✨ The July Follow-Up

Affirmations, reading recs, and how I'm following through this July

Jul 01, 2025

Happy July, my friends!!!

Welcome to The Follow-Up—my way of honoring the past month & looking forward to the month ahead. In it, you’ll find monthly affirmations, media recs, short book reviews, & some other fun surprises.

🔮 Looking Ahead

Can you believe we’re already halfway through 2025?! If you’re anything like me, you might be feeling some pressure to prove yourself—to show that the last six months weren’t a total waste of time.

Here’s a gentle reframe: you are allowed to simply exist. You are not a cog in a machine. You don’t have to earn your keep or constantly justify your presence with productivity.

And if you’re feeling behind, I want to challenge you to think back to who you were at the start of the year. Odds are, you’ve made way more progress than you’re giving yourself credit for. It’s easy to focus on what you haven’t done, but don’t forget everything you have.

You’re still here. You got through the hard days. You did your laundry. You washed your dishes. You paid your bills. You took care of yourself every damn day, and that is no small thing.

As we step into July, I hope you let that truth soften the pressure and quiet the noise. You don’t have to hustle your way into the second half of the year. You can begin with care, with intention, and with courage to keep showing up.

Affirmations for July:

✨ I trust slow progress over performative productivity.
✨ Every time I show up for my creativity, I’m casting a vote for the life I want.
✨ I don’t need a perfect plan to begin. I just need to begin.
✨ I can honor my energy without abandoning my vision.
✨ Following through doesn’t mean forcing it. It means showing up and choosing to trust the process.
✨ My resistance isn’t laziness. I meet it with curiosity, not shame.

🐌 How I’m following through

When I was a senior in college, I had one general education requirement left to check off: humanities. I looked at all of my options, and I was most intrigued by the entrepreneurship class. I signed up, and showed up on my first day, bright eyed and bushy-tailed, excited to learn what it looks like to build something from scratch.

Within the first class, I regretted this decision.

We were divided into groups and told, “These are your business partners for the semester. Between yourselves, assign each person in your group a role: CEO, COO, CFO, CMO.”

I could tell within minutes this class was not for me. First of all, this is not how businesses work. Maybe there are times where fate connects strangers and they form a business instantaneously (I suppose that’s how we ended up with One Direction), but I have a feeling that’s a pretty rare occurrence, all things considered.

It certainly isn’t how I would choose to start a business, and it wasn’t how I wanted to spend a full semester of my final year of school.

I scrambled back to the course catalogue with my tail between my legs, and found one of a handful of classes that sounded promising, fulfilled a humanities credit, and worked with my current class schedule. That class was called Marketing Yourself.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, there are a couple reasons:

The power of no. If I hadn’t decided to say “no thanks, this isn’t for me” to that entrepreneurship class, if I had forced myself to go through with it simply because I signed up, I never would have found Marketing Yourself.
Marketing Yourself ended up being the most influential course I took in undergrad. It introduced me to the concept of a personal brand and why that matters.

The class was taught by one of my favorite professors, Susan Newman. Each week, Susan would ask each of us a simple question: “How did you build your brand this week?”

My brand? What brand??? I thought to myself.

Well, it turns out that each of us (yes, even you) inherently has a brand. Your brand is how you present yourself to people: how you dress, the words you say, how you introduce yourself to strangers, the content you post online, your side projects, your creative whims. It’s all a part of your brand.

This is all to say, I still come back to this question almost every week. Even when I worked as a nanny, even when I was laid off.

I don’t want you to get confused, though. This “brand” that I’m talking about isn’t the same thing as the branding you pick for your social media platforms, your “niche”, or anything like that. I equate this concept more heavily with your values. I guess, the question I really am asking is, “How did you become more you this week?” (or in this case, this month)

Here are a few ways I followed through and built my brand in June:

✍️ Creative Work & Consistency

Rebranded my Substack from The Thought Spiral to Follow Through to better reflect my vision of becoming a more reliable, less anxious version of myself
Posted 5 new articles to Substack
Revisited my outline for Project Ivy, updated it, and fleshed out character profiles
Took Instagram content creation more seriously and built a flexible content plan for the coming weeks
Started exploring ‘cross-pollination’ between Instagram and Substack (this one has been really fun and has taken a lot of planning work out of Instagram for me!)

💼 Professional Growth

Updated my portfolio and resume
Continued applying to jobs and networking
Attended a career workshop at my local public library

🌿 Personal Follow-Through

Spent intentional, quality time with family and friends
Found a new favorite way to be active: my park district’s River Walks—an hour-long stroll through the lazy river (with or against the current), surrounded by community, sunshine, and no screens
Spent some time playing video games and intentionally off of my phone. I know, it’s just a different screen, but I feel better after playing the Sims than I do after doom-scrolling.

What are your goals for July, and how are you planning to follow through? Drop them in the comments if you’re craving a little extra accountability. You got this. Remember, slow and steady.

📖 Book Nook

2025 Reading Goal Update: 14/24

In June, I read…

Throwing Sparks by igsygrace — Again, might be controversial because this series is fanfiction and not traditionally published, but I’ve been reading it on my Kindle, and it’s the same length as the books in the original trilogy, so I feel like it counts! Throwing Sparks follows the events of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, but it’s from the point of view of Peeta. It’s been so interesting re-experiencing this series from his POV, and this second installment was just as incredible and devastating as the first.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌟
Would I recommend it? YES! In fact, I’ve been recommending it to all of my friends and yapping nonstop about it the past month 😅

If you’d like more regular updates on my reading journey, you can add me on Fable!

🌟 Hyper-fixations

This couple makes ~hour long Lo-Fi music videos where they just chill with their pets and make art! My new must have background music while I’m working!

This creator spends his time bringing vintage Coach handbags back to life. The transformations are so satisfying. I could watch his videos for hours!

jxoris

A post shared by @jxoris

Starburst Pops—they’re like Tootsie Pops but with a piece of Starburst in the center. I like to either chew on gum or have a lollipop when I’m doing focused work because I find it helps me really zero-in, and these have become a staple in my office.

The Sims 4 is finally releasing a FAIRIES expansion pack!!! I already know this is going to be a HUGE one for me, and I’m so excited to explore all of the fun new additions to gameplay!

💾 Save these for later

💖 examining my queerness during pride month by

michelle james

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A beautiful reflection on bisexuality and what it means to be queer during pride month.

💖 You don’t need a niche — you need a newsletter by

MJ Mayes

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Fun fact, you can directly trace the line from me listening to the

Internet People

podcast episode about starting a newsletter and the creation of this Substack account! I’ll forever be grateful to MJ’s advice to start a newsletter. It’s opened so many doors for me and helped me reconnect to my creativity in ways I couldn’t have even imagined a year ago.

💖 if you’ve forgotten how to live, start here. by

amber.

💖

You are allowed to begin again. As many times as it takes. Even if your fire has gone out—the ashes remember, they always remember—what it was to burn. Life was always about returning; to your body, to the present, to yourself.

An absolutely stunning essay on connecting to your body, waking up, and trying again.

💖 the gen z resilience drought by

Jordan Stacey

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This one was a big player in me finally deciding to rebrand. Jordan asks a lot of really important questions about what it means to be in community, how to enact change, and why it’s so hard to find the balance between pushing yourself too far and challenging yourself a healthy amount.

💖 The Curse of Being Smart by

Alexis Barber

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Addresses the question “How do we make it easier to be inside our own heads?” with clarity, compassion, and humor. Plus, some great skincare recs!

💖 Propaganda I’m Not Falling For (the Body Edition) by

Chrissy King

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Breaks down some of the dangers of diet culture, challenges myths like needing to get at least 10,000 steps, and ultimately is a fantastic reminder that we should care more about our health than our weight and that those words are NOT interchangeable.