The chart’s clean line was made from days that did not feel clean or linear.

Smoothness is a property of the summary, not of the thing being summarised. A line rising steadily across a year hides the weeks of nothing, the reversals, the days somebody nearly stopped. From far enough away almost any progress looks tidy, which is comforting afterwards and misleading while you are inside it. Feeling messy is not evidence that the shape is wrong.

If your own progress feels unrecognisable beside somebody’s neat chart, plot your last few months at a coarser grain. Compare seasons instead of days. The aim is not to feel better but to see a truer scale.