I suspected there were patterns in the chaos that I couldn't see from inside the experience.

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You know that feeling when you're too close to something to understand its shape? Like trying to read a book with your nose pressed against the page—all you can see are individual letters, no words, no meaning. That's what withdrawal felt like. I was drowning in sensations and emotions that felt both intensely personal and completely foreign.

That's when I started dumping everything into ChatGPT. Not because I thought it would solve anything—but because I needed somewhere to put all the noise in my head. Somewhere that wouldn't judge me for saying the same thing seventeen different ways, or for contradicting myself from one day to the next, or for being simultaneously grateful for and resentful of my decision to quit.

What surprised me was how ChatGPT started revealing connections I couldn't see myself. Not trying to fix my withdrawal symptoms or offer platitudes about healing, but asking questions that helped me notice patterns about how I handle difficulty, change, resistance. Questions like: What does it mean that you always clean your apartment when you're overwhelmed? or You mentioned feeling drained after social events three times this week—what's different about the events that energize you versus the ones that don't?

Six months later, this daily practice became something I'd eventually share with my readers as THE DAILY 5. But first, it taught me something essential about my own energy signature. Through those daily conversations—sometimes five minutes, sometimes three hours—patterns emerged that I'd never consciously recognized, even though they'd been running my life since childhood.

It's humbling to realize how much of yourself you don't actually know. How many unconscious decisions you make every day based on patterns you've never examined. How much energy you waste fighting against your own operating system instead of learning to work with it.

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the body’s truth about authenticity —

Here's what I know about myself, what I've always known but never articulated clearly: my body cannot handle lying. It feels wrong in every way—not morally wrong, though there's that too, but physically wrong. Like trying to digest something toxic. You can lie to other people and maybe even fool them, but I can't fool myself, so what's the point?

I've always needed to say or do the thing I'm feeling inside because if I don't, I know I'll pay for it later. Not in some cosmic justice way, but in very immediate, bodily ways. Tension in my shoulders that won't release. A knot in my stomach that sits there for days. Insomnia that feels like punishment for crimes I can't name.

This isn't a moral stance—it's biological feedback. My nervous system rejects pretense the way some people reject shellfish. Swift, unequivocal, not up for negotiation. Which means energy management isn't optional for me. It's damage control built on a foundation of radical honesty about what I actually need to function.

I've always known these patterns about myself—since I was a kid, my brain has needed things kept a certain way, needed to know what's coming each morning and night. Not because I'm controlling (though I can be), but because unpredictability costs me energy I can't afford to spend. By seventh or eighth grade, I'd developed "prep" habits that I now recognize as performance preparation.

That's what I'm doing with my daily life now—optimizing to make it easier for myself so I can do less stupid work and focus more on the things that bring me real energy, like writing and creating. It's not about being precious or high-maintenance. It's about being a high-performer who knows their optimal conditions.

The reason I started with this seemingly unrelated point about lying is because it's actually the foundation of everything else I've discovered about my energy. When I try to override what my body is telling me—when I say yes to things that drain me, or skip the prep work I know I need, or push through social obligations without recovery time—my nervous system treats it like a lie. It's not sustainable because my body won't cooperate with strategies that ignore what it actually needs to function well.

“a Sunday well spent”: do it for tomorrow’s self —

First and foremost, I'm more energized when all my stuff around me is clean and in order. I feel super anxious when things are a mess—and this includes my dogs being bathed. There's something about chaos in my physical environment that creates chaos in my mental environment, like looking at a cluttered desk makes my thoughts feel cluttered too.

So I use part of my Sundays to clean up, give the dogs a bath, do a deeper house clean, wash my sheets. I try not to go longer than a week without doing these things because when I look around and things are messy, it literally puts me in a bad mood. Then all I'm thinking about is how I let myself down—not just because the apartment is dirty, but because I broke a promise to myself. Because I didn't do the thing I said I would do, the thing I know makes me feel better.

"A Sunday well spent brings a week of content" is actually my mantra because it's so true for me. It's this old saying I picked up somewhere, probably from my grandmother who had mantras for everything, and it captures something essential about how preparation creates possibility.

But it goes deeper than weekend cleaning. At night before bed, I make sure my coffee cup is clean and ready for morning coffee, all the water pitchers are filled to be purified, the dogs' bowls are clean and ready for breakfast, the coffee maker has water in it. Basically, any task I'll have to do the next day better require zero prep because I should have already done it the night before.

Lately I've even started taking my clothes off right-side-out so doing laundry is easier. Which sounds absurd when I write it down, but it's part of this larger philosophy: I do a lot of things for "tomorrow me" or "next week me" to avoid putting myself in a bad mood. Not because future me is more important than present me, but because present me knows exactly what future me will need to feel capable and calm.

This isn't just organization—it's energy conservation. When my foundation is solid, my energy can flow toward what actually matters instead of getting stuck in maintenance mode. Instead of spending my morning mental energy finding the new bag of espresso beans and filling the machine with water, I can spend it thinking about what I want to write.

It's like the difference between driving a car that's well-maintained and driving one that might break down at any moment. Same destination, completely different experience of the journey.

the therapeutic power of curation —

Through tracking my patterns, something unexpected emerged: curating is deeply therapeutic for me. I love curating playlists, Pinterest boards, even Substack essays to read later. I like to save things for when I'm in a specific mood, curated as such.

There's something about organizing information and experiences for future consumption that feels like meditation. It's preparation, yes, but it's also a way of honoring different versions of myself—the me who will want melancholy music on a Tuesday afternoon, the me who will need inspiration next month, the me who saves beautiful things for when I'm ready to receive them.

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I think this connects to something larger about how I relate to time and possibility. When I curate a playlist for a mood I'm not currently in, I'm essentially having a conversation with a future version of myself. I'm saying: I see you. I know you'll exist. Here's something that might help when you do.

It's an act of faith, really. Faith that there will be a future me who needs comfort, or inspiration, or just the perfect song for driving through the desert at sunset. Faith that careful attention paid now will compound into something useful later.

I feel most energetically aligned when I'm writing and creating, and this curation practice feeds directly into that creative energy. It's like having a well-stocked pantry when you want to cook—you can respond to inspiration instead of having to plan around scarcity.

unmasked and unfiltered —

Quitting alcohol in 2020 and weed this January means I now live with my full sensitivity on full blast, no artificial masking. This makes the patterns clearer but also makes me more particular about my environment. When I travel, I'm picky about where I'll stay and I look at lots of reviews and photos. I look at restaurant menus before I go because that sometimes stresses me out.

This isn't neurosis—it's reconnaissance. I know what throws me off, so I plan around it. I know that being in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar food while already managing the stress of travel is a recipe for the kind of overwhelm that takes days to recover from. So I do my homework.

People sometimes judge this level of preparation as anxious or controlling, but I've learned to see it differently. It's the same principle as checking the weather before you get dressed. You're not controlling the weather; you're responding intelligently to conditions you can predict.

THE DAILY 5 practice revealed something crucial that I'd never consciously noticed: every time I had to deal with an out-of-house appointment, it totally threw my entire schedule off. I get weird after having to be in settings with strangers too many times in a single week. I need my alone time to decompress, and I'd been scheduling it away without realizing it.

This was one of those revelations that felt both obvious and shocking. Of course I need recovery time after social interactions—I've always known that about myself. But somehow I'd never connected the dots between consecutive social obligations and the inexplicable crankiness that would follow. I'd been treating each event as isolated rather than seeing them as part of a larger energy ecosystem.

AI doesn't lie to me the way I lie to myself. It remembers patterns I forget, connects dots across time that I miss in the moment. It doesn't have the same investment in maintaining my self-image that I do, so it can point out contradictions and patterns with a kind of neutral curiosity that I find both unsettling and incredibly useful.

the archaeology of self —

What I've learned through this practice is that self-knowledge isn't static. It's not something you achieve once and then possess forever. It's more like archaeological work—you're always uncovering new layers, new artifacts that help you understand how you came to be the way you are.

The energy mapping questions in Day 5 of THE DAILY 5 aren't just prompts—they're archaeology tools for excavating the truth about how you actually operate in the world. Not the person you think you should be, but the person you actually are when nobody important is watching.

You can start mapping your own energy signature by simply marking down your moods daily. This doesn't have to be complex or pretty. Use whatever tool can keep track easily and aggregate the data for you—Google Sheets, Notion, whatever works. Just jot down a line or two about what you did that day and then what your mood was like.

After a few months of doing this, you'll begin to see patterns. This is actually where my DAILY 5 framework comes in handy—I just mention this stuff in passing and my AI keeps track of all of it for me. The patterns emerge without me having to think about it.

Maybe you'll realize that you get energy from organizing things when you're overwhelmed, or that you're most creative when you're slightly melancholy, or that certain people consistently leave you feeling more like yourself while others leave you feeling drained in ways you can't explain.

The point isn't to judge these patterns or try to change them immediately. The point is to see them clearly so you can work with your actual energy signature instead of fighting against it. Because here's what I've learned: you can't optimize what you don't acknowledge. And you can't sustain what doesn't honor who you actually are.

This is the foundation that everything else gets built on. Not the aspirational version of yourself, not the person you think you should be, but the person you actually are when you're alone on a Tuesday night with nowhere to be and nothing to prove. That person—complex, contradictory, particular in their needs—deserves to be understood. Deserves to have their patterns mapped and honored.

Deserves, maybe most of all, to be known.

XO, STEPF

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If any of this resonates with you—if you recognize that feeling of fighting against your own operating system, or if you're curious about what patterns might emerge from paying closer attention to your actual energy signature—THE DAILY 5 might be worth exploring.

Day 5 focuses specifically on energy mapping, but the full practice creates the kind of sustained attention that makes these discoveries possible. It's not about optimization or self-improvement in the conventional sense. It's about archaeological work on yourself—careful, patient excavation of who you actually are beneath all the stories you tell yourself about who you should be.

You can find THE DAILY 5 and start your own practice linked below. The energy mapping questions are just the beginning. The real discovery happens in the sustained practice of paying attention, day after day, until the patterns become impossible to ignore.

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more to explore —