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Welcome to my Personal Rebrand series! I’m so excited to finally share my first part to help you along your journey. Please take full advantage of the workshop services provided throughout the series!

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You can want a different life and still be the person standing in your own way.

You can make the Pinterest board, buy the journal, plan the n…

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I want to talk about something that may make some people uncomfortable, while making others feel understood in a way they have struggled to articulate: the experience of being an attractive woman in the workforce, and the complicated reality of having your appearance precede your abilities.

Maybe the discomfort lies in the fact that I am calling myself attractive. But for the sake of this conversation, I am willing to sit with that discomfort. Because as an “attractive” woman, I have learned that there are moments when the very thing the world teaches you to value about yourself can become the thing that complicates your ability to be valued for anything else.

In high school and college, I worked in a restaurant, which, therefore, requires me to discuss no further, as I am sure your thoughts match the interactions. I once attempted to work at a private country club in hopes of increasing my income and connecting with the right people. Within a month, I left because I learned quickly how you earned the bigger tips. When my male boss told me I was in to make a lot of money that night, pointing to the fire pit full of old men smoking cigars who just stumbled to the restaurant patio after a long, exhausting day of golf, I thought, sure, a couple drunk rich guys will do the trick. But my three minutes out there were consumed with conversation about my leggings being so tight, my hair being up, and my eyes being so blue. I didn’t walk away with more money or even a single drink order. But I walked away seeing firsthand what it felt like to be viewed as a product. I went right back up to my boss and requested a different section; he refused and told me that girls wear tight black pants here for a reason, and if I wanted to make money, that was the trade. So that night I also walked away without a job.

I left that experience assuming I was the girl that got away. But I also struggled with feeling like it was my own fault for putting myself in that position and expecting anything different than what I received.

I understand this is not a unique experience, and since then, I have removed myself from the restaurant industry. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see it virtually everywhere else.

And before I continue, let me preface by saying that there is an entire industry built for this kind of business. From OnlyFans to TikTok Shop, there are plenty of ways for females of any age to willingly make money and build a career off the way they look. That is not what I am talking about. If that is your destiny, then go for it.

I am talking about the women who go out in the world and want to build something BEYOND what they look like. The women who want to go be a badass businesswoman because they can communicate and strategize in ways textbooks can’t. The women who want to argue in a courtroom and assert dominance without everyone assuming she slept with someone to represent that case. Or the women who want to climb the corporate ladder because their ambition and drive for success terrify anyone who gets in their way.

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As a young girl, I always had big dreams for myself. The things I feared were never being placed in certain boxes or on certain pedestals because of the way I looked. I never understood the sad reality of attractive women in the workforce until I arrived.

But no one talks about what it is like for the girl who finally arrives at the big girl job after spending years struggling with body image, appearance, and self-love, and she finds out that those very things are still what come before your ability to be a badass businesswoman, a formidable lawyer, or an ambitious corporate climber.

We build movies around this narrative, read about it, see it, then act surprised when it actually happens. Some women have the ability to see past it; some women have the ability to challenge it; some women just want to put their heads down and work but can’t help questioning the narrative.

Circling back to the point I brushed over, I struggled for years with body image and, more explicitly, an eating disorder. But I went to therapy, had a care team, and even went to treatment, for crying out loud. To have gone through the intensive outpatient and inpatient work over the last six years to then be placed in an environment that defines your entire ability to prove yourself based on the way you look. So what do you do? Commit to the version of the world that respects attractive women who are okay with using their looks and appearance to climb to the top. Or stick to every conflicting piece of information about disconnecting self-image from worth that has been nailed into my brain and saved me from death by vanity. Because to some, this may not be the most disturbing piece of what attractive women in the workforce look like, but for someone like me it is.

For someone who spent years being her own worst critic. Framing lies based around what I saw from myself in the mirror. Displaying my opportunities like a carrot on a stick, yet the stick was one long, sick road of anorexia. Yeah, this all may sound harsh, but this is MY reality and the reality I still face today.

I have touched briefly on the fact that I work in a field I had merely dreamt about for years. The price of that? My values and morals. That in itself is a topic for another day, but again, the narrative persists. Attractive women in the workforce are only as good as their appearance.

So now I have to stop feeling like an attractive woman to fairly make my way through the workforce? We all know that can’t be possible, given the extra lengths women already have to go to just to prove themselves in the first place.

This is the part about having a big girl job that I am still trying to understand.

What happens when the very thing you spent years learning not to use as a measure of your worth becomes the thing the world keeps using to measure you? How do you separate your appearance from your identity when other people seem so determined to make the two synonymous? How do you continue building a career on the foundation of your intelligence, ambition, and character when you are constantly reminded that your appearance can enter a room before any of those things ever get the chance?

I don’t want to pretend I have the answers. I am walking through this forest with a dream and curiosity the same way you are. I am still learning how to exist in a world that can make a woman feel simultaneously privileged and powerless because of the same thing.

But I do know that I refuse to spend the rest of my life fighting with my reflection just to make other people more comfortable with my presence.

I refuse to undo six years of work on myself because someone else has decided that my appearance is more interesting than my ability. I refuse to confuse being noticed with being respected, being desired with being valued, or being given an opportunity with having to earn it through something that has nothing to do with my qualifications.

And most importantly, I refuse to believe that the only way to win is to play a game I never wanted to play in the first place.

Maybe being an attractive woman in the workforce means learning to navigate a reality that shouldn’t exist. Maybe it means acknowledging that pretty privilege and prejudice can occupy the same room, sometimes in the same conversation. Maybe it means accepting that I can recognize my appearance without allowing it to become the most important thing about me.

I want to walk into a room and have my ideas challenge people before my appearance does. I want my ambition to be intimidating because of what I am capable of, not because of what someone assumes about me. I want to earn my place without wondering which parts of myself I need to emphasize, conceal, or sacrifice to be taken seriously.

I worked too hard to become a woman who could look in the mirror without tearing herself apart to start doing it all over again for the sake of a career.

And if that makes me difficult to categorize, then maybe I was never meant to fit into an archetype in the first place.

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Working in communications has made me suspicious of anything that looks a little too polished, a little too perfectly worded, and a little too aware of how it will be received. Which is an inconvenient thing considering that your actual job involves making things sound good for a living.

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At some point, wellness became a second job.

Suddenly, drinking water required a $90 limited-edition cup with a color-coded tracking system, getting enough sleep meant purchasing a $300 alarm clock so my circadian rhythm could be managed with red light, and going for a walk evolved into a 12-step protocol involving electrolytes, ankle weights, and a podcast about nervous system regulation.

I just wanted to feel a little better on a Tuesday.

I love wellness. I like feeling good, moving my body, eating food that makes me feel like a functioning member of society, and occasionally pretending that my life resembles the morning routine of someone who has her affairs in order. But I refuse to believe that improving your quality of life should require a complete personality transplant.

The older I get, the more interested I am in the smallest possible changes that make the biggest difference. Not because I’m trying to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of my existence, but because being alive is already a surprisingly demanding administrative position.

These are low-lift wellness hacks I think deserve considerably more attention than another expensive supplement with a name you can’t even pronounce.

1. Take a “fab” (fresh air break)

I don’t care if you're hiking a mountain, walking around the block, sitting on your front steps, or standing in the driveway in yesterday’s sweatshirt wondering if that email sounded too passive-aggressive. Get outside for a while.

We started acting like going outdoors only counts if it involves a scenic trail, matching workout set, and a step goal of 15k.

Meanwhile, I promise you there is perfectly good nature approximately 14 feet from your front door.

When I was in treatment for my eating disorder, we had to earn the privilege of a fab, and even if you were of that caliber, there were only four a day. Over time, the fab became my fifteen minutes of peace. I found so much joy standing outside in a parking lot in the middle of nowhere, without a phone, and my only focus being on soaking up every second of being outside. I actually went outside and spent time looking for a four-leaf clover and found exactly that.

Natural daylight helps regulate your body’s internal clock, which plays a role in sleep and alertness. A little outdoor movement can also be a well-deserved break from sitting inside all day. You don’t need to turn it into the most aesthetic event possible.

The point is to give yourself a change of scenery without making it a whole production.

The Hack: attach outside time to something you already do: drink your morning coffee outside, take a five-minute walk after lunch, or take a call with someone out in the sun.

2. Put your phone somewhere mildly inconvenient.

Not in a safe. not at the bottom of a lake. Just somewhere that requires you to get up and walk to.

We tend to treat our attention like a character flaw when, in reality, our environments are designed to compete for it. If your phone is beside you, unlocked, glowing, offering 47 different opportunities to abandon your train of thought, ignoring it becomes considerably harder.

Instead of relying on an extraordinary amount of willpower, introduce a tiny amount of friction.

Charge it across the room while you work. Leave it in your bag during lunch. Move your most distracting apps off your home screen. Let your bedroom be a place where your brain isn’t receiving breaking news about somebody else’s night out.

You do not need to become a woman who has never experienced dopamine. You just need to stop letting a rectangle make every decision about what you pay attention to.

The Hack: Pick one daily activity during which your phone lives somewhere else. Start with 20 minutes. You can survive without checking whether someone you haven't spoken to since 2018 viewed your Instagram story.

3. Develop a signature waiting room personality

You know those weird little gaps in the day. Waiting for your coffee? Sitting in the car before you go inside? Waiting for your boyfriend to finish explaining something in football that definitely required a diagram and PowerPoint presentation.

We have become so uncomfortable with unoccupied time that we immediately fill it with our phones.

Try letting one of those gaps remain empty.

Look around. Listen to the music playing in the store. Think about what you want for dinner. Stare into the distance.

You don’t have to turn every spare minute into an opportunity to consume information or improve yourself. Boredom, daydreaming, and unstructured time can have value too.

The Hack: choose one recurring waiting period each day when you don’t automatically reach for your phone. Let yourself be a person standing in place for absolutely no reason other than the fact that you have to wait there.

4. Become the concierge for your future self

I am a huge believer in doing one tiny favor for the version of yourself who will exist tomorrow morning.

Not an entire Sunday reset. Not a three-hour preparation ritual that requires you to recover from preparing for the week.

One favor.

Put your keys where you can find them. Fill the coffee maker. Set out the clothes you actually want to wear. Put your lunch in the front of the fridge instead of behind the random ingredients you seem to never find when you need it.

The trick is to stop making your future self solve problems that your current self could eliminate in 30 seconds.

Think of it as being your own personal assistant, except the pay is terrible and your boss is also you.

The Hack: Every evening, ask yourself, “What is one annoying thing I can make easier for tomorrow me?”

5. Have a two-song emotional support walk.

This one might be my personal favorite.

Some days, a 45-minute walk sounds lovely. Other days, the idea of putting on shoes and leaving the house feels like an unreasonable demand from management.

That's where the two-song walk comes in.

Choose two songs you love. Walk until they end. That’s it.

You can continue if you feel like it, but make the deal to commit to the two songs. And you can change the songs with the season, your mood, or your current obsession. Have multiple two-song playlists ready for whatever the vibe is.

Give yourself those two songs to breathe, take in your surroundings, and give yourself a virtual hug. Movement doesn’t have to be punishment. Let it be a time for your brain to reset before you keep going.

The Hack: Keep a specific playlist of two songs always ready for when you need to hit the reset button.

6. Stop turning a bad day into a bad identity.

I think we could all start doing a little more of this.

You can have a terrible night’s sleep without deciding your entire routine is broken. You can miss a workout without declaring you have lost all discipline. You can eat differently than you planned, have a difficult conversation, or spend a day feeling insecure without turning it into a referendum on your progress.

One imperfect day is not evidence that you’ve failed at being a person.

A sustainable routine needs room for the days when you are tired, busy, sad, distracted, or simply not operating at your usual capacity.

Instead of asking yourself how to get back to being perfect, ask yourself what the next supportive choice could be.

Maybe go to bed earlier. Eat a more satisfying meal. Stop analyzing yourself and go watch a stupid reality TV show.

The point is to respond to yourself with care instead of punishment.

The Hack: When a day goes sideways, replace “I’ve ruined my routine” with “What’s one thing that would help me feel a little better right now?”

The real low-lift wellness hack is making your life easier to live.

I’m not against elaborate routines. If waking up early, journaling, going to the gym, and making a beautiful breakfast genuinely makes your life better, then keep doing that!

But I don't think wellness should become another arena in which we get to feel inadequate.

It's deeply ironic to try to improve your well-being through a routine that leaves you stressed, behind, and convinced you’re doing everything wrong.

The most useful habits are often the ones that fit into the life you already have. They don’t require you to become a completely different person to begin.

Put your phone further away. Get some fresh air. Make tomorrow include one less step. Do something fun without making it productive. Let a bad day be a bad day without turning it into a personality analysis.

You don't need to optimize every minute of your existence to deserve feeling good in it.

Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is stop making your life so difficult to maintain.

And if all you accomplish today is drinking some water, getting a little fresh air, and going to bed without mentally prosecuting yourself for the last six hours?

Honestly, that’s a pretty respectable Tuesday.

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you could spend your entire life correcting people’s versions of you.

the friend who thinks your selfish. the person who decided you were cold after one conversation. the people who knew you before you grew up and still talk about you as if you are frozen in that particular year of your life. you can explain yourself, soften the edges, provide context, or remind them of everything they didn’t see.

You can spend years auditioning for the role of a good person in someone else’s story.

or you could let them be wrong about you.

because there will always be someone who misunderstands you. someone who meets you during the wrong season of life. someone who mistakes your boundaries for cruelty, your self-assurance for arrogance, or your growth for a personality change they were not invited to witness.

then, at some point, constantly proving that you are good starts to become its own kind of self-abandonment.

incase no one ever told you: your allowed to go through change without issuing a press release.

your allowed to outgrow a version of yourself that someone else still loves. your allowed to leave a bad impression behind you without chasing after the person who holds it and begging them to reconsider.

And some people will never know who you become.

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This is the hardest part to accept, especially if you have spent most of your life trying to be understood. when someone accuses you of something you know you are not, your first instinct is to defend yourself. when someone you once knew believes the worst about you, you want to hand them every piece of evidence that proves they are wrong. you want to explain the circumstances, the person you were then, the person you are now, and every detail that might finally make the truth obvious.

being misunderstood feels unfair. and it is. but fairness does not guarantee that you will get to correct the record.

sometimes, the person who brought out the worst in you will become the person who defines you in someone else’s mind. sometimes you will hear one side of a story and never feel the need to hear yours. sometimes, you will become a villain in a narrative you never agreed to be part of, and no amount of explaining will convince someone who has already made up their mind.

you have to learn to live with that.

not because your character doesn’t matter, but because it matters too much to spend your life placing it in the hands of people who have already made up their minds about you.

there is a difference between taking accountability for who you have been and feeling obligated to convince everyone that you have changed. one requires honesty, and the other requires an audience.

and if you have genuinely grown, you will eventually have to accept that some people will never update their understanding of you. they may continue to associate you with the worst decision, your most difficult season, or the version of yourself you have worked incredibly hard to leave behind. you can regret who you were without agreeing to remain that person in perpetuity.

you do not owe every person who has misunderstood you a front-row seat to your redemption.

there is power in becoming comfortable with the possibility that someone, somewhere, has the wrong idea about you. that someone might dislike you for a reason that does not reflect your character, that a person you once wanted to impress may never think highly of you. that you can do everything in your power to be a good person and still be the bad guy in somebody’s story.

you can be misunderstood and still be at peace with yourself. you can be disliked without turning it into a referendum on your character. you can know that you have changed without needing the people who knew you before to acknowledge it.

because the truth it, you will never have complete control over who you are in other people’s minds; you only have complete control over who you are when no one is watching, what you take responsibility for, and what you choose to do differently the next time.

let people have their opinions.l let them tell their stories. let them remember you incorrectly, if that is what they choose to do.

you do not have to spend your life trying to make every witness testify in your favor.

at some point, you have to decide whether you want t

o be free or whether you want to be understood by everyone. because sometimes, you can not have both.

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As an attempt to shift the focus from believing that success is based on a woman’s physical appearance, I have started to think that the women who get furthest in life are not the smartest, skinniest, or most accomplished women in the room. Sometimes they are simply the women who decided they were going to start taking themselves seriously.

There is almost something offensive about a woman who believes in herself before she has the resume to prove she should.

We tend to think confidence comes from accomplishments. You accomplish something, people recognize it, and eventually you develop enough evidence to believe that you are capable. But I think some women reverse that process and quietly make their way to the top. They develop an almost unreasonable amount of faith in themselves first, and that faith permits them to attempt things they would otherwise talk themselves out of. The confidence does not come from knowing they will succeed. It comes from knowing that they would rather try and fail than spend their lives wondering what might have happened if they had.

Women are taught to wait for proof. We are encouraged to become prettier before we feel beautiful, more qualified before we speak with authority, more successful before we call ourselves ambitious. There is always another benchmark that supposedly needs to be reached before we are allowed to feel secure in our own skin. And let’s not forget women are also taught to be aware of how they are perceived; it becomes incredibly easy to spend more time evaluating yourself than actually building a life.

That is where self-obsession stops being a flaw and starts becoming something interesting.

Self-obsession doesn’t have to be about thinking you are better than everyone else. Maybe sometimes being sufficiently interested in your own life that you stop allowing everyone else’s opinions to dictate where your next thought comes from gives you the ability to realize just how important YOU are in your own life.

A woman who is genuinely invested in herself does not need every decision to be understood. She can take a job because it moves her closer to something she wants; she can want a bigger life without having every moment planned out, and she can say no without reassurance to the things she doesn’t value.

And maybe that woman is difficult to categorize because she isn’t constantly asking people for permission. That is one of the most uncomfortable things about female confidence.

We like confidence when it is justified. We are comfortable with the woman who has the impressive degree, the beautiful body, the successful career, the money, the experience, and then carries herself with confidence because, according to everyone else, she has earned it. What makes people uncomfortable is the woman who carries herself that way before she has any of those things.

She has not been given the evidence that she should believe in herself; she just decided that she should.

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There is a big difference between arrogance and self-trust, and I think women are often afraid to discover where that line is. Arrogance requires believing you are better than other people. Self-trust requires something much more glamorous: believing you can figure things out even when you do not have all the answers yet.

You do not have to be the prettiest girl in the room to walk into it without apologizing for being there. You just have to be willing to take yourself seriously before the rest of the world does.

We should also be careful about treating confidence as an individual project. It is difficult to become deeply secure in yourself when you are constantly surrounded by people who benefit from your insecurity. The environment around you matters. So does the company you keep.

I want to cultivate a life surrounded by women who are a little self-obsessed in the best way possible. Women who can celebrate another woman’s success without immediately comparing it to their own. Women who encourage each other to go after their vision, apply for the job, leave the relationship, or simply ask for more. Women who do not treat other women’s confidence as a threat to their own.

There is something powerful about being around women who have stopped competing for the same tiny definition of what a successful woman is supposed to look like. When one woman decides she doesn’t want to conform, it permits another woman to question what she has been conforming to already. Eventually, you create an environment where nobody has to shrink simply because everyone else is standing up.

That, to me, is a much more interesting kind of female empowerment. Not telling women to become identical versions of some ideal confident woman, but creating enough space for each woman to become herself completely.

Maybe, self obsession is, at its healthiest, is the refusal to abandon yourself.

It is paying enough attention to your own life to know what you want from it, instead of assuming you have to be grateful and accept whatever happens to you.

That is why self obsessed women get ahead. They know what happens for them vs. what happens to them, and they are less willing to let other people’s expectations become the boundaries of their lives.

Someone will always think you are dreaming too big, changing too much, asking for too much, or becoming too much. There will always be a version of you that would make other people more comfortable.

But you only get one life to become the woman you actually want to be.

So maybe we should stop teaching women to spend so much time wondering whether everyone else likes who they are and start teaching them to become someone they like living with.

Because the woman who takes herself seriously does not need to be the most impressive person in the room.

She needs to believe the room she is currently standing in does not have to be the biggest one she ever enters.

You often hear from people who have just merely escaped the abyss of death, and they talk about how they started living differently, what shifted in perspective for them, and what led them to pursue the belief that their purpose escaped the grip of death for a reason only they will understand.

Their stories usually have a common thread: when they came face-to-face with the possibility of losing their life, they suddenly understood how much they had been missing while living it.

Let me tell you about the time I sat on the brink of death, and the only thing I could think about was figuring out a way to still make it to D.C. and complete the internship I had worked so hard to get, or the fact that I was going to get fat.

Yes, those were the two things running through my head.

My dad looked his daughter in the face, tears in his eyes, and told me that he couldn’t lose me. I wasn’t thinking about all the places I hadn’t travelled to yet. I wasn’t thinking about the things I hadn’t experienced yet.

I was thinking about my internship.

And my body.

Luckily, a lot of perspective growth has taken place since that one fearful Friday afternoon over a year ago. Yet, I still listen to stories of people finding themselves face to face with death, and their thoughts surround the things they wish they did or wish they said.

And I think about how different my experience was.

I wasn’t as afraid of dying as I was afraid of the fact that I had to send an email to my internship supervisor and let her know that they must give my spot to someone else because I couldn’t figure out how to feed myself to stay alive.

I was more afraid of failing than I was dying. And that is hard to admit.

In that moment, I had a severe case of Optimism Bias, a term I learned during my senior year of AP Psychology. I knew exactly what it meant. I knew I fit the criteria perfectly. And yet, I still refused to believe that it applied to me.

I thought to myself as I faced a very real and very scary near-death experience, “I won’t actually die; that doesn’t happen to people like me,” as I lay in a hospital bed as a severely anorexic 2o year old girl.

That is what optimism bias does; it creates this strange distance between knowing something is possible and believing it could actually happen to you.

And so I carried on thinking about my internship, how I was going to white-knuckle my way through treatment so I could get out and go back to doing the same thing that got me in there in the first place, and seriously, how was I going to graduate college if I didn’t get the credits and experience from my internship.

Looking back, this sounds very selfish and self-absorbed. But underneath the internship and the fear of weight gain, there was something else entirely. I was terrified.

Terrified about moving away from my family for the first time. Terrified about what my family would think of me. What my friends would say about me. What my dogs would think when my bedroom door stayed closed for the next three months.

Because while I was so busy worried about everything else I might lose, I nearly lost sight of the one thing I was already losing: my life.

After settling into the fact that I was sick, I needed medical help, and I needed to focus on larger things than an internship, I started to understand something about myself that I hadn’t wanted to see before.

I had spent so much time incapable of believing that I would actually ever become sick enough that I had stopped recognizing myself as someone who could actually be in danger.

We know our lives could change in an instant, but no one ever actually believes it. Until it happens.

But I often find myself coming back to that moment of needing to put things into perspective in order to see the bigger picture. Eventually, I started to realize this was turning into one of those situations where the easy choices lead to a hard life and the hard choices lead to an easy life. I had to make the hard choice, which was to eat the sandwich (literally & figuratively). I had to bring myself back to health. I had to let go of the idea that taking care of myself meant giving up on something else.

I had to accept that sometimes the thing you're most afraid of losing is the very thing keeping you from living.

I don’t think my five-year battle with anorexia that led me to a near-death experience suddenly gave me some profound purpose. What I do know is that I was given a perspective I never would have chosen myself. Having plans doesn’t make you invincible, and knowing something could happen to you doesn’t make it less likely to happen.

I thought I was the exception. I thought I would never become sick enough. And maybe that’s the part that stays with me the most because I still catch myself doing it. I still put things off. I still save things for a later time when I am more ready. I still catch myself waiting for the right moment. But now I recognize the thought for what it is: I’ll have more time.

Maybe I will. But I don’t know that I will. And neither does anyone else.

I think back to that Friday afternoon sometimes. I think about the girl lying in the hospital bed who was worried about an internship she thought she couldn’t miss, who was terrified of gaining weight, who was worried about graduating, and disappointing everyone. She was so consumed with protecting the future she thought she needed to have that she couldn’t see what was happening to the person who was supposed to live it.

And maybe that is what I needed to understand all along. The internship wasn’t the important thing. My weight wasn’t the important thing. Even my future, which I was trying so desperately to prepare, wasn’t the most important thing. I was.

Not the future version of me. Not the more successful version. Not the thinner version. Not the version who finally had everything figured out. Just me, exactly as I was, sitting in that hospital bed and still having a life waiting for me.

I used to think that living meant eventually getting to the point where everything felt right. Where I was successful enough, confident enough, healthy enough, and comfortable enough in my own life to actually enjoy it. Now, I think living is much less about arriving at some perfect version of yourself and much more about recognizing that the life you’re constantly waiting for is already happening around you.

I used to think people who came close to death were given some kind of clarity that the rest of us spend our whole lives searching for. I understand it differently now. I sat on the brink of death and worried about everything except the fact that I was alive. I was focused on the future I thought I needed, and I almost lost the chance to even have one.

I don’t think surviving gave me all the answers, and I don’t think it was some sign that I was meant for something extraordinary. The signs were there all along. I think it simply gave me the chance to understand something I had spent years forgetting: I was already living the life I kept waiting to start.

I think one of the strangest parts of growing up is realizing that the future does not arrive when you finally become the person you imagined you would be.

A relationship becomes serious. A place starts to feel like home. A career you once hoped for becomes your blank canvas. You begin making decisions with a life in mind that, not long ago, existed only in your imagination.

For a long time, I thought the future would arrive all at once. I thought there would be some distinct moment when I finally felt like I had become the person I was supposed to be.

I don’t think that’s how it happens.

I think sometimes your life begins to reveal itself in quieter ways.

You wake up one morning and realize that something you used to hope for no longer feels like a distant possibility. It feels like something that could actually be yours.

Maybe that is one of the most beautiful parts of getting older. The things you once could only imagine begin to take shape around you, and suddenly the life you are living feels less like a waiting room for something better and more like something worth being completely present for.

Sometimes the future becomes something you are living and stops become something you are waiting for without even realizing.

This idea has crossed my mind a lot recently.

About how easy it is to rush through your own life because you are so convinced that the next version of it will be better. We try and rush through the pain because we know our endurance will amount to something on the other end. We are constantly encouraged to improve ourselves, build something, become something, get somewhere. And there is nothing wrong with ambition. I love ambition. I love having somewhere to go.

But sometimes I wonder if the most important parts of a life are the ones we are least capable of planning for.

There are certain things you cannot manifest into existence by wanting them badly enough. You cannot schedule the moment a stranger becomes familiar to you. You cannot decide when a place will start to feel like home, or when a person will become so deeply threaded through your days that imagining your life before them requires actual effort.

Love is strange because it rarely feels like the beginning of a life while it’s happening.

There is no announcement when someone crosses the line from being a person you love into being part of the architecture of your life. It happens through accumulation. A thousand ordinary moments begin to stack on top of each other until you realize you have built an entire private world with another person without ever consciously deciding to.

You know the sound of their footsteps. You know which stories they tell too often and which ones only come out when they are nostalgic. You know what they will order when they say they do not care where you eat. You know the face they make when they are listening but pretending they are not. You know the look they give you across a crowded room that somehow holds an entire conversation.

None of these things would sound important on their own.

That is what makes them important.

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A person slowly becomes embedded in the smallest parts of your life until loving them is no longer just about how you feel when you are together. They become the way you experience the world. A restaurant becomes your restaurant. A story becomes one you have told each other so many times that the details barely matter anymore. A random day on the calendar becomes one shared between the two of you.

You do not wake up one morning and decide, this person is now a part of the life I am building.

You simply wake up one morning and realize they already are.

And there is a particular level of intimacy in being known without having to introduce yourself.

Someone knows what you sound like when you’re overwhelmed. They know the things you overthink. They know the stories you have told a hundred times and the parts you still struggle to tell at all. They know the version of you that exists before makeup, before the good mood, before you have brushed your teeth, before you have decided what kind of day you are going to have.

And somehow, being seen that closely does not make you want to become more impressive. It makes you want to stay.

Maybe that’s why after spending so much of my life trying to understand myself, there is something deeply calming about being understood by someone else.

I have known what it is like to live too long inside my head. To make small things enormous. To question feelings after I have already felt them. To convince myself that if I could just understand myself perfectly, I would finally know how to move through the world without getting lost in it.

Then there is a strange experience of having someone beside you who does not need a perfect explanation for everything.

There is no grand lesson in that. It is simply a beautiful thing to be known by another human being and still have room to be human.

And, perhaps, that is why my imagination of the future has changed so quietly.

For years I have envisioned myself as a mother. But when I thought about what that could look like, I could only picture the outline. A baby, a house, a kitchen, little clothes, a family gathered around the table. I could imagine the feeling of wanting it without knowing what it would mean to actually live it.

Without warning, life placed a person inside that picture. That changes everything.

Suddenly, motherhood isn’t only an idea about the kind of woman I might become; it is a scene I can see more clearly. How I want to nurture my kids, the importance of maintaining a strong family connection, and two people looking at each other with the exhausted disbelief of having somehow created an entire human being’s life together.

Maybe the future becomes less frightening when it stops being empty. And I think there is something beautiful about allowing yourself to imagine that far ahead.

Not because you know it will happen exactly that way; you don’t. But because there is a particular kind of freedom in letting yourself want things before you know whether you will get them.

We are so accustomed to protecting ourselves from disappointment that we sometimes mistake emotional distance for wisdom.

We call it being realistic. We call it having standards. We call it not getting our hopes up.

But there is a difference between knowing that life is uncertain and refusing to let yourself be delighted by it.

I want to be the person who gets embarrassingly excited about her own life. Who lets a good morning be a good morning without wondering when it will end or what I did to “deserve” it. Who lets herself love someone deeply and unapologetically, because the feeling of loving and being loved deserves a celebration every day.

Because there is something almost sacred about being able to say, I am happy here, while knowing that life could still change.

I don’t want to spend my life waiting until I feel sufficiently certain, sufficiently anything, before I allow myself to enjoy it.

Maybe growing up is not becoming the person you once imagined you would be.

Maybe it’s realizing that she has been forming quietly all along.

In the relationship you did not know would matter. In the places you never expected to call home. In the work that became yours. In the ordinary Tuesday nights that somehow became memories you know you will miss someday.

And maybe that is why I do not want to rush this part.

There will always be another version of my life to imagine. Another city. Another job. Another apartment. Another year. There will always be something ahead of me that I can turn into a fantasy and convince myself I will finally feel complete once I get there.

But I do not want to become so interested in the life I might have that I miss the one I actually have.

I want to remember what it felt like to be young and deeply in love. To miss someone who was just around my waist. To hear their voice at the end of a long day and feel my entire body recognize home. To look across the room and think, without needing to say it, there you are.

Because the future doesn’t begin when you finally arrive at the life you have been imagining.

Maybe it begins the moment you realize you are already living inside it.

And for once, I do not want to rush ahead and find out what happens next.

I want to stay here long enough to notice.

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I have always been a disciplined person. By the end of high school, I was already accustomed to working hard, staying busy, and expecting a lot from myself. In college, that only intensified. I worked multiple jobs, kept up with school, took on leadership opportunities, was consistent in the gym, and was constantly looking for what I could do next.

None of that felt particularly extraordinary to me at the time. It was simply how I operated. If something mattered to me, I worked for it.

The problem was not that I was doing too much. The problem was that I rarely felt like I was doing enough.

I could look at everything I had accomplished and still find the thing I hadn’t done yet. I could have a productive day but still obsess over the things I could have accomplished instead. I could be further ahead than most people my age and somehow still feel like I am a step behind.

That is where your relationship with discipline needs to change.

What began as ambition gradually became an obsession with being disciplined enough. I started creating increasingly specific expectations for how I should spend my time, how I should take care of myself, how I should appear, and what a good day was “supposed” to look like. When I followed everything exactly, I felt like I was on track. And when I didn’t, anxiety filled the silence with the relentless feeling that I had missed something, and I was one step behind the life I was supposed to be living.

The irony was that I wasn’t behind at all.

I was just constantly moving the goalpost. Thank you, social media and society, for creating a goalpost that never stays in place for longer than five seconds.

And with that, we have turned discipline into a measure of worth.

There is a reason this can happen so easily, especially now.

We’re suffocated by a culture that has turned productivity into a measuring stick for how well we are succeeding at life. We are constantly surrounded by reminders of what we could be doing better, how much more we could accomplish, how many more hours we can maximize, and how much further we could work ahead if we simply worked a little harder. The more disciplined you are, the more productive you appear; the more productive you appear, the more successful you must be. At some point, productivity stops being something we do and starts becoming something we depend on. We become addicted to doing more while overlooking any of the progress we have already made.

The message is rarely explicitly harmful. Most of what we are encouraged to do is objectively good: move your body, work hard, eat nourishing food, get enough sleep, build a career, accomplish your goals, and develop healthy habits. The problem is what happens when all of those things become measurements instead of choices.

You probably haven’t noticed, but you stop asking whether something is actually helping you and you start asking if you're doing it correctly. Instead of being proud that you worked hard your wishing you could have worked harder. Instead of appreciating what you accomplished, you immediately begin thinking about the next thing you need to accomplish to justify feeling proud of yourself.

Then, hustle culture enters the picture, and suddenly, doing more starts to feel like the only way to prove we are doing enough.

It doesn’t necessarily convince us to do unhealthy things. Sometimes it takes healthy things and teaches us to use them without limits.

Work hard becomes work constantly. Move your body becomes never missing a workout. Eat well becomes never having a slice of cake. Have goals becomes always working towards the next one. Self-care becomes something you squeeze in with whatever time is left over.

Eventually, these habits that are meant to make your life better can start making your life feel like one long never-ending to-do list.

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The most difficult kind of pressure is the pressure that looks productive.

I think this is why conversations about mental health and productivity need to overlap more.

We are generally good at identifying when something looks destructive. We know that being overwhelmed, exhausted, or consumed by anxiety can be signs that something isn’t working. But how can something not be working if you're doing all the right things?

What is harder to recognize is when the same underlying pressure is producing impressive results.

You can have a demanding job yet still believe you aren't working hard enough. You can exercise regularly and eat well while becoming increasingly rigid about what happens when you don’t. You can build this impressive life while feeling like you're failing to keep up with it.

From the outside, these things look like discipline.

Internally, they feel completely different.

That doesn’t mean discipline causes mental illness, and it doesn't mean ambition should be treated like something you need to fix. It means that productivity is not proof of well-being. A behavior can help you accomplish something and still deserve to be examined if the pressure behind it is making your life smaller.

For anyone who tends toward perfectionism, anxiety, obsessive thinking, or an intense desire to stay in control, this distinction is important to make. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate those parts of yourself or stop caring about achievement and working hard. It should be to make sure your ambition is working for you rather than becoming a system you are afraid of stepping out of.

There is a difference between discipline and rigidity

I still believe that discipline matters.

Discipline is what allows you to do something difficult because you know it matters more than how you feel in one particular moment. It is how you finish the degree, apply for the job, or go to the gym when you would rather be sleeping. But discipline becomes something else when the rules become more important than the reason you created them.

If you built a routine to become healthier, but you feel guilty whenever you can’t follow it perfectly, then the routine no longer serves its purpose.

If you set goals to create a life you are excited about, but hold yourself to unrealistic expectations along the way, you end up spending so much time trying to become the person you think you should be that you stop enjoying the life you are truly trying to build.

If you are working hard because you genuinely care about what you're building, that is one thing. If you are working hard because slowing down makes you feel worthless, that is something else entirely.

Learning to tell the difference is where I think healthier discipline begins.

Your body should be a part of the equation

One of the biggest things I am learning is that discipline cannot mean ignoring yourself.

Your body is constantly serving you information. Some days you have the energy to withstand more. Some days you need more sleep. Sometimes you need energy from a real meal and not another coffee. Your capacity changes because you are a human being, not a machine that is supposed to perform at the same level every day.

A rigid definition of discipline leaves very little room for that reality.

A healthier definition allows you to respond to it.

That might look like sticking to your workout when you are simply unmotivated, while also recognizing when you are genuinely exhausted. It might mean maintaining healthy eating habits without turning one spontaneous meal into a reason to feel like you have ruined everything. It might mean having a productive morning and then letting yourself have an afternoon where you do absolutely nothing useful.

None of those choices erase your discipline.

In fact, I think being able to make them without spiraling requires a deeper kind of discipline because you have to trust yourself without a checklist telling you that you are doing everything correctly.

Maybe being disciplined should make you feel less behind

That is the part I wish I understood earlier.

If you are constantly working, constantly setting goals, constantly improving, and constantly trying to become better, but you still feel behind, the answer is not that you need to work harder.

You need to stop moving the finish line.

There will always be something else you could accomplish. There will always be someone waking up earlier, working longer, earning more, or seemingly figuring out life faster. If your definition of success depends on the speed of eliminating failure, you will never actually arrive anywhere.

I don’t want to lose my discipline. I don't want to become someone who has no goals or standards or desire to do something great with my life. Those qualities have taken me places I am incredibly grateful for.

What I want is to use them differently.

I want discipline to help me pursue my potential without making me feel guilty for being human along the way. I want to work hard because I care about the career I am building, not because I think that resting means I am falling behind. I want to take care of my body because I want to live long and well, not because every day needs to prove I am disciplined.

There is a version of ambition that constantly asks, what else can I do more of?

I still want the ambition.

I just want to pair it with the ability to recognize when I have already done enough for today.

Because sometimes the most disciplined thing you can do is keep going.

And sometimes it is finally allowing yourself to realize that you are already a step ahead.

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For a long time, I have confused the two.

I thought being considerate meant considering others’ feelings before my own. I thought being loving meant being accommodating. I thought being a good friend, daughter, coworker, or person in general meant making sure everyone around me was comfortable with the decisions I made. Somewhere along the way, I became very good at anticipating what other people might need from me before I had even stopped to ask myself what I needed from myself.

There is an addictive kind of safety in being agreeable. When you become familiar with making yourself smaller, softer, easier, and more predictable, you become very good at avoiding conflict. You learn which opinions are worth keeping to yourself, which decisions will require an unwanted explanation, and which version of yourself would be easiest for people to love.

The problem is that eventually you have to live with the person making all of those compromises. And that person is you.

When I was a freshman in high school, I finally had the big friend group everyone wanted to be a part of. The “popular” group, if you will. It was strange because I had never even said a curse word before, and the kind of things involved in that lifestyle went far beyond using a curse word. Yet, somehow, I shrunk myself into a version that fit in there.

I knew what people said about us, but I stayed quiet. I learned what to say, what not to say, when to speak up and when it was easier not to. I wasn’t necessarily afraid of the people in the room. I was afraid of being the person they didn’t want in it.

Looking back, I think that was one of my first experiences with the kind of people-pleasing that follows you long after just freshman year. I learned that being liked could feel safer than being honest, and that disappointing people or going against the consensus could feel worse than disappointing yourself.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but I was already learning something I would have to unlearn later: that keeping everyone happy was not the same thing as being content with who you are.

I have started to wonder how much of people-pleasing is actually about being afraid of other people’s reactions and how much of it is about being afraid of our own reactions to those reactions.

Because sometimes we know exactly what we want to say. We know we don’t want to go. We know we disagree. We know something doesn’t feel right anymore. We know we want to leave, change directions, set a boundary, ask for more, or simply say NO.

And then the guilt arrives.

Suddenly, the decision we were completely comfortable making five minutes ago feels selfish. We start rewriting the conversation in our heads. We think about how disappointed someone might be, whether they will misunderstand us, whether they will think we have changed, whether they will be angry, whether we could just tolerate a situation a little longer so nobody feels uncomfortable.

So, we abandon the decision before anyone else even has the chance to react.

I think this is where people-pleasing becomes more complicated than simply wanting everyone to like you. It becomes a way of managing your own emotions through other people.

If I can keep everyone happy, maybe I won’t feel guilty.

If I can make everyone understand, maybe I won’t feel anxious.

If nobody is disappointed in me, maybe I can be certain that I haven't done anything wrong.

But life simply doesn’t work that way.

Eventually there will be a decision where doing what is right for you means someone else doesn’t understand. There will be a boundary that makes someone uncomfortable. There will be a version of your life that someone else preferred for you. There will be a moment when you have to disappoint someone you genuinely love.

But, say this with me: their disappointment does not automatically mean YOU made the wrong decision.

We live in a culture that has become much better at talking about mental health, and I am grateful for that. We have more language for anxiety, burnout, boundaries, trauma, stress, and the ways our minds respond to difficult experiences. We have become more willing to admit that struggling is not a character flaw.

But sometimes I wonder if somewhere in this constant pursuit of feeling better, we have also become less willing to simply feel something difficult.

Sometimes guilt means you have done something you regret. Sometimes it means you have finally stopped doing something that everyone else was comfortable receiving from you.

There is a difference between pain that is warning you and discomfort that is asking you to grow.

Learning that difference is one of the most important things you can do in your twenties.

Because if every uncomfortable feeling becomes a reason to retreat, we can accidentally build our entire lives around emotional avoidance. We choose the job that makes everyone proud instead of the one that makes us curious. We keep the friendships alive because ending them feels mean. We say yes because saying no makes our stomach turn. We keep opinions to ourselves because being misunderstood feels worse than being dishonest with ourselves.

Eventually, we can become incredibly good at living a life that nobody else has a problem with. And still feel like something is missing.

I don’t think the answer is to not care what everyone else thinks. That advice has never felt particularly realistic to me. Other people’s opinions matter. The people we love matter. Their feelings matter. Being considerate matters. There is nothing inherently unhealthy about wanting to be loved, understood, or accepted.

The goal isn't becoming someone who can hurt people without caring.

The goal is becoming someone who can care about another person’s feelings without automatically making those feelings your responsibility.

There is a difference between “I disappointed someone” and “I am disappointing.”

One describes something that happened. The other describes who you are.

People-pleasing thrives in the space between the two. We take someone's temporary disappointment and turn it into evidence about our character. We take someone’s disagreement and interpret it as rejection. We take someone’s frustration and immediately assume we have done something wrong.

But other people are allowed to have feelings about our choices. And our feelings can contradict theirs.

I think becoming an adult is learning that you cannot build a life around keeping everyone else’s version of you intact.

At some point you have to become willing to trust yourself enough to sit with the discomfort that comes after choosing yourself.

I don’t want to become so afraid of making other people uncomfortable that I stop being honest with myself. I don’t want to spend years carefully constructing a life that looks good from the outside because I was too afraid to disappoint people watching.

But here is what I have learned: you can be a good person without being a person who keeps everyone happy. You just have to become willing to disappoint people.

Not because their feelings don’t matter.

But because yours do, too.

I have been thinking a lot about how strange it is that we can spend so much of our lives trying to figure out who we are, only to realize later on that sometimes the person we think we are is just a collection of all the things that happened to us.

A bad experience becomes an insecurity. Insecurity becomes a habit. Habit becomes a personality trait, and eventually we stop giving thought to any of it.

We say, “That’s just who I am,” when it should really be, “This is who I was taught to be,” and believe me, I take full responsibility for hacking the truth by saying that is just “who I am,” but I never sat back to think about why I claim to be the way I am. Do I have to be that way?

And most of the time, we learned it from somewhere. We learned it from the things that came easily to us and the things that didn’t, from the people who made us feel seen to the people who made us feel like we were not enough. We learned it from the rooms that we felt like we belonged in and the rooms that made us feel small and lost. Little by little, these experiences became evidence. Evidence about whether we are smart, likeable, confident, talented, interesting, capable. Eventually, we stop remembering that these were the conclusions we made and start treating them like facts.

It led me to think about how, when I look back at my younger self, I easily could have passed off my circumstances for my identity. I wasn’t the smartest in the room; I wasn’t the girl with the most friends; I wasn’t the girl who had one obvious talent or one thing that seemed to come naturally to me. I started at an all-girls private school, which sounds like the beginning of a very polished academic success story. Instead, I mostly came out with anxiety, an early education in how mean girls can be, and the feeling that I didn’t quite fit anywhere. I carried that feeling with me, and like a lot of people do, I started using what had happened to me to explain who I was.

Maybe that’s where this starts for all of us. Not with some dramatic decision to hold ourselves back, but with a few experiences that hurt enough, happened often enough, or mattered enough that we began building an identity around them. The kid who struggled in school starts thinking they aren’t smart. The person who was always left out starts to feel like they are difficult to like. The person who tried something and failed assumes they aren’t good at it. The person who never had one obvious passion starts wondering if they’re simply not capable of being exceptional at anything.

The experience may be real, but the conclusion is certainly not.

But we rarely separate the two.

Rather, we decide it’s easier to carry those conclusions with us as a map to navigate our lives. Therefore, we make choices around them, or we avoid things that may challenge them. And then, years later, we look at the life we’ve built and use it as further proof that we were right about ourselves all along.

That’s the part that should scare you.

Not that we can be wrong about other people, or wrong about what we want, or wrong about what our future will look like. That we can be deeply wrong about ourselves and build an entire life around that mistake.

We don’t think that way when we’re young. We are in desperate search for an explanation as to why we feel different, rejected, unsuccessful, or uncertain, so we create one.

But we also forget to update the story. We change our hair, our jobs, our routines, our relationships, and practically our entire lives, yet we still carry around those quiet assumptions about ourselves that we formed years ago.

That’s where our fear of our own potential comes from. Not from always believing we are incapable. But sometimes from being terrified that we might actually be capable of more.

Because if you genuinely believe that you can’t do something, there is a certain comfort in never trying. You don’t have to risk failing. You don’t have to be embarrassed, and you don’t have to discover that you maybe aren’t as talented as you had hoped. You keep the possibility alive in your head that, if you had really tried, maybe you could have done it.

Failure lets you close the door.

Potential leaves the door open.

And this is where I think everyone has to be careful with the phrase “knowing yourself.” Knowing your patterns, your strengths, your limits, and what matters to you is valuable. But knowing yourself shouldn’t mean taking inventory once, deciding who you are, and using it to dictate the rest of your life.

Exhale with me while you read this: You’re allowed to change your mind about who you are.

Actually, I think you have to.

At some point, you have to stop treating your past like a permanent character reference. You have to look at the person you were, understand why she became who she became, and then permit yourself to become someone else. Not because the old version of you was wrong or weak or something you need to outgrow as quickly as possible, but maybe because she was working with the information that was available at the time. She made conclusions before she had lived enough life to know how temporary those conclusions could be.

And maybe that is what growing up actually requires: not becoming completely certain of who you are, but becoming willing to keep finding out.

Because potential is uncomfortable precisely because it is unfinished. You cannot prove your potential by thinking about it. You can’t think your way into confidence, and you can’t wait until you feel completely ready before becoming the person you want to be. At some point, push has to come to shove, and you have to start moving. You have to try something you might not be good at yet. You have to walk into the room you’re not sure you belong in. You have to take the job, or you submit to admitting that the life you have been living no longer feels like the life that you want.

And then you pay attention.

That part matters just as much as moving forward. Every once in a while, you have to do an internal audit of yourself and ask: What have I learned about myself? Where have I surprised myself? Where am I still making decisions based on fear and calling it practicality? What doors have I quietly stopped looking at because I convinced myself they weren’t meant for someone like me?

You will start to notice how each time you ask yourself these questions, there is a different response. A different tone, a different vision, and a different piece of information you learn about yourself along the way. And the best part is that you walk away with all the proof. I tried something new, and it worked. I tried something new, and it taught me I want to take a completely different route. It is scary to face the fact that something you have believed about yourself your entire life may be so completely mistaken, but it’s all part of collecting data.

I think that is the part of my own story I am finally beginning to understand. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what category I fit into, as if finding the right label would finally explain what I was capable of. But maybe the problem was that I was looking for a definition when really what I needed was room. Room to try things. Room to fail. Room to learn. Room to change my mind. Room to become more than the person I had already decided I was.

The goal isn’t to become fearless. I don’t think that’s realistic, and I don’t think it’s even necessary. There will probably always be some part of you that is afraid of failing, of being judged, of doing the wrong thing, or finding out you aren’t as capable of something as you had hoped.

But the bigger part of you is more afraid of never finding out.

Never finding out what would have happened if you had tried. Finding out who you could have become if you had stopped making your past responsible for predicting your future. Never finding out how much bigger your life could have been because you were committed to staying inside a version of yourself that once felt safe.

So keep your door open. Keep moving. Keep taking inventory. Keep asking yourself whether the life you’re building still fits the person you are becoming.

And when you realize it doesn’t, don’t be afraid to change directions.

Maybe that is what it means to stop being afraid to find out your true potential. Not finally becoming certain that you can do everything you want, but refusing to close the door before you have given yourself a chance to find out.

You don’t need to know exactly where the door leads.

You just have to be willing to walk through it.

After years of being told to build a personal brand, curate your feed, romanticize your morning routines, and document every detail of your life, we seem to be developing a craving for something that can’t be curated.

As someone who has always been fascinated by the online world whether it be influencers, reporters, podcasters or bloggers, when I start to sense a pattern reflecting change it sparks a desire to dissect why. Despite what my previous substacks read, regarding the push for final product placement all over our feeds, the journalist in me can’t help but investigate the positive changes I have documented across the media landscape and the positive changes it has evoked in myself.

This dissection all began when digital cameras found their way back to the mainstream. And then people became nostalgic for the internet of mid-2010s. Remember the 2016 trend? Old clothes, old music, Snapchat filters, disposable cameras, less polished photos, and more spontaneous ways of sharing our lives are all beginning to feel appealing in a way that is difficult to explain if you look at each trend individually.

Maybe what we are actually nostalgic for is not a specific year or aesthetic, but a version of ourselves that existed before we became so conscience of being perceived.

For the better part of the last decade, we have been taught to experience life and document it simultaneously. We learned how to make our coffee look picture-worthy. Even the most ordinary parts of life became chances to communicate something about who we are. Anyone else remember always hearing “pics or it didn't happen.” Look at how that silly trend wrote the script for how things should be experienced.

There is nothing inherently wrong about that, actually I enjoy these things myself. I like taking pictures, I like creating an image that captures the exact feeling I felt in the moment, I like making videos, I like finding music that enhances the visual, I like sharing moments that made me laugh, and I love turning something ordinary into something beautiful that might make someone stop scrolling. Creating content can be a really great creative outlet, and there is something really special about getting to share that moment with people who might otherwise never get to experience it with you.

This is what makes the whole concept difficult to navigate. I hate the scroll but I love the post.

I don’t want to pretend that social media is shallow or that wanting to be seen is some terrible character flaw. There are genuinely beautiful parts of sharing your life. Sometimes you want people to see your favorite Pinterest board come to life, or that great restaurant no one knows about. Sometimes sharing something on the internet doesn’t need to come from insecurity or desperation for validation, sometimes you have something you simply love and want to share it with the world.

The difficult part becomes knowing what is sharing and what is proving.

There is a subtle difference between wanting to capture something because it filled your cup and feeling like you need to capture it because everyone needs to know that your life is going well. I think all of us have experienced both, maybe within the same five minutes. You can genuinely be having the best time at dinner while also thinking about whether the lighting is hitting the right angle. You can be excited about a trip while also thinking about which outfits you absolutely have to take a picture in.

None of this means the experience is fake. It just means that we have become so accustomed to having an audience that the audience can sometimes exist in our heads even when nobody is actually watching.

That is where I think the internet has changed us in a way that is harder to notice.

There is a difference living your life and watching yourself live your life. When you are constantly aware of how something could look from the outside, you begin to experience it from two perspectives at once. There is one version of you walking along the beach, grabbing lunch, laughing with friends and another version of you inside your head asking, is this interesting? Is it worth posting? Am I following the trends? Does this fit the version of myself that I have already placed online?

Overtime, that can make your life feel strangely performative without you ever intentionally deciding to perform it.

I think that is why we become so nostalgic for the internet we had years ago. Everyone keeps calling it nostalgia for 2016, but I don’t think we necessarily miss being younger or want every part of that era back. I think we miss when the internet felt less like a secondary identity we had to ALSO keep up with. A blurry picture could be just a blurry picture. Your friends can post embarrassing photos of you without worrying whether or not it fits your feed. You can have an ordinary life without feeling like you were supposed to be turning it into something aspirational.

The internet used to feel more like a place we visited. Now, for a lot of us, it feels like a place we live.

That might help explain why things that are beginning to feel cool again are often the things that exist outside the pressure to make sure everything look perfect online. Going somewhere without documenting anything means you actually had to be there to experience it. And there is something comforting about that. It pulls us out of the role of constantly observing our own lives and puts us back into the position of living it.

But even this has become complicated because we have figured out how to turn being offline into an aesthetic, too. We have turned the desire to escape social media into something that can be packaged and shared on social media.

It is almost impossible to completely remove ourselves from the performance because the performance has become so deeply integrated into the way we communicate.

And I do not think the answer is to stop creating.

Despite everything I am writing I do believe there is something beautiful about creating a record of your life. Years from now, I want to be able to look back at photographs and remember what I wore, where I went, who my friends were, or what my style was. I want the pictures. I want the videos. I want the ridiculous little moments that would otherwise disappear.

I just don’t want the documentation to become more important than the moment it is documenting.

There is a stark difference between capturing moments of your life and constantly constructing it for an audience. There is a difference between sharing something because it brought light into your life and needing to share it so that other people know your life contains light. The first can be joyful and creative. The second can become exhausting because no amount of engagement can permanently reassure you that your life is interesting enough, beautiful enough, or successful enough.

There is also something incredibly freeing about having a conversation that never becomes a screenshot. Doing something no one will ever see. Taking a walk without tracking it. Having a hobby that you aren’t particularly good at and have no intention of monetizing. Spending an entire night with people you love and only realizing afterword's you didn’t pull your phone out once to capture the moment.

I think that is the balance I am trying to find for myself. I don't want to become someone who is constantly trying to prove that she is having a good life, but I also don’t want to stop sharing the things that genuinely make me happy. I don’t want to lose the creative part of social media because I think there is so much beauty in being able to make something and send it into the world. I just want to remember that creating a beautiful picture of my life and actually having a beautiful life are two completely different things.

Let me make one thing clear: one part of this you can control with lighting, filters, or a caption. The other one is messier. It involves bad days, unfinished projects, awkward conversations, not getting out of bed. Things that we would never deem to make a “good post.” But also the moments that are priceless simply because no one knows they even happened.

Maybe that is what were searching for when we say we want to get offline. Maybe I needed to hear this and writing it out would be the only way for me to fully understand. No one is looking to throw their phones away or disappear from social media forever. We are looking for some separation between who we are when people are watching and who we are when they are not.

I still want to take the picture. I still want to make the post. I still want to share the things that make me happy.

I just don’t want to spend so much time making my life look beautiful that I forgot to notice when it actually is.

I thought we finally decided that women could eat dinner without calculating what it would do to her body in the morning.

Then suddenly, my social media feed started to look distorted.

Thin bodies. “What I eat in a day.” Weight-loss injections. Before and after. And the revolving door of diet trends that are actually just a fancy way of saying “I’m starving myself.”

I think its time that we all stop pretending we aren’t seeing the same message about women's bodies being held to what I call a skinny standard.

Women are getting thinner. Celebrities are getting thinner. Influencers are getting thinner. Clothes are getting smaller. Weight-loss drugs are everywhere. And somehow we’re still having conversations about body positivity as if that cultural standard hasn’t been silently pulled out from underneath us.

I’m not talking about one celebrity or one medication. I’m talking about the fact that thinness has become desierable enough again that we’ve started building an entire ecosystem around achieving it.

And I think we’re lying to ourselves if we pretend this is just about health.

What if the problem is not that women want to be thin? What if the problem has become convincing ourselves that once we BECOME thin we can start living.

These are the kinds of conversations people aren’t ready for.

We all say we want to be “healthy” but what does that look like? Do you picture better sleep, stronger muscles, more energy? Or do you picture a smaller waist?

Sometimes “health” is just a socially acceptable way of saying “I want to be thinner.”

If this IS all about health, why don’t we celebrate women who build more muscle, enjoy food, prioritize sleep, have high energy, and are mentally well with the same enthusiasms we do with weight loss.

Instead, someone looses 20 pounds and we assume they’re healthier, happier, stronger. When really its a performative act because you have traded a personality, mental clarity, peace, energy, happiness JUST to prove that being thinner looks better than it feels. But who is ready to admit that?

We have manifested a culture where a women's body could become breaking news.

We tell women not to compare themselves while making celebrity bodies some of the most photographed, analyzed, and discussed objects on the internet.

Girls, so young, have never had so much access to the tools required to dislike their own body and chase an unrealistic expectation of what they are supposed to look like.

And I do not think any woman who yearns to look a certain way is wrong for wanting that. I think society has made us incredibly predictable. If society rewards a certain body, of course people are going to want that body.

And if you want to be thin, say you want to be thin. That is more honest than calling it “wellness.” But lets stop pretending that the desire wasn't shaped by the society were living in and the cycle thats perpetuating is reinforced without us even realizing.

We have become so comfortable with the idea that women want to be smaller. We never question where that desire even comes from. This is the oldest beauty standard in the book just wearing a new costume.

And with that, I dont want to spend my life proving I can make myself smaller. I have much more interesting things to do with it.

They have apartments with matching furniture. A job with an important title. An investment in retirement accounts. They go to the grocery store and actually know what to buy. They get married and have kids. Buy houses. Create a 5-year plan.

Are we all just... pretending? When did everyone learn how to do this?

Not pretending in a vindictive way. Pretending in the very human sense of “I have no idea what I’m doing, but I suppose I’ll figure it out” kind of way.

When you’re a kid, adults seem like they know everything. They know what to say, where they are going, what bills need to be paid, how taxes work and what the hell the government actually does. Looking back, it feels as if they had unlocked some secret level of the game that I haven’t gotten to yet.

So naturally, I assumed that one day I would get there too.

I went to high school, graduated college, started my first full-time job and experienced living on my own. So maybe NOW I have unlocked the next level?

Yet, at 22 years old, I am still me and I still have questions.

Objectively, you assume that following the typical timeline lands you in the same place as the other adults in your life. That one day, you will be smacked so hard with adultness and everything would make perfect sense.

You go to college. Drown yourself in work. Get the degree. Get the job.

I got the diploma. I got the full-time job. I did the responsible things. And somehow no one has handed me the Adult Handbook yet. Did anyone else get theirs?

Maybe that's because adulthood isn't necessarily a checklist.

As I have strolled through life and landed here, writing this essay, I have realized that accomplishing things doesn’t necessarily tell you what you want.

You can have the job that aligns with your degree and wonder: is this what I want to do forever?

You can have independence and still think: Wait, am I making the right decisions?

Up until this point I have realized I know how to function as a human being but I have no idea what I am doing with my life.

And then there's social media.

We scroll, we like, we follow and we observe all the people who show off their life like a product sold at high value. We see the final product. The clean house. The dream job. The big group of friends. We consume everyone else final product while staring at our own unfinished draft wondering where we went wrong.

As if we didn’t already know that social media is a highlight reel. We know people aren’t posting their bad moments. The jobs they didn’t get, the projects they never completed, or the vision for themselves they never even began to work on. And yet, somehow we let everyone else's polished version of life become the standard we measure for ours.

What happens when we compare our behind-the-scenes to someone else final cut?

We amount ourselves to what we have done and assume this is the level of greatness we were destined for. We settle for the career, home, or life that looks post-worthy because that's what everyone else is doing. Right?

The problem is that we are becoming too comfortable with being “in progress.”

There is something about being in your 20s where your constantly told to become something. Like who you are right now isn’t enough. That the next step determines your whole outcome.

But no one really talks about how your 20s is also just a big cluster of “I don’t know yet.”

And social media makes that uncertianty feel like your behind.

We have been accustomed to seeing proof of achievement rather than the process of the journey.

I know my journey is not social media worthy, but does it need to be in order to prove I have become something.

Maybe there isn't a moment where you suddenly become an adult, or a morning you wake up and suddenly have everything figured out.

Maybe adulthood is about making the wrong decisions and learning where your feet DESERVE to land. Maybe adulthood is about wearing all the hats and seeing which one fits just right. And maybe adulthood isn't about having everything all together while STILL being successful.

So maybe we're all preforming adulthood.

Maybe we're all putting on the costume.

Maybe we're all watching the people ahead of us and thinking we missed a step.

and maybe we're not.

We spend our whole lives assuming adulthood is a destination where everyone suddenly knows what they're doing. Then we become adults and realize, most people are just doing their best to make it look like they do.

It’s that time of year again. College applications are being submitted, college campuses are being toured, and the stress of decision making consumes the mind of every high school senior.

Where are you going?

What are you majoring in?

I think for most of my life, I had a pretty clear idea of what college was supposed to look like. You graduate high school, you go away, you live in a dorm, you drink your weight in alcohol and you complain about being broke.

And apparently, if you don’t do that, you’re doing college all wrong. At least that’s what I thought.

As if it were yesterday I recall telling myself, and anyone who could hear, that I needed to go away for college. Not necessarily because I even wanted to, but because it felt like what you were supposed to want.

One thing I don’t think we talked about enough or at all in high school was what actually comes after that acceptance letter. We learned how to get into college, but not how to pay for it, what student debt could actually look like, or how a decision at 18 could affect the years that followed.

I knew college was expensive, but I didn’t fully understand what that meant. And when you’re 17 or 18, you’re expected to make a pretty major financial and life decision before you’ve really had the chance to understand either.

The funny thing is, I don’t think I really understood how expensive college can be until I got there.

I was lost, confused and listened to everyone besides myself. I committed to a small Division 3 school in Pennsylvania to play lacrosse because I thought that felt right. Meanwhile, not one part of me wanted to play lacrosse nor go to this school yet I felt as if it was the right decision because that is what everyone else was doing right?

me signing the papers thinking the sinking feeling would finally go away

I de-committed from college on decision day in May, senior year of high school. I was even more lost than I was at the start of the process. I finally realized I had no idea what I wanted or where I wanted to go. That’s when someone suggested community college.

There is something about saying “community college” when you’re 18 that makes you feel like you have to explain yourself. Like you need to immediately follow with a reason. I’m saving money, I’m transferring, it’s temporary.

After a semester, I transferred to Penn State Brandywine, a branch campus of Penn State that was close to my home. I thought about what I was going to tell people now. This is temporary, I am transferring to the main campus. But again, I was lying to myself, I couldn’t accept that maybe I didn’t want the typical college experience. I didn’t want to join a sorority, party until morning, or be a tiny regular boring fish in a massive pond full of things I didn't even like. But staying at community college or Penn State Brandywine was not the experience I had pictured for myself when I was 17.

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But somehow, that decision became the reason I am successful today.

And that’s the part I don’t think we talk about enough.

Now, I understood how college debt worked and if I wanted to pick a different school I would be paying that off probably until my kids were ready to enroll.

I knew I was still getting the same Penn State degree as anyone else who attended the university, saving massive amounts of money and receiving an individualized learning experience. It took me 19 years to figure out that that was the exact kind of environment I needed in order to thrive.

I graduated with honors recognition and made Deans List every semester.

Me. The girl who could RARELY find an A on her report card.

I became someone who cared about my work, found things I am genuinely interested in, built relationships with professors (that I still talk to today), got involved, and was pushed to places I never thought were imaginable.

But I want to emphasize that I didn’t become successful because I finally figured out how to do college the “right” way.

I became successful after I stopped trying to make my college experience look like everyone else’s.

Three days after graduating college, I started my first full-time job in a field I am actually interested in. That opportunity came to me directly through my connections as a student at Penn State Brandywine. Isn't THAT the goal?

So, four years later I can tell you exactly the expectations I would set for myself if I were to do college over again:

Find a place that encourages you to learn and step outside your comfort zone.

Small community, broad connections.

Leave feeling prepared to handle navigating the work force.

Always have the people and the place to call on.

And sometimes I still think about how different that is from what I thought my life was going to look like.

I thought I would have to leave home to become independent.

I thought I needed a big school.

I thought playing lacrosse meant I had made the right choice.

I thought community college meant I was behind.

Now I see the biggest mistake I could have made would have been following that timeline simply because it looked familiar to everyone else.

There is so much pressure surrounding college that we barely question anymore. The dorms. The parties. The football games. The four years. The big campus. The student loans. The “best four years of your life.”

But college is not a single experience, and it does not have to be a performance of independence, success, or belonging. You can commute, start at community college, transfer, live at home, change directions, or take longer than you expected. None of those choices make your education less meaningful or your life less ambitious. They simply mean you are building from the circumstances that are truly yours.

I spent a lot of my teenage years trying to make decisions that would prove I am likeable, trendy, or doing life correctly. It took a few wrong turns to understand that the better question was not whether my choices looked impressive from the outside, but whether they were helping me become the person I wanted to be.

This is what my college experience gave me. Not a perfect four years, and not a story that followed the expectation, but the chance to stop performing someone else’s definition of success and start making decisions with more honesty. I learned that independence is not measured by how far you move away from home, that ambition is not determined by the name of your university, and that taking a different route does not mean your falling behind.

I still got to experience the parties, the friendships, and the football games just in a way that allowed me to remove myself when I wanted.

Maybe I didn’t miss the traditional college experience. Maybe I outgrew the idea that there is only one version worth wanting.

My college experience was the complete opposite of what I had envisioned for myself at 17. But it gave me something more important than the picture I thought I was supposed to want: a life that feels chosen rather than assigned.

You are allowed to want something different.

You are allowed to change your mind.

You are allowed to take the long way.

And if that path that feels most honest to you does not look like the one everyone else is taking, that does not mean you are behind.

It might mean you are finally moving forward on your own terms.

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