Lately I’ve been trying to do less of it. I’ve noticed that not everyone values it, and that being the one who always helps doesn’t automatically mean being appreciated for it. Knowing that is one thing. Changing a habit this old is another, and it’s harder than it sounds.

What I find myself thinking about more and more is the gap between two things that can look exactly the same from the outside: being needed and being loved.

Usefulness is easier to see

Both mean people want you around. Both come with messages, invitations and thank yous. Both can make a life feel full.

The difference only shows when you ask what someone would actually miss if you stepped back for a while. What you do for them, or you?

Most relationships hold a bit of both, and that’s fine. The trouble is that one of the two is much easier to see.

Usefulness is visible. You can count it. A favour done, a problem solved, a message answered within minutes, a plan that only happened because you organised it. Every one of those is a small piece of proof that you matter to someone.

Love doesn’t give you receipts. It asks you to believe you’re wanted without being able to point to the reason. If you’ve spent years trusting what you can measure, that is a lot to ask.

So the reliable person keeps being reliable. And the role tends to stick. People adjust to it. They stop offering help because you always seem to have things covered. They stop asking how you are because you’re usually the one asking. Nobody decided you should carry everything. It happened one favour at a time.

The other half of it is that you stop asking, too. I rarely ask anyone for help. Almost never, if I’m being accurate, and only ever the very few people who are closest to me. Everyone else gets the version of me that has things handled.

From the outside nothing looks wrong. You’re thanked. You’re relied on. It can take a long time to notice how much of your place in other people’s lives rests on what you do for them.

The rest of this essay is about what happens on the days you have nothing to give.

Read more

None of that has changed the way my mother sees me.

To her, I’m still fourteen. Still the rebellious girl who supposedly has no idea about life, who needs supervision and correction and who will get things wrong the moment nobody is checking.

What I’m describing has been going on for years. It shows up in small comments and ordinary moments, which is exactly what makes it so hard to explain to anyone else. The topics change. The message underneath stays the same: you don’t know what you’re doing.

What happens after the comment

She tells me what to pack for my daughter. She tells me how to dress her.

Written down like that, it sounds small. A grandmother with opinions. Someone who wants to be involved.

But my daughter is ten, and I’ve been doing this every day of her life. I know my own child. And still my mother speaks to me as though I’m doing it for the first time and need someone to walk me through it.

What happens inside me next is the part I find hardest to admit.

The anger comes first, and it comes quickly. So does the frustration, because I’ve heard some version of this so many times that I could almost predict it.

Then, almost automatically, something else begins. I start to doubt myself. I go back over the decision I made. I ask myself whether she could be right, whether I’ve missed something, whether I’ve been careless without noticing.

I know I’m doing my best. I know it even while I’m doubting it. Both happen at the same time, and the doubt is quicker than I would like it to be.

One comment wouldn’t have this kind of power. Years of them do.

Something good, looked at critically

Recently we got a kitten. My mother’s reaction was that it would be far too much work.

This time I didn’t doubt our decision for a second. What I felt was sadness.

I kept asking myself why she couldn’t just be happy for me. Why something good, something small and sweet that had just come into our home, had to be looked at critically straight away.

That difference matters to me. Her criticism doesn’t always make me question myself. Sometimes it simply makes me sad, because there is no room left to be happy about something together. Even the good things get checked for what could go wrong.

These days, I rarely feel relaxed around my mother. Even when nothing has happened yet, part of me is already waiting for the criticism. I find myself anticipating what she might say, wondering what she’ll find wrong this time.

And the frustrating thing is that it seems to come eventually, however hard I try. Sometimes I wish I could just spend time with her without preparing myself for the next comment.

The role I never left

This is the contradiction I live with.

In my own life I’m an adult. I make decisions every day without asking anyone. I built what I have on my own. Most of the time I trust myself.

With my mother, that adult can disappear surprisingly fast. One comment and I’m back in the role I thought I’d left behind when I moved out. The rebellious girl. The one who has to justify herself. The one who is probably wrong.

And I do justify myself. That reflex is strong. Whenever she questions something I’ve decided, I feel the urge to explain it, to give reasons, to lay everything out until she understands.

I’m consciously trying to stop doing that now. It’s harder than it sounds, because the reflex is older than my attempts to fight it.

In my mother’s mind, the girl I was at fourteen is still the most accurate picture of who I am. Sixteen years of living independently haven’t updated it. I don’t believe anything will.

Seeing the patterns

Conversations with therapists have opened my eyes to things I hadn’t recognised before. I’ve also read a lot about narcissism, and in much of it I recognise my mother. The control. The criticism that doesn’t stop. The way my independence seems to be something she can’t accept.

I’m careful with that word. I’m not diagnosing her. I can only describe what I see and what it has done to me.

Recognising these patterns makes me angry. It also makes me tired. I see things now that I used to accept as normal, and I look back at my childhood differently.

It has also shown me something about myself that I find much harder to look at.

I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for approval, and I’m only now starting to understand how closely that is tied to her. I also see the self-doubt that kicks in when she criticises me as a consequence of our relationship. It grew over years in which my best was never quite enough.

That’s the part that hurts the most. My best has apparently never been good enough for her. Whatever I give, it seems to fall short in her eyes.

When it isn’t only her

There is another part of this I’ve only noticed recently.

The pattern doesn’t stay with her.

When someone asks me the same thing two or three times, when they question a decision I’ve made or want me to explain it again, I can get angry very quickly. Much more quickly than the situation deserves. I hate the feeling of having to justify myself. I hate it so much that a simple question can set off something that has very little to do with the question itself.

I know that not every question is an attack. I know that someone asking again is usually not trying to control me.

And still, in that moment, I sometimes react as though I have to defend myself again. As though I’m standing in front of my mother and the old pressure is back. The other person gets a reaction that was never meant for them.

That’s uncomfortable to admit. It means her voice isn’t only something I hear when I talk to her. It has found its way into how I hear other people too.

This is what I want to work on. I want to be able to hear a question as a question, without the old reflex answering first.

Still trying

The anger is real. I’m angry when she criticises how I raise my daughter or what I decide for my own life. I’m angry that I still get spoken to like a teenager. And I’m frustrated by how far her voice still reaches, how quickly it can turn my certainty into questions and other people’s questions into something I need to fight.

And I’m tired. Tired of defending ordinary decisions. Tired of the same pattern in new versions. Tired of how much energy it takes to stay sure of myself around the one person who should have made that easiest.

But underneath the anger there is something I’d rather not admit in public.

It would be easier to write that I’m past this. That I’ve stopped caring what she thinks and her opinion no longer matters to me.

I’m not there.

I still want to get it right for her. I notice it, I fight against it and I still want it. I know she won’t change. I know my best will never be enough for her.

Knowing doesn’t make the wanting stop.

I’ll never be good enough for my mother. I’m almost thirty-five and I know that.

Some days I still try anyway.

I wonder how many of you recognise something of your own life in this.

Have you ever had a relationship where you felt you could never quite get things right, no matter how hard you tried? Maybe with a parent, or maybe with someone else entirely.

And if you’ve experienced it, how do you deal with it now? Have you found a way to stop questioning yourself, or is it something you’re still working through?

I’d love to hear your experiences, especially from those of you who are still figuring it out too.

Every Wednesday there's an exclusive essay for paid subscribers. On top of that, there are reflection pages and little guides several times a month. If you're already one of them, thank you. If not, you're very welcome to join.

Become a paid subscriber

Ten years ago, that would have seemed strange to me. Back then, a weekend felt like something you had to use. Going out, being somewhere, doing something was simply part of it. Staying in on a Saturday evening didn’t feel like a choice so much as a gap. Nobody made me feel that way, as far as I can remember. It just seemed to be how weekends worked.

Now I need far less of that. I’m happiest in familiar surroundings, and a weekend without plans doesn’t feel like a weekend I’ve wasted. Before this sounds like a retreat from the world: I don’t live alone, and I still like people very much. When I’m invited somewhere, I’m pleased, and I go, and I usually enjoy it. What has changed is that I rarely organise anything myself any more. I’ve become a reliably enthusiastic guest and a fairly hopeless instigator.

So what happened?

Age, home and the bit in between

Age is the obvious answer, and it explains everything and nothing at once. Plenty of things change with age. That doesn’t tell me why this particular thing did.

Home has changed, at least in what it’s for. It’s where I work now, and where most of my days actually happen. You might expect that to make me want to escape it more often. If anything, it has done the opposite. Home used to be where I went when nothing else was on. Now it’s where I’d quite often choose to be even if something else were on. I can’t say when that switched, which is mildly irritating for someone who likes to know why things change.

The explanation I find most convincing is that my idea of “doing something” has shifted. Ten years ago, a weekend seemed to count only if it contained an event. Something with a time and a place, something you could point to afterwards. The rest of the weekend was the bit in between. These days the bit in between is most of what I want. A day can feel complete without containing anything I’d describe as a plan.

I don’t take that as proof that I’ve worked out what I need for good. My needs have changed once already, quite thoroughly, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t change again. Perhaps in ten years I’ll be the one organising dinners and booking weekends away, and this essay will read like a description of a very quiet phase. For now, though, what I need from a week is less excitement than it used to be, and I’m not missing the rest.

The question that turns up anyway

Which makes the other thing harder to explain.

Every so often, usually without any obvious trigger, a thought turns up: should I be going out more? Not because I’m bored, and not because I’m missing anything in particular. I’m content, and I know I’m content. And still the question arrives, as if it had been scheduled.

I’ve tried to work out where it comes from, and I don’t have a tidy answer. It might be the old rule about weekends, still running quietly in the background long after it stopped being useful. It might be that contentment which doesn’t involve doing much is harder to trust than contentment which does. When you’re happy at a concert, the concert explains it. When you’re happy at home on a Wednesday, there’s nothing to point at, and some part of me seems to want something to point at.

Or it might simply be that I can’t tell, from the inside, whether this is a preference or a habit. I think it’s a preference. It feels like one. But habits also feel like preferences once you’ve had them for long enough, and I don’t know of a reliable way to tell the two apart without stepping outside and checking. Which, I’m aware, is exactly the kind of thing I’m not doing very often.

What I’ve noticed is that the question doesn’t come with any real longing attached. It doesn’t make me want to grab my coat, and there’s nothing specific I’m missing when it turns up. I think about it for a moment, decide that I’m fine as I am, and go back to what I was doing.

Where things stand

So I don’t have an answer to whether it’s normal. I only have the honest version of where things stand. I like my days as they are. I still enjoy going out when something comes up. I just don’t feel the same need to make something happen. Every now and then I wonder whether I should want more than this, and so far the answer has been no. If that changes, I expect I’ll be just as surprised as I was the first time.

Has what you need from a weekend changed over the years? What do you need more of now, what do you need less of, and do you ever catch yourself wondering whether you should want something different?

Every Wednesday there's an exclusive essay for paid subscribers. On top of that, there are reflection pages and little guides several times a month. If you're already one of them, thank you. If not, you're very welcome to join.

Become a paid subscriber

You probably know the kind. A vague prior commitment. A busy week. A “let me see how I’m doing for time”, said in the full knowledge that time has nothing to do with it. I’ve used versions of this when the real answer was much simpler and much harder to say: I can’t afford that right now.

I have also been on the other side of the table. I’ve been the friend with more room in the budget, the one who wanted the nice restaurant and the proper dinner, and who felt faintly guilty for wanting it while sitting opposite someone who couldn’t make the same choice without thinking twice.

I’m still not sure which of the two is more uncomfortable. I’ve changed my mind about it several times, usually depending on which side I happened to be on.

Both sides of the table

When you have less, the awkwardness is mostly private. You do the maths before anyone else has opened the menu. You decline things in advance so that you never have to decline them in the moment. With some friends it’s easy to say it plainly. With others it would be perfectly possible, and still something stops you, and you reach for the busy week instead.

When you have more, the awkwardness is quieter but just as real. You want something, and you know that wanting it out loud might put pressure on someone else. So you start editing yourself. You suggest the cheaper place before anyone asks. You say “I don’t mind” about things you do, in fact, mind. You become oddly careful with your own enthusiasm.

What I’ve noticed, from both sides, is that the moment people usually picture, the bill arriving and everyone looking at it slightly too long, is rarely where the difficulty sits. It sits in the plans before that, and in the friendship itself. Some friendships absorb a difference in money without anyone noticing. Others turn every invitation into a small calculation. I’ve been trying to work out why.

Read more

Ask me to ring the dentist and book a check-up, and the request goes onto a list where it can live quite comfortably for a very long time.

The call itself isn’t the problem

I’ve been trying to work out why. The call itself isn’t the problem. The conversation, if it ever happens, will consist of my name, my date of birth and a polite negotiation between Tuesday and Thursday. Nobody has ever been changed by it. And yet it stays on the list, while far bigger and more complicated things get done all around it.

The answer I keep coming back to is that I never know how long it’s going to take.

It might take a minute. Someone picks up, there’s a free slot next week, I put it in my calendar and that’s that. Or nobody picks up. Or the line is busy and I have to try again later, and later could easily turn out to be lunchtime. The same task can be over before my coffee has cooled or spread itself across several days in small, irritating pieces, and there is no way of telling in advance which version I’m going to get.

Work, for all its faults, usually comes with edges. Even when a project is huge, I have a rough sense of its shape. A phone call to a dental practice has no shape at all. It’s a small door into a corridor of unknown length, and I’m being asked to open it without knowing whether I’ll be back in a minute or still standing in that corridor at eleven.

So I don’t open it. Not today, anyway. Today I’m busy, and busy is the perfect place for a small task to hide, because it never looks urgent next to everything else. Tomorrow, first thing, I tell myself.

The five-minute email

Cancelling contracts works the same way, only without the excuse of opening hours. Sometimes the whole thing requires one email that I could write in five minutes. I have written far more difficult emails than “I would like to cancel my contract at the end of the notice period”. And still I put it off, because the email is only the visible part. Around it sits a small cloud of unknowns. Which address does it go to? Is there a customer number somewhere? Have I already missed the notice period? Will they confirm, or will I have to chase them? Each question takes a few seconds to ask and an unknown amount of time to answer, and the five-minute email quietly turns into an afternoon of not knowing.

What strikes me is how badly this fits the way people like me tend to see ourselves. If you work a lot, you assume you’re good at getting things done, and in many ways you are. But being good at large, defined tasks says surprisingly little about how you handle small, undefined ones. Plenty of capable people can run a project, keep several things going at once and meet every deadline, and still have a check-up that has been about to be booked for longer than they’d care to admit.

A question of control

The more I think about it, the more it seems to be about control. When I work, I decide the pace. I choose what comes first, when to stop, when to carry on for another hour. Even on a chaotic day, the chaos is mine to arrange. A phone call to a practice works by different rules. I’m stepping into someone else’s system, with their opening hours, their queue and their “could you call back after two”. A cancellation email puts me at the mercy of a company that has no particular reason to let me go quickly. In both cases I’m being asked for an open-ended amount of my time, and nobody on the other side will tell me how much.

Part of what I avoid, I think, is handing control of my time to someone who doesn’t even know it’s being handed over. The receptionist isn’t trying to take my morning. The company isn’t plotting against my Thursday. They simply don’t know that I’ve organised my day around keeping things in my own hands, and that their hold music sits right in the middle of it.

That might also explain why some of the most organised-looking adults have the strangest gaps. The large things are under control because they belong to them. The small things belong partly to other people’s queues, and those don’t follow anybody’s plan.

A more interesting list

I’d like to say that understanding this has changed something. Mostly it has made the list more interesting to look at. I can now explain, in some detail, why every item on it is still there. That doesn’t get a single one of them crossed off, but it does make me sound a great deal more reasonable about it.

What’s the small task you’ve been carrying around for far longer than it would take to do?

Every Wednesday there's an exclusive essay for paid subscribers. On top of that, there are reflection pages and little guides several times a month. If you're already one of them, thank you. If not, you're very welcome to join.

Become a paid subscriber

That’s the whole fantasy. No hammock, no early retirement, no dramatic resignation from adult life. I’m not imagining a version of myself who has stopped working. I’m imagining the same work, the same deadlines and the same slightly unrealistic to-do list, with a much better view.

I’ve come to think this is an odd thing to dream about. Most escape fantasies are built around not having to do anything. Mine is built around doing roughly what I do now, just somewhere else. When I try to explain it out loud, it sounds less like a dream and more like a relocation request.

An unlocked door

Part of the reason the image is so persistent is that it isn’t completely absurd. I’m self-employed. Much of what I do happens on a laptop and could, in theory, happen anywhere with electricity and a decent connection. Nobody expects me in a particular building at eight in the morning. That fact sits at the back of my mind like an unlocked door. I haven’t walked through it, but knowing it’s unlocked changes how the room feels.

What I want, I think, has less to do with the sea itself than with the choice. The idea that where I live could be a decision rather than a default. Most people end up where they are for reasons that made sense at the time: a job, a school, a lease, a relationship, a place that was familiar enough. Very few of us sat down and chose a city the way we’d choose a holiday destination. The sea plan is partly a fantasy about getting to make that choice on purpose, as an adult, with all the information.

Sand, wifi and February

I should say that I’m fully aware of the problems with the laptop-on-the-beach image. Screens are famously hard to read in direct sunlight. Sand gets into things. Wifi near the water is largely a matter of faith. There’s a reason the photos of people working on beaches always look a little staged, and I suspect that in most of them nobody is working at all. The realistic version involves a café table set back from the beach, a charger, a lot of squinting and a waiter who would like the table back. I’d take it. A compromised view of the sea is still the sea.

And then there’s everything that doesn’t fit into the picture. Residency rules, taxes, insurance and a language you might speak charmingly on holiday and very badly at a government office. Also February, when the beach town is empty and the lovely café is closed until spring. Not every country would be a realistic option, and the realistic ones aren’t necessarily the ones that look best in photos.

The life I already have

There’s also the life I already have. I live somewhere that works. It’s stable and secure, and most of the infrastructure of my life runs quietly in the background without asking for attention. That counts for a lot. I’ve reached the age where I’m suspicious of anyone, myself included, who talks about giving up stability as if it were a small price. Security is boring to describe and enormously valuable to have. I’m not looking for a way out of my current life. I like a great deal of it, and I’m building it on purpose.

Which leaves me in a slightly ridiculous position. I’ve built a working life whose main selling point is freedom, and I’m still, at heart, a sceptic who likes to know what happens if things go wrong. I wanted independence, I got it, and now I’d like it to come with a safety net, please, and ideally a sea view. It seems to be a very millennial way of dreaming: the beach apartment in one tab, the fine print in the other.

My work makes geographical freedom imaginable. It doesn’t make it simple, and it certainly doesn’t make it automatically sensible. Those are three separate things, and they get blurred together very easily. Somewhere along the way, “you can work from anywhere” started to sound like “you should”, as if the only thing standing between a person and a life by the sea were a lack of courage. Mostly, I suspect, what stands in between is paperwork. Also, the perfectly reasonable wish not to take apart something that works.

For now, a wish

So for now it stays a wish. I don’t know where it would be. I don’t know when, or even whether. People tend to expect a dream like this to be either acted on or let go of, as though wanting something without a timeline were a sign of indecision. I don’t think it works that way. A wish can sit next to an actual life without competing with it.

I can love the life I’m building here and still keep a second version of it in my head: same work, same deadlines, better light, worse wifi and, presumably, a fair amount of sand in the keyboard.

For a long time I believed that wanting to be impressive was a phase. Something that belonged to being fifteen and wanting the right jeans, or twenty-two and wanting the right internship. You were supposed to grow out of it the way you grow out of caring who sits next to whom at lunch. By your thirties, the story goes, you know who you are, you’ve stopped performing, and the opinions of people at weddings and reunions slide right off you. I liked that story. I think a lot of us do. It makes adulthood sound like the place where you finally get to stop auditioning.

Then I started paying attention to how people my age actually talk about their lives. The careful way someone mentions that she’s “doing a slow year.” The renovation described with so much humility that it somehow sounds more impressive. The promotion that never gets posted but always comes up at dinner. Nobody brags anymore, at least not openly. We’ve become far too skilled for that.

So I’ve been looking at that belief again, and here is where I’ve landed: I don’t think I ever stopped wanting to be impressive. I think I just got better at choosing what kind.

The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers, along with a printable reflection page.

Read more

You say it at a birthday dinner, or in the kitchen at someone’s party, and you can watch it land. The other person smiles, says that’s so nice to hear, and turns to whoever is standing next to you. Nobody is being unkind. There’s just nowhere for the conversation to go. A breakup comes with questions. So does a new job, a move, a wedding, a diagnosis, a baby. “Good” comes with a nod.

I’ve started to think we have a language for almost every part of adult life except the part where most of it actually happens.

We know exactly what to say to someone whose life is falling apart, and we know what to say to someone whose life is suddenly going very well. There are cards for both. There are casseroles and champagne. But the long stretch in between doesn’t have much of a vocabulary. Those are the years when you go to work, pay rent, see your friends when four calendars finally line up, buy the same groceries and sometimes lie awake wondering whether this is it. When someone asks “So, what’s new?”, the question already assumes there should be something. And if there isn’t, you either invent a small update to fill the space or you say “not much” and feel oddly like you’ve failed a test you didn’t know you were taking.

The uncomfortable part is that we do this to each other, too. I’m not convinced I’m any better at it than the people who turn away at parties. When a friend is in a crisis, the group chat wakes up. People call. They check in a week later, and again a week after that. When a friend is fine, she gets a heart reaction on her photo and an invitation to the next birthday. That’s how attention works. It goes where the drama is, and it leaves the people who are coping well to cope on their own. I think a lot of women who seem to have it together have noticed this, even if they’d never say it out loud.

Being okay is the state in which you’re least likely to be asked anything real.

Online the same thing happens, only faster. An engagement gets hundreds of likes. A new job gets a stream of congratulations from people you haven’t spoken to in years. Nobody posts “had a normal week, felt mostly fine, made soup on Thursday,” and if they did, it would sink without a trace. So the normal weeks disappear from view. And then we scroll through everyone else’s announcements on a Tuesday evening and come away thinking other people’s lives are made almost entirely of events, while ours is made of errands. We’re comparing their headlines with our whole calendar. Everyone knows this, and it doesn’t seem to help much, because knowing how the trick works doesn’t stop it from working.

And here’s the part I find harder to admit. When nobody asks about the quiet years, there’s a strange temptation to make them less quiet. Not in a dramatic way. Just a pull toward having something to show. A new project, a new plan, a renovation, a course, a five-year goal that sounds good when you say it over dinner. I wonder how many decisions get made partly because “I’m fine” felt like too little to bring to the table. We grew up being told we could become anything, which was a gift, and somewhere inside that gift was an instruction to keep becoming. A life that’s simply going well can start to look like a life that has stalled, even to the person living it.

The thing is, a lot happens in those years. It just doesn’t happen in a way you can announce. Someone spends a whole autumn slowly realizing she doesn’t want the promotion she used to want. Someone notices that a friendship has become one-sided and hasn’t decided yet what to do about it. Someone finally stops feeling anxious about something that used to take up half her thoughts, and there’s no moment she can point to when it stopped. These are some of the biggest changes a person goes through, and they arrive without a date. If you tried to explain them at a party, you’d lose your listener halfway through the second sentence. So you say “good,” and the most interesting thing about your year stays in your head.

That’s also why I don’t fully trust the word “fine.” It covers too much. It can mean content. It can mean tired in a way that isn’t worth explaining. It can mean that nothing is wrong and something is still missing. That’s a very specific feeling and a very hard one to say out loud, because it sounds ungrateful. You have the job, the apartment, the people, the routine. You’re aware that plenty of people would trade places with you.

And still there are Sunday afternoons where the whole thing feels like a room you’re standing in rather than a place you live. I don’t think that feeling always means you need to change your life. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it’s just what it feels like to be a person in the middle of a long, ordinary stretch with nobody asking how it’s going.

What I’d like is for the second question to come back. The one that follows “good.” Good how? What’s taking up your thoughts lately? What are you enjoying that you didn’t expect to? What would you be doing if nobody needed anything from you this month? None of these are deep questions. They just assume that a person who is doing well still has an inner life worth hearing about, which, if you think about it, is a fairly basic thing to assume about someone you love.

I also think the people who are okay could stop apologizing for it. “Not much, sorry” has become such a common answer that it almost sounds normal. Sorry for what? For not having a crisis to report? For not producing enough plot? There’s something a bit sad about how quickly we shrink our own lives when they don’t come with headlines, as if the only parts that count are the parts with a before and an after.

I don’t think the middle years need to be redeemed by turning them into a lesson. Some of them are boring. Some of them are lonely in a way that’s hard to name. Some of them are the best years someone will have, and she won’t realize it until much later, because nobody was asking at the time and she wasn’t asking herself either.

But I do know that most of a life is lived between the updates. Most of yours, most of mine. And if nobody is curious about that part, including us, we end up treating most of our own time as filler.

So I’ll ask the question properly, and I’d like an actual answer in the comments: how is your life going right now, when nothing in particular is happening?

You finally leave the job. End the relationship. Move somewhere new. Make the decision you’ve been thinking about for months, sometimes years.

And for a while, everything feels different. People tell you how brave you are. You tell them you’re excited. You probably are.

But then a few ordinary Tuesdays go by.

The new job becomes a job. The new apartment needs cleaning. The freedom you wanted comes with decisions you didn’t have to make before. And the version of yourself you imagined becoming hasn’t quite shown up.

Nobody really talks about this part.

We love stories about starting over. We love the moment someone finally decides they’ve had enough, packs their things and chooses a different life. It’s satisfying. There’s a clear before and after.

But real life doesn’t end when the main character makes the big decision.

That’s usually where the complicated part begins.

Read more

Subscribe

Maybe it happened gradually. Somewhere between reading about morning routines, listening to podcasts about personal growth and saving articles about habits I apparently needed to change. At some point, improving myself became such a normal part of everyday life that I stopped questioning it.

There’s always something I could be doing better. I could be more disciplined, more confident, more organised. I could spend less time on my phone, read more books, exercise more consistently and finally become one of those people who somehow manage to have a perfectly balanced life.

And the strange thing is, I actually enjoy learning about these things. I like understanding myself better. I like the idea that we can change, grow and make different choices.

But lately, I’ve been wondering when all of this stopped feeling like an opportunity and started feeling like an obligation.

There’s always a better version of you waiting

It seems like almost every part of our lives has become something we can improve.

We don’t just go for a walk anymore. We aim for ten thousand steps. We don’t simply spend an evening at home. We create an evening routine. Even resting comes with recommendations about how to do it properly.

And somehow, there’s always someone online who has figured out a better way to live.

Someone wakes up earlier, eats healthier, manages their time better or has finally discovered the five habits that changed their life. None of this is necessarily bad advice. But when you’re surrounded by it every day, it’s difficult not to start looking at your own life as a collection of things that need fixing.

I’ve caught myself doing exactly that. I’ll have a perfectly ordinary day, get things done, enjoy some time to myself and still think about what I could have done differently.

Maybe I should have been more productive. Maybe I should have gone outside instead of watching something on Netflix. Maybe I should have spent that hour doing something useful.

It’s exhausting when even the things you choose to do for yourself begin to feel like things you should be doing better.

When did being a work in progress become a full-time job?

I think there’s something genuinely valuable about recognising our patterns, questioning our habits and wanting to become better people.

I wouldn’t want to live a life where I never reconsidered anything about myself.

But there’s a difference between wanting to grow and constantly searching for another reason why you’re not quite there yet.

Sometimes I wonder whether we’ve become so used to thinking of ourselves as works in progress that we’ve forgotten we’re also allowed to be people who are simply living.

People who have bad habits. Who waste an afternoon occasionally. Who don’t have a five-year plan or a particularly impressive morning routine. People who are doing reasonably well without feeling the need to turn every part of their personality into a project.

I find it interesting how easily personal growth can turn into another form of comparison. We might not be comparing our jobs, relationships or appearances anymore, but we’re still comparing something. Our emotional maturity, our discipline, our ability to set boundaries, our supposedly healthy habits.

Even becoming more comfortable with ourselves can start to feel like another goal we haven’t achieved yet.

And I don’t think that’s what personal growth was supposed to be about.

Maybe not everything needs improving

I still want to learn things about myself. I still want to change certain habits and become better at handling situations that used to overwhelm me.

I’m not planning to stop caring about any of that.

But I would like to stop treating every ordinary part of my life as an opportunity for improvement.

Sometimes an evening spent watching a series is just an evening spent watching a series. It doesn’t have to be a failure to use my time wisely. A hobby doesn’t have to teach me something. A quiet weekend doesn’t have to leave me feeling refreshed, inspired and ready to take on the world.

And maybe I don’t need to turn every uncomfortable feeling into something I have to analyse, understand and overcome immediately.

Some things can just be part of being human.

I think that’s what I’ve been missing in so many conversations about becoming our best selves. The possibility that we can want more for ourselves without being permanently dissatisfied with who we are today.

Because if there’s always another habit to build, another mindset to change and another version of ourselves to become, at what point do we actually get to enjoy the person we’ve already become?

I don’t have an answer to that.

But I think I’d like to spend a little less time trying to improve my life and a little more time actually living it.

Join the chat

Every Wednesday there's an exclusive essay for paid subscribers. On top of that, there are reflection pages and little guides several times a month. If you're already one of them, thank you. If not, you're very welcome to join.

Become a paid subscriber

And I think that’s become so normal that we barely question it anymore. There are people I haven’t seen in five, maybe ten years, whose lives I could probably give you a fairly detailed update on. I know what their partners look like, where they spend their holidays and what they’ve been doing lately. But I couldn’t tell you what they’re really like these days, what matters to them or whether they’re even happy.

What I find particularly strange is that I don’t necessarily feel disconnected from these people. Their faces are familiar, their lives are familiar and every now and then we might even exchange a few words under a photograph. It’s easy to forget that the last time we actually sat down and had a proper conversation might have been years ago.

I wonder how many people I still think of as someone I know, when really, all I know is what they’ve chosen to show me.

Subscribe now

The people we never really lose sight of

There was a time when losing touch with someone meant actually losing touch.

You might hear about them through a mutual friend or run into them unexpectedly at a supermarket. Maybe you’d wonder occasionally what happened to the girl you sat next to in school or the friend you spent an entire summer with. You’d remember them as they were when you last knew them, and everything that happened afterwards would remain something of a mystery.

Now, we rarely have to wonder.

I can open Instagram and find out what someone I haven’t seen in eight years had for breakfast yesterday. I can watch their children grow up, see their new apartment and recognize their partner’s face without ever having met them. Sometimes I know about major changes in someone’s life before I hear about them from people I actually speak to.

It’s an odd kind of access when you think about it.

People who once belonged to a very specific chapter of our lives are still there, appearing between advertisements, recipes and videos of strangers doing things we’ll probably never attempt ourselves.

We don’t necessarily miss them. We don’t necessarily want to reconnect. Most of the time, we don’t think about the arrangement at all.

We just keep watching.

And occasionally, when something significant happens, we leave a heart or write a quick congratulations. They might reply with a thank you and a little emoji. For a moment, we’ve acknowledged each other’s existence again.

Then we go back to being spectators.

Knowing about someone isn’t the same as knowing them

I think social media has made it surprisingly easy to feel familiar with people we barely know anymore.

We recognize the places they visit, the clothes they wear and the people they spend time with. We know their birthdays because the app reminds us. We know when they’re having a good week because they post about it, and sometimes we know when they’re having a difficult one because they disappear for a while or share something unusually personal.

It’s enough information to create a sense of closeness.

But familiarity is a funny thing. It can make us feel as though we’re still involved in someone’s life, even when we haven’t had a proper conversation in years.

I sometimes catch myself saying things like, “Oh, she’s doing really well,” about someone I haven’t spoken to in ages.

And then I wonder what I’m basing that on.

A nice holiday? A new apartment? A photograph of her smiling beside someone?

For all I know, she could be having the hardest year of her life. She might hate the job I assumed she loved. She might have spent the evening before that beautiful photograph crying in her kitchen.

Or perhaps she really is doing wonderfully.

The point is that I have absolutely no idea.

I’ve seen what she’s shared, and somewhere along the way, I’ve started treating those fragments as though they tell me something meaningful about her life.

Of course, this isn’t entirely new. People have always shown different sides of themselves in different situations. We don’t tell everyone everything, and we never have. But I think the constant stream of updates makes it easier to forget how much we’re not seeing.

We have more information about one another than ever before, yet so much of it tells us very little.

I’m doing exactly the same thing

It would be easy to write about this as though everyone else were putting on a performance and I were somehow standing outside it, seeing through the whole thing.

But I’m not.

I do it too.

I share photographs from places I’ve been, things I’ve enjoyed and moments I want to remember. Sometimes I post because something made me happy. Sometimes because I like the photograph. Sometimes for no particular reason at all.

What I don’t usually share is the argument I had that morning, the afternoon I spent worrying about something completely irrational or the fact that I occasionally have days when I feel like I’m getting absolutely nothing done.

Not because I’m deliberately trying to make my life look better than it is. I simply don’t feel the need to invite hundreds of people into every part of it.

And I think most people feel the same.

We want to share certain things without sharing everything. We want to be seen, but not necessarily examined. We enjoy knowing what’s happening in other people’s lives while still wanting some privacy in our own.

There’s nothing particularly dishonest about that.

The problem, if there is one, starts when we forget that everyone else is doing it too.

When we look at someone’s carefully selected moments and unconsciously compare them with the much less edited version of our own lives. Or when we assume that because we’ve seen so much of someone, we must understand something about them.

I wonder how many people think they know what my life looks like based on what I choose to post.

And how different their version of it might be from the one I’m actually living.

When staying in touch doesn’t involve talking

Something else I’ve noticed is how easily social media has replaced the small efforts that used to keep certain relationships alive.

You don’t have to ask someone how their holiday was because you’ve already seen the pictures. You don’t need to ask whether they got the new job because they announced it three weeks ago. You might not even think to ask how they’re doing because, from what you’ve seen, everything appears to be going quite well.

I don’t think we consciously decide to stop asking questions. We simply feel as though we’ve already been given the answers.

And in a way, it’s convenient.

Keeping in touch takes effort. It requires remembering to message someone, finding time to meet and occasionally having conversations that are a little more involved than replying to a story.

Watching someone’s updates takes almost none.

I can keep up with twenty people while waiting for my coffee without speaking to a single one of them. And by the time I’ve put my phone away, I might genuinely feel as though I’ve caught up on what everyone has been doing.

Except I haven’t really caught up with anyone.

I’ve just collected a few more pieces of information.

I think that’s the part I find most peculiar. Social media allows relationships to remain visible long after they’ve stopped being active. There’s no obvious ending, no moment when you acknowledge that someone has quietly become a stranger.

They’re still there. You still recognize their face. You still know what they’ve been up to.

You just don’t know them in the way you once did.

Not every old friendship needs to be revived

I should probably say that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with drifting apart.

People change. They move, start families, develop different interests and find themselves in completely different circumstances. Some friendships belong to particular periods of our lives, and I don’t think that makes them any less meaningful.

There are people I remember very fondly whom I have no real desire to reconnect with. Not because anything happened between us, but because our lives simply went in different directions.

I can be happy to see that someone I once cared about is doing well without wanting to become part of their everyday life again.

And sometimes, seeing an occasional photograph is enough.

I don’t believe every relationship needs to be maintained indefinitely. That would be exhausting, and probably impossible.

What I find interesting is that social media has made the difference between knowing someone and knowing ofsomeone increasingly difficult to recognize.

An old friend can remain a familiar presence in your life for years, even though the friendship itself ended long ago.

You might know more about what they’re doing today than you know about someone you see regularly. Yet if you happened to sit down together for coffee, you might discover that you have very little idea who they’ve become.

I sometimes wonder what those conversations would be like.

Would we pick up where we left off? Would we have anything to say beyond the things we’ve already seen online? Would we recognize the people sitting across from us, or would we spend the first hour trying to catch up on all the things that never made it into a photograph?

The things we don’t post

A while ago, I came across a photograph of someone I used to know quite well. She looked happy. It was a lovely picture, the sort you look at for a second before scrolling on.

I remember thinking that she seemed to have a really nice life.

Then it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the last time we’d actually spoken.

I knew where she’d been recently, what she looked like now and a surprising number of details about her everyday life. But I didn’t know what she was worried about. I didn’t know whether she was happy in her relationship or whether she still wanted the same things she used to talk about years ago.

And she probably didn’t know any of those things about me either.

It wasn’t a particularly sad realization. At least not in the way I might have expected. I didn’t suddenly feel the need to message her or arrange a reunion. Our lives had moved on, and that was perfectly fine.

I just found it strange that I could feel so familiar with someone who had become, in almost every meaningful sense, a stranger.

Perhaps that’s what makes this whole thing so difficult to notice. Nothing dramatic happens. Nobody disappears. There isn’t necessarily a falling-out or a goodbye. We simply stop being part of each other’s lives while continuing to watch them from a distance.

And because we can still see each other, we don’t always notice how much has changed.

I don’t think the answer is to stop sharing things online or to turn every old acquaintance into a close friend again. I like seeing what people are doing. I like the occasional glimpse into a life that once overlapped with mine. And I don’t think those small connections are completely meaningless.

But I’ve started paying more attention to the difference between seeing someone’s life and actually being part of it.

Because the people we know best aren’t necessarily the ones whose updates we see most often. They’re the ones we can ask an ordinary question and get an answer that hasn’t been prepared for an audience. The ones who can tell us about the boring Tuesday, the difficult conversation or the thing they’re not quite ready to announce to everyone else.

And perhaps the strangest thing about our very connected lives is that we can spend years watching someone change without ever finding out who they’ve become.

Maybe it was just a difficult phase. Maybe things would get better. Maybe you needed to be more patient, try a little harder or remember why you fell in love in the first place. You begin negotiating with yourself, overlooking things you once thought you would never accept and convincing yourself that the good moments are enough to make up for everything else. Until one day, you realize that wanting something to work isn’t always enough to make it work.

And then comes the grief. Not necessarily for what you’ve lost, but for everything you thought was still ahead of you. The future you had imagined so clearly suddenly becomes a future you’re never going to live.

I’ve experienced that kind of breakup. Only mine wasn’t with a person.

It was with the career I had spent years dreaming about.

I broke up with being a teacher. And while I knew that ending a relationship could make you question your future, I hadn’t expected leaving a profession to make me question my entire past.

I thought I knew exactly who I wanted to become

For a long time, becoming a teacher wasn’t just one possible career among many. It was the plan. There is something reassuring about having a dream when you’re young. While everyone around you seems to be figuring things out, you have a direction. You know what you’re working towards. You can imagine yourself five or ten years from now and the picture feels reasonably clear.

Mine included a classroom.

I wanted to teach. I wanted to work with young people. I wanted a profession that meant something beyond earning a salary and going home at the end of the day. And because I believed in that future, I was willing to do what it took to get there.

I went to university. I studied for years, worked towards my qualifications and invested an enormous amount of time and energy in becoming the person I had decided I wanted to be. There were exams, deadlines, difficult periods and all the ordinary sacrifices that come with pursuing a degree. None of it felt pointless because I knew what I was doing it for. Every completed semester brought me closer to a future I had already imagined in considerable detail.

The strange thing about working towards a dream for years is that eventually it becomes difficult to distinguish between wanting something and being the kind of person who wants it. You introduce yourself through your studies. You talk about your future profession. People associate you with that path. And slowly, almost without noticing, you begin building your identity around something you haven’t even experienced yet.

I wasn’t simply studying to become a teacher anymore. Being a teacher was becoming part of who I believed I was.

So when I finally reached that point, when the studying was behind me and the actual job began, I expected to feel like I had arrived. After all, this was what I’d been working towards. I had followed the plan, put in the work and reached the destination.

What I didn’t know was that achieving the dream would eventually become the reason I started questioning it.

Nobody tells you what happens when you stop loving your dream

I worked as a teacher for four years. Four years of classrooms, school days, responsibilities and all the things you can never fully understand about a profession until you’re actually doing it. Four years of experiencing the enormous difference between the idea of teaching and the reality of working within an education system.

I want to be careful here because I don’t want to pretend that everything about teaching was terrible. It wasn’t. I believed in the importance of education then and I still believe in it today. I met young people who reminded me why I had chosen the profession in the first place. There were moments when the work felt meaningful and when I could see exactly why someone would dedicate their entire career to it.

But there was another side to it, one that became increasingly difficult for me to ignore.

The lack of appreciation. The amount of emotional energy the job demanded. The expectations that seemed to grow while the recognition of the work itself remained painfully limited. The feeling that no matter how much you gave, there was always something else you should have done, something you could have prepared better or someone who needed more of your attention.

And above all, there was the system.

A system that, in my experience, placed enormous demands on the people working within it while offering far too little protection from the exhaustion those demands created. A system in which being overwhelmed could begin to feel normal and where the line between professional dedication and sacrificing too much of yourself became increasingly difficult to see.

I began to understand how people could enter teaching with genuine enthusiasm and gradually lose the energy that had brought them there. How a profession built around helping others could leave the people doing that work feeling so unsupported themselves.

What troubled me most was that I still cared about the work. I didn’t suddenly stop believing that teachers could make a difference. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide that education no longer mattered to me. I was becoming unhappy doing something I still believed was important, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with that contradiction.

Because when you’ve worked so hard to achieve something, unhappiness doesn’t immediately make you question the dream. More often, it makes you question yourself. Perhaps you’re not resilient enough. Perhaps you’re expecting too much. Perhaps everyone else has simply learned to accept the parts of working life that you keep struggling with.

I didn’t want to believe that the profession was wrong for me. It was much easier to believe that I just hadn’t figured out how to make it work yet.

Maybe we just needed a change

If you’ve ever stayed in a relationship longer than you probably should have, you might recognize what happened next.

You start negotiating with yourself. You tell yourself that every relationship has difficult periods, that no situation is perfect and that leaving just because you’re unhappy would be giving up too easily. You remember the good moments and convince yourself that if you could somehow change the circumstances, everything might feel different again.

I did exactly that with teaching.

I didn’t want to leave. Not really. I wanted to find a way to stay without feeling the way I did. I wanted the profession I had imagined for so long to become the profession I had hoped it would be. I wanted to recover the enthusiasm I remembered from the beginning, when becoming a teacher still felt like something to look forward to rather than something I was increasingly questioning.

So I changed schools.

Looking back, that decision says a lot about how desperately I wanted to hold on to my original plan. I wasn’t ready to accept that the problem might be bigger than one workplace. A different school meant a fresh start, different colleagues, different circumstances and the possibility that everything I had been struggling with might finally improve.

And sometimes that really is the answer. Sometimes the environment is wrong, not the profession. I needed to find out whether that was true for me, because I couldn’t imagine walking away without knowing that I’d at least tried to make things better.

But changing schools didn’t change everything.

There were still aspects of the work that exhausted me. There were still expectations I struggled with and realities of the profession that I couldn’t imagine accepting for the next thirty or forty years. Some circumstances were different, but the deeper questions I’d been trying to escape followed me.

And underneath all of that, there was something I had been avoiding.

I was no longer the same person who had started university with such certainty. My priorities had changed. My idea of a good life had changed. Even my understanding of success had begun to shift in ways I hadn’t fully acknowledged.

I kept trying to repair the relationship without asking whether I still wanted the future that came with it.

And that was a much more frightening question.

I wanted a different kind of life

At some point, I began thinking less about what I wanted to achieve professionally and more about how I wanted my life to feel on an ordinary Tuesday. Not the impressive moments, the qualifications, the job title or the satisfaction of telling someone what I did for a living. Just everyday life.

What time did I want to wake up? How much control did I want over my schedule? What kind of work would leave me feeling interested and engaged rather than constantly exhausted? How much space did I want for creativity, curiosity and the possibility of changing direction?

And one answer kept coming back to me.

I wanted freedom.

I know that word can sound vague, especially when people use it to describe some idealized life without responsibilities. That wasn’t what I meant. I wasn’t looking for a way to avoid working. I had spent years proving to myself that I was capable of working hard for something I cared about. What I wanted was more freedom to decide how I worked and what I built with my time.

I didn’t want to spend the rest of my working life getting up at six in the morning because someone else’s schedule required it. I didn’t want my days to be so rigidly structured that the possibility of choosing differently barely existed. And I was beginning to question why a secure, respectable career should automatically be considered a successful one if the life surrounding it didn’t make me happy.

For some people, teaching offers exactly the kind of structure and meaning they want. I understand that. But I was slowly realizing that the life I wanted might be fundamentally incompatible with the profession I had chosen.

That realization made me feel guilty. There are people who would love to have the career you’ve worked towards. There are people who spend years searching for the kind of security you’re considering leaving behind. And there is always that voice reminding you that adulthood isn’t supposed to be about doing whatever you want.

I wondered whether I was being unrealistic. Whether I expected too much from work. Whether this was simply what growing up felt like and everyone else had somehow learned to accept it.

But the more I tried to ignore what I wanted, the harder it became to imagine staying. I had spent years working towards a future that once felt right, and now I was beginning to dread the idea of living it forever.

When do you stop trying to save something?

I think we’re taught to recognize the value of persistence much earlier than we’re taught to recognize the value of letting go.

Don’t give up. Keep going. Remember why you started. You’ve already come so far.

Most of us have heard some version of those sentences countless times. And they aren’t necessarily bad advice. There are moments when we need encouragement to continue, especially when the things we want require patience and effort. But what happens when continuing is no longer the right thing? What happens when the very qualities that helped you achieve your dream, your determination, discipline and willingness to keep going, become the things preventing you from leaving it?

I kept thinking about the years I had invested. The university degree. The work. The time. The version of my future I had been building for so long. Leaving felt like taking all of that and throwing it away.

Psychologists have a term for the tendency to continue something because of what we’ve already invested in it: the sunk cost fallacy. We find it difficult to walk away from a decision when we’ve already spent considerable time, money or effort pursuing it, even if continuing no longer serves us.

It sounds perfectly logical when you read about it. It feels entirely different when the investment is your own life.

I couldn’t stop asking myself what all those years had been for if I wasn’t going to remain a teacher. I wondered whether I should stay simply because I’d already come this far. Whether leaving would mean admitting that the person who had worked so hard to get here had been wrong all along.

And perhaps that’s why it took me so long to accept what I already knew. I wasn’t only afraid of leaving teaching. I was afraid of becoming someone who had given up on her dream.

How many more years was I willing to spend proving that the years I’d already invested hadn’t been a mistake?

I wish I could tell you that asking myself that question made everything clear. It didn’t. But it was becoming harder to avoid the answer, and eventually I had to confront the possibility that staying might cost me far more than leaving.

The breakup didn’t feel like freedom

There is a version of this story that would be much easier to tell. In that version, I finally realize that teaching isn’t right for me, make the brave decision to leave and immediately feel an enormous sense of relief. I discover exciting new possibilities, find my passion and look back on the entire experience as a necessary chapter in a much bigger success story.

It’s the kind of story we like because it gives uncertainty a satisfying ending.

Unfortunately, that isn’t what happened.

When I left teaching, I fell into a hole.

For years, I had been working towards a specific future. I knew what I was studying for, what profession I wanted and what kind of life I was supposed to build. Even when the reality became difficult, at least I had an identity I could hold on to. And then it was gone.

I had made the decision to leave, but I didn’t immediately know who I was without the career I had spent so much time becoming qualified for. I felt lost. I felt embarrassed by how uncertain everything suddenly seemed. And underneath those feelings was something I found even harder to admit.

I felt like a failure.

Not because someone had told me I was one. I was perfectly capable of reaching that conclusion on my own.

I kept thinking about all the people who had managed to stay in their professions, who had accepted the difficult parts and built careers around the decisions they’d made when they were younger. Why couldn’t I do the same? Why had I needed so many years to figure out something that, in hindsight, seemed so important?

Sometimes I wondered whether I simply hadn’t been strong enough. Whether I had mistaken ordinary professional difficulties for signs that something was fundamentally wrong. Whether the desire for freedom was a genuine priority or just a convenient explanation for leaving a job I couldn’t handle.

And then there was the question I kept returning to: What if I’d just wasted years of my life?

That thought stayed with me far longer than I expected. There is something deeply unsettling about looking back at a period of your life that once felt so purposeful and suddenly questioning its meaning. I had worked hard, achieved what I set out to achieve and then voluntarily walked away from it.

It didn’t feel like an achievement anymore. It felt like I’d spent years climbing a ladder only to discover that I didn’t want to be where it led. And now I was standing at the bottom again, watching other people continue upwards, wondering what on earth I was supposed to do next.

“Walking away from a job you once loved can shake your identity. It is hard to release something that once made you proud, even when you know it no longer fits.”

The most difficult part was that I couldn’t even offer myself the comfort of having a new plan. I knew what I no longer wanted, but I had no clear idea of what should replace it. I had spent so many years preparing to become one thing that the possibility of becoming something else felt almost impossible to imagine.

Starting over isn’t nearly as romantic as it sounds

We talk about starting over as though it were a single decision. You close one door, open another and begin a new chapter. There’s something appealing about that image, especially when you’re looking at someone else’s life from the outside.

But in reality, the space between closing one door and finding another can be painfully uncomfortable. You don’t necessarily wake up the next morning with a new dream. You don’t automatically know what you’re good at outside the profession you’ve trained for. And you certainly don’t stop comparing your current uncertainty with the stability you once had.

For a while, I missed having a clear answer. Not necessarily because I wanted to go back to teaching, but because I missed knowing where my life was heading. I missed the certainty of having a plan, even if that plan had eventually made me unhappy.

I think that was one of the most difficult things to accept: I had left something that wasn’t right for me, but leaving didn’t immediately make everything right.

I still had doubts. I still questioned whether I’d made the correct decision. I still wondered what my life would have looked like if I’d stayed at a different school, tried harder or simply waited a little longer. And even today, those thoughts haven’t disappeared entirely. Sometimes I still catch myself revisiting the decision, wondering whether I could have made teaching work under different circumstances.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to answer that question with absolute certainty.

But over time, I stopped treating the existence of doubt as proof that I’d made a mistake. I began allowing myself to explore other interests without demanding that they immediately turn into a new career plan. I started paying attention to the things I naturally returned to, the ideas that occupied my mind and the kind of work that made me lose track of time rather than constantly check it.

I found myself becoming more interested in creating things. In developing ideas, building something of my own and discovering what I could do when I wasn’t trying to fit myself into a professional identity I’d chosen years earlier.

Slowly, writing became a much bigger part of my life.

And somewhere in that process, I began to understand something about my old dream that had escaped me for years.

The question I couldn’t stop asking

For a long time after leaving teaching, one question continued to bother me: Why had I wanted to become a teacher in the first place?

I kept returning to it, almost as though I were trying to find evidence that my original decision had made sense. I wanted to understand what had been so important about that dream that I’d been willing to spend years pursuing it. And if it really had mattered that much, how could I have given it up?

It was a question that carried a lot of judgment. Every time I asked it, I seemed to be searching for something I’d done wrong. Maybe I’d misunderstood myself. Maybe I’d romanticized the profession. Maybe I’d simply been too young to know what I wanted.

But the more I thought about it, the more I began remembering what had actually attracted me to teaching. And it wasn’t quite what I’d assumed.

I had never seen myself primarily as someone whose purpose was to stand in front of a classroom and transfer information from a textbook into someone else’s head. Of course, teaching involves knowledge. And of course, helping young people learn is important. But that was never the part that moved me most.

I wanted to understand what was happening behind the expressions on people’s faces. I wanted to have conversations that mattered, to make someone think differently about something they’d always taken for granted and to encourage people who perhaps didn’t yet recognize their own possibilities. I wanted to challenge assumptions, inspire curiosity and sometimes simply be the person who said something at exactly the right moment.

I wanted to reach people in a way that stayed with them after the lesson was over.

And when I finally understood that, something about my entire experience began to change. Because the more I thought about what I had actually wanted from teaching, the more I realized that I hadn’t necessarily stopped wanting it.

Maybe I had never been in love with the idea of teaching itself. Maybe I had been in love with the possibility of reaching another person.

For years, I had been so focused on the profession I’d left behind that I hadn’t considered the possibility that the reason I’d wanted it was still very much part of who I was.

I had only stopped wanting to do it in a classroom.

Maybe I never really gave up on my dream

These days, I write.

I write here, on Sunday Feeling, and I also run two other blogs. They have their own subjects, their own readers and their own ways of exploring the things that interest me. Together, they give me space to be creative, to follow ideas and to turn thoughts into something I can share with other people.

Sometimes that means researching a topic and trying to understand it more deeply. Sometimes it means writing about an experience that has stayed with me for years. And sometimes it means sitting in front of a blank page, trying to put words to a feeling I suspect other people have experienced too.

I love the process of creating something from nothing. I love the possibility of deciding what to write about, how to approach it and what I want to say. I love that an idea can begin as a thought in my head and eventually become something another person reads on the other side of the world.

But what I find most meaningful isn’t simply the act of writing. It’s the possibility of reaching someone.

Someone who has been questioning a decision they made years ago. Someone who feels stuck in a life they worked hard to build. Someone who has been carrying around a thought they haven’t quite known how to express. Perhaps they read an article and recognize something of themselves in it. Perhaps a sentence makes them reconsider an assumption or gives them the courage to ask a question they’ve been avoiding. Or perhaps they simply feel a little less alone with whatever they’ve been thinking about.

I can’t know what happens after someone closes one of my articles. I don’t know whether my words stay with them or disappear from their minds a few minutes later. And I certainly don’t want to pretend that writing a blog is the same as standing in a classroom with young people whose lives you’re directly involved in.

It isn’t.

But the more I write, the more I recognize the same motivation that once made me want to become a teacher. I still want to reach people. I still want to make them think, question things and perhaps see something from a perspective they hadn’t considered before.

Only now, I get to do that in a way that also allows me to be creative and gives me more of the freedom I had been searching for.

And there’s something almost unbelievable about realizing that the thing I thought I’d abandoned might have been there all along, waiting for me in a different form.

For years, I kept asking myself how I could have given up on becoming a teacher. I was so focused on the profession I’d left behind that I hadn’t considered the possibility that the reason I’d wanted it was still very much part of who I was.

Maybe I had been holding on to the wrong part of the dream.

I don’t think those years were wasted anymore

I wish I could say that realizing all of this erased every difficult feeling I had about leaving teaching. It hasn’t. There are still moments when I think about the years I spent studying, the four years I worked in schools and the different direction my life might have taken if I’d made another decision. Sometimes I still wonder whether I should have stayed.

But I no longer believe that questioning a decision automatically means regretting it. And I no longer look at my years as a teacher as something I need to justify.

I did become a teacher. I achieved something that once mattered enormously to me. I experienced the reality of a profession I had admired and discovered things about myself that I couldn’t possibly have known while sitting in a university lecture.

I learned how much emotional energy meaningful work can require. I learned that believing in a profession doesn’t mean you have to accept every condition that comes with it. I learned that security and fulfillment aren’t necessarily the same thing and that the version of success we imagine when we’re younger doesn’t always survive contact with the life we eventually live.

Perhaps most importantly, I learned that I’m allowed to change my mind.

That sounds so simple when written down, but I think it can take years to truly believe it, especially when changing your mind means leaving behind something you’ve invested so much of yourself in.

I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. I don’t think every painful experience is secretly preparing us for something wonderful, and I don’t think we need to turn every difficult chapter into a beautiful lesson. There were parts of leaving teaching that were genuinely painful. There was uncertainty I would have preferred to avoid and a period of feeling lost that I wouldn’t romanticize now just because I understand it better.

But I can recognize that those experiences shaped the person I am today without pretending they were easy or necessary in some grand, predetermined sense.

If I hadn’t become a teacher, I might not have understood what kind of work matters to me. If I hadn’t experienced the realities of the profession, I might not have questioned the kind of life I wanted. And if I hadn’t eventually left, I might never have given myself the opportunity to explore writing in the way I do now.

I can’t prove any of that, of course. I can only look at where I am today and recognize the connection between the person I was then and the person I’m becoming now.

For the first time, those years no longer look like a detour I need to explain. They look like part of my story.

The hardest breakup of my life

I started this story by comparing leaving a career to ending a relationship, and I think the comparison still holds. When you leave someone you once loved, you don’t only lose the relationship. You lose the future you imagined together, the routines you built and sometimes even the version of yourself that existed within it.

Leaving teaching felt like that. I had to say goodbye to a future I’d spent years preparing for. I had to accept that the person I once imagined becoming wasn’t necessarily the person I wanted to remain. And I had to live with the uncomfortable feeling that I might have failed at something that had once meant everything to me.

It took me a long time to stop seeing that breakup as a failure. Maybe because I’d been asking myself the wrong question all along.

For years, I asked why I had given up on teaching. Now, when I look at the articles I’ve written, the blogs I’ve built and the thoughts I get to share with people who choose to read them, I find myself asking something else.

Did I really give up on what I wanted?

Because the more I think about the young woman who decided she wanted to become a teacher, the more I recognize her in what I’m doing today. She wanted to connect with people. She wanted to make them think. She wanted to create moments in which someone might feel understood, encouraged or inspired to look at the world differently.

She just thought a classroom was where she needed to be to do that.

I don’t know whether my writing will become everything I hope it might become. I don’t know exactly where these blogs will take me or what my working life will look like ten years from now. And for once, I don’t feel the need to have all those answers.

What I do know is that I get to sit down, open a blank page and create something that didn’t exist before. I get to explore the subjects that matter to me and share my thoughts without knowing who might eventually find them. I get to build something of my own, something that reflects not only what I’ve learned but also what I’m still trying to understand.

And perhaps that’s what makes writing feel so meaningful to me. Not because I’ve finally found the perfect career or because everything has fallen into place, but because it allows me to continue doing something I’ve cared about for much longer than I realized.

Maybe someone reading this article is standing at the same point I once stood, wondering whether it’s too late to change direction after investing so much in a future that no longer feels right. Maybe they’ve been telling themselves that leaving would mean failing, that all those years would have been for nothing or that they owe it to their younger selves to keep going.

I can’t tell them what decision to make. I don’t know their circumstances, what they might lose by leaving or what they might gain by staying. And I know from experience that these decisions are rarely as simple as they look from the outside.

But I can tell them that I once believed walking away from my dream meant I’d lost something essential about myself. I spent a long time wondering why I had worked so hard to become a teacher only to leave the profession behind. I thought I’d abandoned the very thing that had given my younger self such a strong sense of direction.

And now I’m sitting here, writing an article about it, hoping that somewhere, someone might read these words and recognize a little of their own life in them.

Which is a strangely familiar feeling.

Because when I think about it, that’s what I wanted to do all those years ago. I wanted to reach people, to make them think and to leave them with something that might stay with them long after our paths had crossed.

I thought becoming a teacher was the only way I could do that. I spent years preparing for it, four years trying to make it work and a long time afterwards believing I’d failed when I finally walked away.

But perhaps I hadn’t failed t

o become the person I wanted to be. Perhaps I’d simply been too attached to one particular idea of what that person was supposed to look like.

I thought I was giving up on my dream. It took me years to realize that I was only giving up on the way I thought I had to live it.

And maybe that’s what makes this breakup so different from the one I thought I was writing about. I didn’t have to stop caring about what had brought me to teaching in the first place. I only had to accept that the profession itself was no longer where I wanted to spend my life.

I wanted to reach people.

And maybe, through this article and everything else I choose to write, I’m finally finding my own way of doing exactly that.

Have you ever had to let go of something you once thought you wanted more than anything? And looking back, do you think you lost a dream or simply found a different way to live it?

Every Wednesday there's an exclusive essay for paid subscribers. On top of that, there are reflection pages and little guides several times a month. If you're already one of them, thank you. If not, you're very welcome to join.

Become a paid subscriber

But what happens when you can’t? What happens when your life is actually good and some part of you still wants something different? I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’ve made some of my biggest decisions without having the kind of reason that makes sense on paper.

I had a good job. It was secure, I had a steady income and there were plenty of reasons to stay. If I had described the situation to someone else, they probably wouldn’t have immediately thought: you should quit. But I wanted more freedom. Nothing dramatic happened and there wasn’t one terrible day that made the decision for me. I just started realizing that something I had once wanted wasn’t necessarily what I wanted anymore.

And that was surprisingly difficult to accept because when something is good, leaving can feel almost irresponsible. I remember having both thoughts at the same time: Am I crazy for giving up something this secure? and I think I need to do this.

Both were true. I knew what I had and I knew what I would be giving up. A regular income, security and a path that was relatively easy to explain to other people. Self-employment offered me the freedom I wanted, but it certainly didn’t offer more certainty. There was no guarantee that I would look back six months later and think I had made the smartest decision of my life.

Eventually, though, the second thought became louder. So I quit and chose self-employment. Not because my old life had become unbearable, but because I wanted a different one.

And I think that distinction matters.

We’re very good at waiting for permission to leave

I think a lot of us have learned to understand change through breaking points. You leave the job when you can’t stand it anymore. You leave the relationship when something terrible happens. You distance yourself from the friendship once the other person has crossed some undeniable line. Until then, you stay.

Maybe because leaving something that is clearly bad feels justified, while leaving something that is simply no longer right for you feels selfish. I’ve done this with friendships too. Sometimes you know a friendship has become one-sided long before you’re willing to admit it. You keep reaching out, you keep making the effort and you tell yourself that you’ve known each other for years or that friendships naturally go through phases.

Sometimes that’s true. And sometimes you’re holding onto the history of a friendship rather than the friendship you actually have now.

There’s actually a very human reason we do this. We tend to give a lot of weight to what we’ve already invested in something. Years in a relationship. Time spent building a career. A decade of friendship. The more we’ve put into something, the harder it can feel to walk away because leaving can make all of that investment feel wasted.

Economics has a rather unromantic term for part of this: the sunk cost effect. We allow what we’ve already invested to influence whether we continue, even when that investment can’t be recovered either way.

Of course, a friendship or a relationship isn’t an economics problem. But I think the idea explains something very familiar. We’ve been friends for fifteen years. I worked so hard to get here. We’ve already built so much together.

Those things matter. But they tell you something about the past, not necessarily what you should choose for your future.

Relationships can be like that too. Not every relationship ends because somebody did something unforgivable. Sometimes the realization arrives much more quietly. You’ve changed. What you need has changed. The relationship that once made sense doesn’t anymore.

And there’s something uncomfortable about admitting that because there is no villain. No dramatic explanation. Nothing you can present as evidence that leaving was the correct decision. There’s just this growing feeling that you don’t want to keep living this way.

Familiar doesn’t necessarily mean right

There’s another reason staying can feel easier: we generally prefer what we already know.

Psychology calls this status quo bias. Put simply, keeping things as they are can feel safer than changing them, even when another option might suit us better. Change introduces uncertainty and uncertainty gives our brains a lot of material to work with.

What if I regret leaving?

What if the next job is worse?

What if I never find another friendship like this one?

What if I’m expecting too much?

What if I discover that the problem was me all along?

The current version of your life might not feel completely right anymore, but at least you know it. The alternative exists mostly in your imagination and imagination is very good at filling empty spaces with worst-case scenarios.

I think this is why Is it bad enough to leave? is often the wrong question.

Maybe a better one is: If I were choosing this for the first time today, knowing what I know now, would I still choose it?

That doesn’t automatically mean you should leave if the answer is no. Life is more complicated than one question. But it changes the perspective. Instead of asking whether your current situation has become sufficiently terrible to justify change, you’re asking whether it still fits the person you are now.

I don’t think I could have done this in my early twenties

If you had shown my 20 or 25-year-old self some of the decisions I would make later, I think she would have thought I was a little crazy. But probably brave too.

Back then, I was much more afraid of going my own way. Partly because I didn’t really know what I wanted yet. Sometimes I thought I did, but those things changed too. And partly because it was much easier to look around and see what everyone else was doing. What am I supposed to want? What does a sensible life look like? Am I doing this the way everyone else seems to be doing it?

There’s comfort in following a path that already exists. You can compare yourself to everyone walking beside you and check whether you’re roughly where you’re supposed to be. Going your own way takes that away. Suddenly there’s nobody next to you telling you whether you’re doing it correctly.

I still have fears. I still think about what could go wrong. I don’t think that part magically disappears when you get older. Quitting a secure job didn’t suddenly turn me into someone who loves uncertainty. I didn’t wake up the next morning completely fearless and certain that I had made the right choice.

What changed was something else.

I started trusting my own reasons more.

I’m getting better at looking inward before I look around and asking myself what I actually want instead of immediately checking what everyone else is doing. I don’t need every decision to make sense to everybody else before it can make sense to me.

That might be one of the biggest differences between me now and the version of me in my early twenties.

A good life can still become the wrong life for you

Maybe that’s the part we don’t talk about enough. You can be grateful for something and still outgrow it. You can love what a certain chapter gave you without wanting to live there forever.

You can have a good job and want more freedom. You can care about someone and know the relationship no longer works. You can have years of history with a friend and realize you’re the only person still carrying the friendship. None of those things cancel out what came before.

Changing your mind doesn’t mean you were wrong when you chose something in the first place. You were a different version of yourself making a decision with what you knew and wanted at the time. Of course some of those decisions won’t fit forever. I actually think it would be stranger if they all did.

And yet we can be incredibly hard on ourselves when they stop fitting. We treat changing our minds as if it means we failed to know ourselves properly the first time around.

But how could we?

I don’t want exactly the same things I wanted ten years ago and I’m glad I don’t. I’ve changed. My priorities have changed. The way I think about my own life has changed.

Why wouldn’t my choices change with me?

But what if you regret it?

This is probably where fear comes in because staying with something good gives you something very valuable: certainty. Leaving replaces that certainty with a giant question mark.

I knew what my job gave me. I didn’t know exactly what self-employment would give me. I knew what I was giving up, but I couldn’t know exactly what I was getting in return. That’s terrifying in a very ordinary way. You can make the brave decision and still wonder whether you’re making a huge mistake.

And I think we sometimes misunderstand what a good decision is because we judge it entirely by what happens afterwards. If everything works out, it was brave. If it doesn’t, maybe we tell ourselves we should have stayed.

But you can’t make decisions with information you don’t have yet.

You can only ask whether the choice makes sense based on who you are, what you know and what you need now. A difficult outcome doesn’t automatically mean the decision was wrong, just as a comfortable outcome doesn’t automatically mean staying was right.

I don’t think courage feels nearly as confident as we sometimes imagine it does. Sometimes it’s just being scared and doing the thing anyway because staying has started to feel less honest than leaving.

And yes, you might change your mind again. That’s allowed too. The goal isn’t to make one perfect decision in your thirties and finally become the finished version of yourself. I’m not sure that version exists.

Maybe figuring yourself out is less about finally arriving somewhere and more about getting better at noticing when something no longer feels like you.

So how do you know if you’ve actually outgrown something?

I don’t think there’s a checklist that can make the decision for you. And feeling restless for a week obviously doesn’t mean you need to quit your job, end your relationship and disappear into a completely different life.

But there are a few questions I find much more useful than Is this bad enough to leave?

If I were choosing this for the first time today, would I still choose it?

Am I staying because I genuinely want this or because I’m afraid of what happens if I leave?

Do I want this person, job or life as it exists now or am I attached to what it used to be?

If nobody else had an opinion about my decision, what would I want?

And maybe the hardest one:

Am I hoping this will become right for me again because accepting that it isn’t would mean I have to do something about it?

None of these questions will hand you an answer. But I think they can help separate gratitude from obligation, familiarity from happiness and fear from genuine desire.

You’re allowed to appreciate what something has been without promising to choose it forever.

“But my life is good” isn’t always a reason to stay

There was probably a time when that sentence would have been enough for me.

It’s good. Why risk it?

I don’t believe that anymore. I don’t think being able to tolerate your life is the same thing as feeling at home in it. And I don’t think the fact that other people would be happy with what you have means you have to be.

That doesn’t mean constantly chasing something better or blowing up your life every time you feel restless. Sometimes the answer really is to stay. But I think there’s a difference between staying because you genuinely choose what you have and staying because you’re afraid you won’t be able to justify leaving.

For me, it has become much more important to feel whole in the life I’m living. Not perfect. Not endlessly happy. Not completely certain about every decision. Just like I’m actually living my own life rather than following a version of it that once made sense.

Maybe that means changing things. Maybe it means letting go of something that was good to you. Maybe it means making a decision your younger self would think was completely crazy.

Hopefully she’d think it was brave too.

And maybe we don’t always need something to go terribly wrong before we allow ourselves to want something different.

Sometimes the fact that it no longer feels like yours is enough.

I’d love to know

Have you ever walked away from something that was actually good simply because you knew it wasn’t right for you anymore?

For such a long time, life seems to exist mostly in the future. There is always another version of yourself waiting somewhere ahead: the person you’ll become when you’re older, when you know yourself better, when you’ve figured out what you want, when you’ve found the right people, the right place, the right kind of life. Even when you’re already an adult, there can be this quiet assumption that eventually things will settle into place and you’ll arrive at some more certain version of yourself.

And then, at some point, you realize you’re not really waiting anymore. This is it. Not in a dramatic or depressing sense. You simply look around and understand that the life you once imagined as something far away is the life you’re living now.

Except it probably doesn’t look the way you thought it would.

I find this especially strange because so much can be good at the same time. I think we tend to associate questioning our lives with being unhappy, as though dissatisfaction must come first. But sometimes nothing is particularly wrong. You can love people deeply, be grateful for what you have and genuinely like parts of the life you’ve built while still wondering about the versions of it that never happened.

The city you thought you might live in. The career you assumed you would have. The friendships you were convinced would last forever. The kind of person you expected to be by now. Maybe there were things you once wanted so badly that you barely recognize the person who wanted them. And maybe there are things you never expected to care about that suddenly matter more than almost anything else.

When I was younger, I assumed getting older would come with certainty. I didn’t expect to have everything figured out, but I did imagine there would be some point at which I would know myself well enough to stop questioning quite so much. I thought adulthood would eventually feel more fixed.

It hasn’t.

If anything, I’ve become less certain about some things with age. Not because I know myself less, but perhaps because I understand more clearly that knowing yourself isn’t something you finish doing.

We change in ways that are difficult to notice while they’re happening. Usually there is no single moment when you become a different person. Your priorities shift slowly. Certain friendships start feeling different. Things that used to excite you become less important. You become less willing to tolerate some things and unexpectedly more forgiving about others. Then one day you look at an old version of your life and realize you wouldn’t choose all of it again.

I sometimes wonder what a younger version of me would think if she could see my life now.

There are things she would probably be surprised by. Things she might be proud of. Other things she would almost certainly question. And there are parts of my life that would require a very long explanation because there is simply no way she could understand all the decisions, accidents, relationships, disappointments and changes that happened between her life and mine.

But I’m not sure I would want her opinion anyway.

Because she imagined my future using the information she had then.

And I think we forget that when we judge our lives against old expectations.

We treat plans we made at twenty, twenty-five or thirty as though they were promises we are somehow obligated to keep. We hold ourselves accountable to ambitions that belonged to a person who had not yet experienced everything we have experienced since. Then, when our lives move in another direction, we can interpret the difference as evidence that something went wrong.

Maybe nothing went wrong.

Maybe you simply changed.

There is a particular kind of grief in realizing that some versions of your life are no longer going to happen. I don’t think we talk about that very much because these losses are difficult to explain. You’re not necessarily grieving something you had. Sometimes you’re grieving something you expected to have.

A friendship you thought would still exist. A relationship you imagined differently. A career you never pursued. A version of family life that didn’t happen. A place you never moved to. A person you thought you would become.

These things can feel surprisingly real considering they never actually existed.

And perhaps that is why it can be difficult to let them go.

At the same time, I don’t think every doubt is a sign that something needs to change. There is a tendency now to turn every uncomfortable feeling into an instruction. If you feel restless, reinvent yourself. If something feels difficult, leave. If you’re bored, start over. If your life doesn’t feel completely aligned, apparently you need a new morning routine, a new city, a new career and possibly an entirely new personality.

I don’t believe that.

Sometimes questioning your life is simply part of living it.

You can wonder about another path without wishing you had taken it. You can miss an old version of yourself without wanting to become her again. You can mourn what didn’t happen while still being grateful for what did.

Two things can be true at once. Maybe that’s one of the harder parts of getting older.

I also think there is a difference between accepting the life you have and actively choosing it. From the outside, those two things can look exactly the same. Internally, they are very different.

Every once in a while, it seems worth asking yourself whether the things surrounding you are still there because you want them to be or simply because they have been there for a long time. Your routines. Your ambitions. Your relationships. Your ideas about success. Even the way you describe yourself.

Not everything needs to survive every version of you.

And changing your mind doesn’t necessarily mean your previous choices were mistakes. They may have been exactly right for who you were at the time. Something can have been right once and not be right forever.

I find that thought strangely reassuring.

There is no single life we were supposed to build and then spend the rest of our years protecting from change. There are just decisions we make with what we know at the time. Some become permanent. Some don’t. Some take us somewhere completely unexpected.

Maybe growing older is partly learning to stop asking whether your life looks the way it was supposed to and asking a different question instead:

Does it still feel like mine?

I think that question is much more interesting.

And maybe it’s also a good place to begin Sunday Feeling.

I don’t want this to be a place where every thought has to become advice or every difficult question needs to end with a neat conclusion. There are enough places telling us how to improve ourselves, optimize our lives and become some better version of who we already are.

I’m more interested in the things we think about when nobody is asking us to solve them.

The thoughts that come back when life gets quiet. The things we’re not entirely sure how to explain yet. The questions we might be slightly afraid to answer honestly.

So this is the first one.

How different is the life you’re living from the life you once imagined and how do you actually feel about that?