There was a stretch of time where my life kept getting shinier on the outside and strangely thinner on the inside. The goals I’d chased for years started lining up: work made sense, money wasn’t a constant headache, weekends didn’t feel like recovery from collapse anymore.
People said things like “You’re in a good place,” and I’d nod, because they weren’t wrong. At the same time, there was this low-level emptiness humming underneath everything that I couldn’t explain without sounding ungrateful.
I tried to outrun it for a while. New targets, upgraded plans, better versions of the same old dreams.
The chase gave me a high, and as long as something was “next,” I didn’t have to sit with the feeling that maybe none of this was actually landing where it mattered.
It took me a long time to admit that I wasn’t chasing passion, I was chasing distraction with better branding.
At some point, the questions got harder to dodge. Not the big philosophical ones, just the small, annoying ones that show up when you’re brushing your teeth or waiting for water to boil.
Is this actually my life, or just the life I got good at building?
Do I want this rhythm, or did I just get good at defending it?
Failure helped more than the wins ever did. When things cracked—plans fell through, certainties evaporated, the version of myself I sold to people stopped matching what I felt inside—it was uncomfortable in a very unglamorous way. No big lesson, no neat turning point. Just a slower, quieter realization that I’d been leaning hard on achievements to avoid asking who I was without them.
Comfort ran on a different frequency. Comfort, in my life, became the season where things looked well put together while I felt increasingly sidelined in my own days. Routines ran smoothly, my calendar behaved, I knew exactly what to expect from most weeks.
From the outside, it passed for stability.
From the inside, it felt like someone had turned the volume down on my curiosity. I caught myself reaching for the familiar option almost by default, not because it was right, but because it didn’t shake anything loose.
The real shift wasn’t some “burn it all down and start over” moment. It was smaller than that, almost boring from the outside.
I started paying more attention to what actually made me feel awake, not just accomplished. Long walks without a podcast. Conversations that left me thinking about them hours later. Mornings where I wasn’t racing the clock. Work that felt aligned, even if nobody else thought it sounded impressive.
It turns out “more” isn’t always about quantity —
Sometimes it’s just about feeling present in your own life again.
The rebellion, for me, isn’t against ambition. It’s against that quiet drift into a life that photographs well but feels strangely out of reach from the inside.
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