If you are not where you wanted to be
You might be looking at yourself and saying, “This is not where I expected myself to be at this age.” You were picturing a different (“better”?) job, more money, a family, more friends, a house, a “hotter” body.
As much as I love pointing out that many of these things are checkboxes that our status-oriented society indoctrinates us to want, and that chasing them for the wrong reasons will never bring genuine fulfillment, I also want to acknowledge that it can be completely legitimate to want them. A better job can mean freedom from precarity or better alignment with your values. A house can be the first symbol of generational wealth in your family. A family, while not a substitute for friendship or community, can be a beautiful and complex experience of healing and love. What you describe as a hotter body might really be a stand-in for actually just wanting to feel good in your body and the desire to take better care of it.
If you feel any shame or disappointment as you survey the scene, remember that being human is not easy. You were saddled with challenges that others did not have. Simultaneously, the world has been growing increasingly complex, making it even harder to get the things that we want.
If you want to change your life, start with this: we know that human behavior follows the path of least resistance. We tend to flow downhill in the landscape we inhabit. This is why we often subtly or not so subtly succumb to the judgment of our parents, peers, and strangers on the internet, and why Instagram can sell us something after showing it to us enough times. Free will, if it exists, is not always available.
Building the life you want involves either changing your landscape or climbing uphill. It means discovering whatever modicum of free will we do have, and slowly nurturing it. This means building trust in yourself. Agency, even if it doesn’t exist, is a delusion worth having. Over time it will grow, and you won’t find running up or moving mountains quite as hard.
If you are feeling brave, more power to you, but know that you don’t actually need courage. You don’t need to feel confident or optimistic or capable. You can feel uncertain, miserable, and terrified. (The first year of my coaching business, I felt like shit 80% of the time.) You don’t need to have it all figured out beforehand. What you do need is to simply do. More doing and less thinking. Doing will kick up some trauma and darkness in your soul, so take the time to heal as you go. Less thinking and more feeling. You can feel your way into a sense of safety again. And that will enable you to do once more. You can just take it one step at a time, figure out one little puzzle after another, and go at your own pace. Trust in your ability to show up time after time, to pick yourself up after you stumble, to do the hard work of learning and growing.
If you want to work together on any of this, please reach out. About me: immigrant, Stanford grad, ex-Silicon Valley, and happy expat living in Berlin. I help marginalized folks define and create their own success.
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