i was in a meeting with my supervisor when he said, almost casually, “you’re switching to a phd, right? so you can finish this project.”

and i said yes. or something close enough to yes that it became a yes. something like, yeah, that’s the plan, which is a very strange thing to say about several years of your life when the private plan, the one you say to your friends when you are being honest, is to finish the master’s, leave academia, become a writer, build your platform, and become a person whose life has more to do with language than lab meetings.

i don’t think i even decided to say it. i think my mouth just got there before the rest of me could object. he had invested in me. the project was relying on me. people had planned around the assumption that i would stay long enough to finish what i started. and in that room, with the fluorescent lights and the polite academic language and the familiar pressure of being useful, staying suddenly felt less like a choice than a way of not becoming a problem.

then my body caught up.

not dramatically, exactly. i didn’t throw up or cry or announce that i was having an existential crisis beside the lab meeting agenda. but something in me tightened so quickly that it felt like my body was trying to interrupt a conversation my mouth had already agreed to. there was this sudden, hot panic of realising i had almost offered up years of my life in the tone of someone saying “no worries”.

and i have been thinking about that ever since.

not the phd, really.

the yes.

the pattern

here’s what i know about myself: this is not only something i do with large life decisions. i do it with matcha, which is probably less impressive but somehow more revealing.

i am lactose intolerant. and still, if a barista gives me normal milk instead of oat milk, my first instinct is not to ask them to remake it. my first instinct is to stand there holding the wrong matcha, calculating how busy they look, how annoyed they might be, how much of a nuisance i am allowed to become over a drink, whether i can just drink it anyway and deal with the consequences later. there is a whole moral weather system that forms around the sentence, actually, i asked for oat milk.

most of the time, i say nothing.

i take the matcha. i smile. i tell myself it’s fine. and then i make my body deal with the thing my voice would not ask someone else to fix.

this is, objectively, ridiculous. it is also the kind of detail that tells you more about a person than the big things do, because the big things can be dressed up in better explanations. a phd can be made to sound responsible. staying in a project can be made to sound generous. finishing what you started can be made to sound noble. but drinking the wrong matcha because you are afraid of mildly inconveniencing a stranger is harder to romanticise.

that is not generosity. that is training.

why easy feels safe

i don’t know exactly when i learned that being easy was better than being honest. i don’t think there was one grand lesson. it was more ambient than that, more like something absorbed from the air.

growing up, i remember hearing the way people spoke about high maintenance women. especially my brother’s girlfriends, or girls around the family, or women who seemed to want too much from the people around them. they were difficult. they were a lot. they were not worth it. and i think, as a girl, you hear those things and begin building a private rulebook without realising that is what you are doing.

don’t be that kind of girl. don’t be the one people have to manage. don’t ask too many questions. don’t make someone remake the matcha. don’t need too much reassurance. don’t make the room adjust around the fact that you are in it.

be easy.

i used to think this was maturity. i thought being adaptable meant i was kind, that being low maintenance meant i was emotionally generous, that needing very little made me someone people would want to keep around. and maybe sometimes it did. maybe sometimes flexibility really is just flexibility. maybe not every compromise is a wound.

i want to be careful here.

i am not saying that every yes is self-betrayal, or that every preference needs to become a boundary, or that the goal is to become impossible to live with. i still think there is dignity in being considerate. i still think there is grace in making room for other people. but there is a difference between making room for someone else and slowly removing yourself from the room.

i think i have confused those things for a long time.

what self-silencing does

there is this psychologist named Dana Jack who writes about something called “self-silencing”. the phrase is almost too plain, which is probably why it works. it describes the way people, especially women, suppress their own needs, anger, thoughts, or preferences in order to preserve connection. outwardly, it can look like compliance or agreeableness. inwardly, it can create anger, inauthenticity, and a feeling of being divided from yourself.

i read that and felt uncomfortably seen.

because the hardest part to admit is that low maintenance does not always feel like low self-worth from the inside. sometimes it feels like being good. it feels like being thoughtful, mature, reasonable, low-drama, easy to work with, easy to date, easy to supervise, easy to love. it feels like choosing connection over conflict, except the connection you are preserving is often with someone else, and the conflict you are avoiding is often with yourself.

that is the part that scares me.

not that i said yes in the meeting. people say things they don’t mean all the time. the scary part is how natural it felt. how quickly my mind found reasons to make it make sense. he invested in you. they need you. it would be inconvenient if you left. you can do hard things. you can make this work. you can want your real life later.

later is very useful when you are trying not to disappoint anyone.

later lets you betray yourself slowly.

the problem with being no trouble

the problem with being no trouble is that people start believing you have none.

not because they are cruel. because you have taught them. you taught them when you said you didn’t mind, when you made the plan work, when you drank the matcha, when you accepted the assumption, when you made your leaving sound easier than it felt, when you said yes so smoothly that no one had time to wonder whether you meant it.

and then, later, you feel unseen.

i know this pattern too well. i have built entire emotional contracts in my head and then felt hurt when no one followed terms they never knew existed. i have wanted people to notice what i needed without having to risk the embarrassment of needing it out loud. i have wanted to be known without having to become inconvenient.

which is a little unfair. and very human.

because sometimes the fantasy is not that people will give you everything you want. sometimes the fantasy is that they will notice the cost before you have to name it. that someone will look at you and say, actually, this is asking too much of you. actually, you don’t have to drink that. actually, you don’t have to become a phd student just because the project needs a clean ending.

but people cannot always read what you have spent years hiding from them.

eventually, if you want people to know what you need, you may have to say it while the thing is still small. while your voice is still soft. while it is still just oat milk.

the history of being agreeable

i have been trying to understand why being easy feels not just pleasant to me, but virtuous. as if wanting less makes me morally better. as if the highest compliment a woman can receive is that she passed through a room without disrupting anyone’s comfort.

i don’t think that came from nowhere.

there is a long history of teaching women to become smaller in respectable ways. under coverture, in English common law and later colonial legal traditions, a married woman’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s; she was, in a legal sense, covered by him rather than treated as a fully separate person. in the nineteenth century, historian Barbara Welter described the “cult of true womanhood” as an ideal built around piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity — a whole moral architecture that made female goodness look a lot like obedience.

i know that sounds far away from a matcha order. it sounds far away from a lab meeting in Vancouver, and a girl trying to decide whether to turn a master’s into a phd because the project would be easier to finish that way. but i don’t think it is entirely unrelated.

the scale is different. the mechanism is familiar.

a good woman does not make things harder. a good woman is grateful for the room she has been given. a good woman understands what other people need from her and adjusts before they have to ask. she is pleasant. she is useful. she is not too loud about the fact that she has a life of her own.

and maybe that is why the word high maintenance still has so much power. it does not just mean a woman wants things. it means she has failed to hide the wanting.

beauty has rules too

i think this is where beauty gets complicated for me, because beauty has its own version of low maintenance. the instruction is not just be beautiful. it is be beautiful without looking like you tried. have taste, but don’t be vain. have standards, but don’t announce them. care about how you move through the world, but never so visibly that someone can accuse you of caring too much.

the effort has to disappear.

i love beauty. i love clothes and perfume and good lighting and the feeling of putting on an outfit that makes me stand differently. i don’t think caring about beauty is the problem. i think the problem is being taught to treat every form of wanting as something that needs to be hidden before it can be respected.

women have always known that appearance is not neutral. suffragists knew it too: colours, sashes, white dresses, and public visual symbolism became part of how the movement made itself legible and memorable. there is something interesting to me about that — not because clothes are freedom by themselves, but because women have so often had to understand the language of being seen. how to be visible enough to be powerful, but not so visible that you become easy to dismiss.

maybe that is what i am tired of.

not beauty. not softness. not consideration. not wanting to be liked.

i am tired of making the evidence of my own wanting disappear.

what high maintenance might mean

i am starting to wonder if high maintenance is only an insult because we have decided some things should not require care.

maybe your time should require care. maybe your body should require care. maybe your future should require care. maybe the life you are trying to build should not have to survive on whatever is left after you have made everyone else comfortable.

i don’t want to become demanding for the sake of it. i don’t want to turn every inconvenience into a referendum on my worth. i don’t want to lose the part of me that is considerate, because i like that part. she is not the enemy. she is probably the reason i have been able to build relationships, and survive new cities, and be trusted with things that matter.

but i want her to stop confusing gratitude with debt.

i can be grateful that my supervisor invested in me and still not owe him the next several years of my life. i can care about the project and still not turn my future into project management. i can want to leave well without making my leaving painless for everyone except me.

maybe that is what i mean by not wanting to be low maintenance anymore. not that i want to be difficult. just that i want to stop treating my own life like the easiest thing to negotiate.

what i want to say

i am not very good at this yet.

i still want to make things easier for people. i still want to be liked. i still want to leave rooms without anyone feeling disappointed in me. i still want to be the girl who understands, who helps, who does not make the ending harder than it already is. i still, apparently, want to protect baristas from the consequences of giving lactose intolerant women normal milk.

so i am not writing this from the other side.

i am writing it from the part where i can finally see the pattern and still do it sometimes. from the meeting where my mouth said yes and my body said absolutely not. from the strange middle space between knowing what you want and learning how to stop apologising for it.

i think that is where most change starts. not in the grand announcement, but in the small pause after the automatic yes. in the second where you realise that being easy has started making decisions for you. in the moment you understand that your life cannot be built entirely around the fear of someone thinking you are difficult.

if you have ever said yes because no would have made you a problem, i think i understand.

if you have ever swallowed the need before anyone else could notice it, i think i understand.

if you have ever made yourself easier to love and then wondered why you felt so unseen, i think i understand.

maybe you are not too much. maybe you are not dramatic. maybe you are not suddenly becoming difficult.

maybe you are just hearing yourself clearly for the first time.

and maybe you are allowed to be inconvenient at the end of something.

maybe you are allowed to ask for the right matcha.

maybe you are allowed to want the life that is actually yours.

not because it is easy.

because it is yours.

i cancelled plans last week because i said i was having a hard week.

and i was. sort of. the thesis was dragging, i was tired, i didn’t feel like being social. it was uncomfortable and i didn’t want to do it. so i said it was hard and i stayed home.

and then i thought about the word i’d just used. and i felt something like embarrassment.

because hard is a word that has carried real weight across human history. and i’d just used it to describe not wanting to leave my apartment.

the word we reach for

we use hard constantly. for traffic. for conversations we don’t want to have. for degrees that require focus. for jobs that are demanding. for relationships that take work. for tuesdays that just feel heavy for no reason.

hard has become our all-purpose word for anything that asks more of us than we’d prefer to give. if it creates friction, it’s hard. if it takes effort, it’s hard. if it makes us uncomfortable, if it makes us tired, if it requires us to do something we didn’t feel like doing — hard.

i’ve been sitting with how much this word does for us. and how much, maybe, we’ve let it off the hook.

what hard actually looked like

harriet tubman made thirteen trips back into slave territory after she had already escaped.

not one. thirteen. each trip risked her life, her freedom, everything she’d fought to build. she carried a gun and reportedly told the people she was guiding: if you’re too scared to keep going, i’ll shoot you myself — because a scared person going back could get everyone killed. she didn’t have the option of cancelling her plans. she didn’t have the luxury of staying home because the week felt heavy.

that is hard.

or take Wangari Maathai — kenyan environmentalist, first african woman to win the nobel peace prize. she started planting trees in kenya in 1977, work the government found so threatening that she was beaten, imprisoned, and publicly ridiculed by the president who called her a madwoman. she planted trees anyway. for decades. through the beatings. through the mockery. through the political persecution.

not because it felt good. because it was the thing she believed in.

or take the ordinary people throughout history whose names we never learned — the medieval peasant who woke up before sunrise to farm land they didn’t own, who watched their children die from preventable diseases, who lived their entire lives inside a radius of a few miles and still showed up the next day. no instagram break. no terminology for burnout. no option to take a mental health day.

hard, for most of human history, meant: you might die. or your children might die. or the thing you love might be taken from you and there is nothing you can do about it.

i’m not saying suffering is a competition

i want to be careful here.

i’m not saying that your pain doesn’t count because someone else had it worse. i’m not saying that hard should only be reserved for extreme circumstances. i’m not making a hierarchy of struggle.

what i’m saying is: we’ve lost the distinction between hard and uncomfortable. between genuinely difficult and merely effortful. between something that costs you something real and something that just asks you to push through friction.

psychologists call it cognitive distortion when we catastrophise — when we take something difficult and amplify it into something unbearable. and i think there’s a version of this at a cultural level. we have collectively learned to call things hard in a way that actually prevents us from doing them. because if it’s hard, you’re allowed to stop. if it’s hard, no one can judge you for struggling. if it’s hard, you have permission.

the word has become an exit.

what i think is actually happening

here’s what i’ve started to notice: most of the things i call hard aren’t hard. they’re uncomfortable.

uncomfortable is: doing the thing when i’m tired. having the conversation i’ve been avoiding. finishing the chapter i don’t care about. staying in a city that doesn’t feel like mine yet, for the fourth month in a row, while it rains.

hard is: doing the thing when it costs you something real. when the stakes are your safety, your livelihood, your people, your dignity. when there is no out.

the problem is that we treat uncomfortable the way we treat hard — which means we give ourselves permission to stop when we shouldn’t. we treat the friction as evidence that something is wrong, as proof that we shouldn’t be here, as a sign to quit. when actually the friction is just — friction. the normal, unavoidable texture of doing something that matters.

uncomfortable is not a reason to stop. it’s a reason to notice that you’re actually doing something.

the thing about doing hard things

harriet tubman didn’t describe what she was doing as hard. she described it as necessary.

i think about that word a lot. necessary. not easy, not comfortable, not even desirable — just necessary. the thing that had to be done, and so it was done. the option to call it hard and stop was not an option that existed.

and i wonder what would shift if we held ourselves to that word instead. not: is this hard? but: is this necessary? not: do i feel like doing this? but: is this the thing that has to be done?

because most of the things we call hard — we actually know are necessary. the thesis. the difficult conversation. the city that doesn’t feel like home yet. the life we’re building while we’re not sure we’re doing it right. we know these things have to be done. we just want permission to feel like it’s okay that they’re difficult.

and they are. it’s okay that they’re difficult. but difficult doesn’t mean you stop. it means you’ve arrived at the part that counts.

what i want to say

i’m not immune to this. i still use the word hard when i mean uncomfortable. i still let the friction feel bigger than it is. i still, sometimes, stay home.

but i’m trying to notice the difference now. between the thing that is genuinely, deeply, historically difficult — and the thing that just requires me to push through something i’d prefer to avoid.

uncomfortable means: keep going.

hard means: you’re being asked to do something that matters.

either way, the answer is the same.

it’s sunday morning and i’m lying in bed thinking about everything i should be doing.

not because i have to. i have nowhere to be. nothing is on fire. by any reasonable measure, i am allowed to just lie here. and yet — the list is already running. the thesis chapter i haven’t touched. the emails sitting unanswered. the content i could be making. the version of today that would feel, at the end of it, like a day well spent.

the version where i did something.

i’ve been trying to notice this about myself lately: i don’t actually know how to have a day that doesn’t count. a day where i’m not building toward something, producing something, becoming something. rest, for me, has always come with a tax. you can have the sunday, but you have to feel guilty about it.

the name for it

psychologists call it productivity guilt — the chronic feeling that you are not doing enough, regardless of what you actually accomplish. you finish a full week of work and lie in bed wondering what you even did. you take an afternoon off and spend it mentally cataloguing the unfinished tasks. you go on holiday and feel vaguely wrong the entire time, like you’ve left something important on.

Verywell Mind describes it simply: “productivity guilt often comes from beliefs that our worth must be earned through achievement.”

not performed. earned. as in — you have to keep proving it. the moment you stop, the proof expires.

i think about how early this gets installed. the gold stars for the right answers. the praise that arrived when you achieved and the quiet that settled when you didn’t. at some point, most of us absorbed the idea that being good means doing well, and doing well means doing more, and rest is just the gap between one effort and the next. not a thing in itself. just a pause before the next thing that counts.

the job that makes me want to cry

i should say something honest here.

i have a day job. i’m a cancer researcher — or i’m finishing the degree that makes me one, which is close enough. and thinking about that work, on a sunday morning, makes me want to cry. not because it’s hard. because it’s not mine. i chose it for reasons that made sense at twenty-one and make less sense now. i show up to it because the degree is also my work permit, and the work permit is also my life in this city, and so i stay.

and then i open my laptop and start writing — essays, notes, things that feel alive — and something in me settles. this is the thing. this is the one that doesn’t feel like work even when it’s work.

i’ve been sitting with the gap between those two feelings for a while. the thing that makes me want to cry and the thing that makes me feel like myself. and the productivity guilt makes it worse — because even on a sunday, even when i’m not doing the research, i feel like i should be. like existing without producing something legitimate is a kind of failure.

what my boyfriend sent me

a few days ago my boyfriend forwarded me a summary of end-of-life regret research. the kind of thing hospice workers and palliative care nurses collect — the patterns of what people wish, in their final weeks, they had done differently.

the list is not what you’d expect. nobody wishes they had worked more. nobody wishes they had been more productive, more impressive, more output-oriented. Bronnie Ware, a palliative care worker who documented these regrets extensively, found that the recurring ones were simpler and more devastating: i wish i had lived more honestly as myself. i wish i hadn’t worked so hard. i wish i had let myself be happier.

i read that and thought about my sunday mornings. the ones i’ve spent feeling guilty for resting. the ones where i’ve been technically present but mentally somewhere else, cataloguing the things i should be doing. the ones where i’ve had a perfectly good day and still gone to bed feeling like i wasted it.

when i’m eighty, i will not wish i’d had more productive sundays. i will wish i’d had more of the other kind.

the thing about existing

there’s a phrase i keep coming back to: human being, not human doing.

it sounds like a bumper sticker and i’m slightly embarrassed to use it, but it points at something real. somewhere along the way, most of us stopped treating existence as enough. being alive, being present, being in a body on a sunday morning with nowhere to be — that stopped counting. it only counts if you do something with it.

but the regret research suggests the opposite is true. that the doing, relentlessly prioritised over the being, is exactly what people mourn. not because achievement is bad. but because achievement that crowds out presence, rest, connection, and joy is a trade that looks different at the end than it does in the middle.

the productive sunday is not more valuable than the quiet one. it just feels that way from inside the guilt.

what i’m trying to do

i’m trying to learn how to have a day that doesn’t count.

not every day. i’m not trying to stop caring or stop making things or stop working toward the life i want. but one sunday. one morning where i lie in bed a little longer without the list starting. where i make coffee slowly and sit with it and don’t open my laptop for an hour. where i let the day be ordinary and quiet and enough.

i’m not there yet. the guilt is fast and it’s loud and it has a lot of practice. but i’m trying to notice it now — to catch it mid-sentence and ask: whose voice is this, actually? and is it telling me something true?

mostly it isn’t. mostly it’s just the old installed thing, running the old programme, measuring my worth by the wrong instrument.

you are not what you produce. not on a sunday. not ever, really.

you are allowed to just be here.

if you’ve ever ruined your own day off by thinking about what you should be doing — this one is for you. you’re not lazy. you just forgot, for a moment, that existing counts.

last week i was walking to meet a group of friends.

i spotted them from across the street — or i thought i did — and i did what you do. i smiled, i opened my arms, i went in for the hug. and the man i was about to embrace ducked smoothly under my arms and kept walking, because he was a complete stranger who happened to be in the same direction.

i stood there for a moment. arms still slightly open. dignity fully gone.

and then i thought: yeah. that’s about right. that’s just what being a person is.

because i have also: waved back at someone who was waving at the person behind me. sent a boy a screenshot of our conversation instead of my friend. said “you too” when a waiter told me to enjoy my meal. liked a photo from three years deep in someone’s instagram at 1am. laughed at something i didn’t hear and pretended i knew what i was laughing at for the rest of the conversation. cried on the phone to my bank. shown up to something on the wrong day. mispronounced a word i’d used confidently in writing for years. started a sentence with no idea how it was going to end and just kept going anyway.

there is a lot of material.

for a long time, i carried these moments like small weights. replayed them at 2am. cringed at them in the shower. felt the specific heat of retrospective embarrassment — the kind that arrives days or weeks after the thing, unbidden, just to remind you.

and then, slowly, i started to notice something. everyone else is doing this too.

the performance of having it together

most social anxiety, when you trace it back, is really about one thing: the fear of being seen as foolish.

not dangerous. not bad. just foolish. clumsy, confused, trying too hard, not trying hard enough, saying the wrong thing, being too much or not enough. the terror that someone will catch a glimpse of the unpolished version of you and make a judgement that sticks.

so we perform. we curate. we edit ourselves in real time, running a constant background check on how we’re coming across, adjusting the presentation, smoothing the edges. it’s exhausting. and it’s also, when you look at it clearly, completely unnecessary — because everyone in the room is doing the exact same thing.

psychologist Kristin Neff, whose research on self-compassion is among the most cited in the field, writes about what she calls common humanity — the recognition that imperfection and suffering are not personal failures but universal experiences. “feelings of inadequacy and disappointment are universal,” she writes. “why else would we say ‘it’s only human’ to comfort someone who has made a mistake?”

the thing we’re most afraid of being caught as — fallible, embarrassed, foolish — is the most human thing there is. we are all, underneath the performance, beautiful idiots. every single one of us.

what i mean by beautiful idiots

i don’t mean it as an insult. i mean it as the most accurate description of the human condition i’ve found.

we are beautiful because we try. we want things. we love people. we make art and write essays and move to new cities and attempt difficult degrees and fall in love and make promises and show up, over and over, to a life that doesn’t come with instructions. there is something genuinely moving about how hard humans try.

and we are idiots because we are also, consistently, getting it wrong. misreading situations. misjudging people. making decisions that seem logical in the moment and look absurd in retrospect. saying things we immediately want to take back. wanting things that aren’t good for us. knowing better and doing it anyway.

both things are true at the same time. the beauty and the idiocy are not in conflict. they are the same thing, viewed from different angles.

the person who tries hard enough to embarrass themselves is the same person who cares enough to try. you cannot have one without the other.

the 2am replay

here’s what i’ve started to do when the 2am replay comes — when some moment from three weeks ago arrives uninvited and makes me want to dissolve into the mattress.

i ask: is the other person still thinking about this?

the answer, almost always, is no. not because the moment didn’t happen, but because they are too busy replaying their own moments to spend much time on mine. they have their own 2am reel. their own collection of wrong names and bad jokes and confident wrong answers. they are lying in their own bed, cringing about something i have already completely forgotten.

we are each the main character of our own embarrassment. we are supporting characters in everyone else’s.

this is one of the most freeing things i know.

what changes when you accept it

when i stopped treating my foolishness as a problem to hide and started treating it as evidence of being human, something shifted.

i became less afraid of being wrong. less afraid of trying things i might fail at. less afraid of being seen in the middle of figuring something out, which is the only place any of us ever actually are.

the anxiety that comes from trying to never be embarrassed is so much heavier than the embarrassment itself. the performance of having it together costs more than the moments where you don’t.

and the moments where you don’t — the trip, the wrong name, the laugh that came out weird — those are actually the moments people remember you for. not with cruelty. with recognition. oh, she’s like me. she’s also just a person. that’s the moment the connection happens. not when you’re perfectly composed, but when you’re not.

your foolishness is not the thing that makes people like you less. it’s often the thing that makes them like you more.

the invitation

i’m not saying stop caring. caring is good. trying is good. the desire to show up well for people you love is worth keeping.

i’m saying: hold it more loosely. let yourself be the beautiful idiot you already are, in public, without the 2am tax.

everyone in the room is embarrassed about something. everyone is running the same background check, smoothing the same edges, hoping no one notices the seams. you are not uniquely clumsy or confused or foolish. you are just a person. doing the thing that all people do.

and that — the shared, universal, completely unavoidable foolishness of being alive — is one of the most tender things about us.

we are all beautiful idiots. you are in excellent company.

i went to new york two months ago.

i’d been putting it on a pedestal for years. the energy, the possibility, the specific fantasy of walking through manhattan and feeling like i was finally somewhere that matched the size of my ambitions. i’d built it up so carefully, for so long, that by the time i actually booked the flight it felt like a significant life event.

i got there. i walked around. i ate good food and saw good things and felt, mostly, like a person on a trip.

it was fine. it was actually great. and it was also just — a place. something i could do. something i had, in fact, just done.

i came home slightly confused by how normal it felt.

the pedestal problem

i do this with everything.

my masters degree — i’ve been treating it like a mountain i have to summit before my real life can begin. the thesis, the defence, the moment i finally hand it in and become someone who finished the thing. i’ve wrapped so much identity around it, so much future happiness, so much of the story of who i’m going to be on the other side.

i’m wrapping it up now. and it feels like — a document i’m finishing. something i can just do.

my instagram hit 30K followers recently. i’d had that number in my head for a long time. a marker. a proof of something. and when it happened i looked at it and thought: oh. okay. and then i went and made a coffee.

none of this is a complaint. i’m genuinely proud of all of it. but i’ve been sitting with the strange flatness of arrival — the gap between how large these things felt in anticipation and how ordinary they feel in reality.

what the psychology says

psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar has a name for this. he calls it the arrival fallacy — the false belief that achieving a specific goal will bring lasting satisfaction. the when/then thinking that runs quietly underneath ambition: when i finish the degree, then i’ll feel settled. when i get to new york, then i’ll feel like i’ve made it. when the number hits 30K, then i’ll feel like enough.

the fallacy isn’t in the wanting. wanting things is fine. the fallacy is in the belief that the arrival will feel like what you imagined — that the happiness you’ve been anticipating is waiting for you on the other side of the goal, fully formed, ready to be collected.

it isn’t. it never is. because the happiness you’re imagining is a projection of your current self onto a future moment. and by the time you arrive at that moment, you’ve already changed. the thing that felt enormous from a distance feels ordinary up close. not because it isn’t real — it is — but because you are now someone who has done it. and someone who has done a thing experiences it differently than someone who is only dreaming of it.

the worry, it turns out, was always bigger than the thing.

what i’m learning from the flatness

here’s what the anticlimactic feeling is actually telling me: the life i was waiting to start has already started.

i kept treating the degree, the trip, the number as thresholds — things i had to get through before the real version of my life could begin. but there is no threshold. there is no moment where everything clicks into place and you finally feel like you’ve arrived. there is just the accumulation of things you did, decisions you made, ordinary tuesdays that didn’t feel like much at the time.

the flatness of arrival isn’t failure. it’s information. it’s the feeling of realising that the thing you were afraid of was always just something you could do. that the mountain was always more manageable than the distance made it look. that you were always more capable than the worry suggested.

and if that’s true — if the things i’ve been most afraid of have repeatedly turned out to be things i could just do — then what exactly am i still waiting for?

the thing about pedestals

i think we put things on pedestals because we need them to be significant. we need the degree to mean something, the trip to transform us, the number to confirm something we’re not yet sure of about ourselves. the pedestal is not about the thing. it’s about the story we need the thing to tell.

but the thing can’t tell that story. it’s just a thing. a place you went, a document you finished, a number on a screen. the meaning was never going to come from the arrival. it was always going to have to come from somewhere else — from the doing of it, the process, the person you became while you were working toward it.

the degree didn’t make me a researcher. the months of showing up to something i didn’t love, in a city that wasn’t yet mine, for reasons that were complicated — that made me someone who knows what she can endure. that’s the thing that matters. not the piece of paper at the end.

new york didn’t change my life. but the version of me who just booked the flight and went — she’s different from the version who spent years making it into something it could never be.

what i want to say

if you have something on a pedestal right now — a goal, a place, a number, a version of your life that you’ve decided will finally be the one — i’m not going to tell you to take it down. wanting things is good. ambition is good. the pedestal is not the problem.

but maybe hold it a little more loosely. maybe let it be something you’re working toward rather than something you’re waiting for. because the life you’re living right now, in the middle of the working toward — this is not the gap before your life starts. this is it.

the thing you’re so afraid of will probably turn out to be something you can just do.

and when it does, you’ll make a coffee and move on to the next thing. and that will be exactly right.

i’ve been thinking about moving to new york.

i should say: i live in vancouver. i moved here fourteen months ago from johannesburg. i left everything i knew, everyone i loved, a whole life i’d spent twenty-two years building — to come here. i packed two suitcases and got on a plane and told myself this was the place. this was the one.

and now i’m sitting in my apartment in vancouver, on a sunday afternoon, looking at apartments in brooklyn.

i haven’t even finished unpacking.

the pattern

here’s what i know about myself: i have always been like this.

not specifically about cities — about everything. the job i wanted until i got it. the degree i chased until i was doing it. the version of my life that looked exactly right from the outside and felt slightly off from the inside. there is always, somewhere in the background, a quiet hum of not quite. not yet. not here.

i used to think this was ambition. i’m starting to think it might be something else.

psychologist Robert Holden calls it destination addiction — “a preoccupation with the idea that happiness is in the next place, the next job, and with the next partner.” the belief, lived out in daily behaviour, that the life you actually want is always one move away. one decision away. one city away.

the person with destination addiction is not unhappy, exactly. they’re just never fully here. they’re always already half-living in the next thing, scouting the exit before the current chapter has finished, keeping one eye on the door even when the room is good.

i read that and felt uncomfortably seen.

why the mind does this

there’s a second piece of psychology that makes this worse.

it’s called hedonic adaptation — the well-documented tendency of the human mind to return to a baseline level of happiness regardless of what changes in your life. you get the thing you wanted. you feel the rush. and then, within weeks or months, it becomes the new normal. the excitement fades. the restlessness returns. and your brain, ever helpful, starts scanning for the next thing that might finally be the thing.

this is why the new city always eventually feels like the old one. not because the city failed you — but because you brought yourself with you. and you are the same person in brooklyn as you are in vancouver as you were in johannesburg. the zip code changes. the baseline doesn’t.

what this means, uncomfortably, is that the feeling i’m chasing — the feeling of this is it, this is the place, this is the life — is not a feeling that a city can give me. it’s a feeling i have to build. slowly. by actually being somewhere long enough for it to become mine.

the specific loneliness of the restless expat

there’s a third thing, specific to people like me.

researchers who study expat psychology have identified a pattern they call restless expat syndrome — the tendency of people who’ve moved abroad to develop a particular relationship with place. they attach quickly and deeply to new environments. they are genuinely excited by the new, genuinely moved by the unfamiliar. but the attachment doesn’t fully settle. it stays slightly provisional. slightly ready to go.

because leaving has become the thing they know how to do.

i think about this a lot. i am very good at arriving somewhere new. i know how to be charmed by a city, how to find the coffee shop that feels like mine, how to build the surface of a life quickly. what i am less good at is the slower work — the staying, the deepening, the letting a place become ordinary in the way that only happens when you’ve been somewhere long enough to be bored by it and love it anyway.

new york is not the answer to that. new york is just the next version of the question.

what i’m actually looking for

i’ve been trying to be honest with myself about what nyc actually represents in my head.

it’s not the subway or the energy or the creative scene, though i tell myself it is. it’s the feeling of starting fresh. of being unknown. of arriving somewhere with no history and no context and no one who remembers the version of you from before. it’s the fantasy of the clean slate — the idea that somewhere in the geography of a new city, you might finally become the person you’ve been trying to become.

but here’s what i know, and keep forgetting, and have to keep relearning: you don’t become that person by moving. you become her by staying. by doing the slow, unglamorous work of building something where you are, even when where you are doesn’t feel like enough yet.

vancouver doesn’t feel like mine yet. that’s not vancouver’s fault. that’s just the timeline of belonging, which is longer than i want it to be and shorter than i’m afraid it might be.

the apartment in brooklyn will still be there. nyc will still be there. i have the rest of my life to live in cities that aren’t ready for me yet.

right now i’m trying to learn how to stay.

the question i keep coming back to

Robert Holden writes: “until you give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where you are.”

i don’t think the answer is to never move again. i don’t think the answer is to stay in one place forever and call it growth. i think the answer is subtler and harder than that — it’s learning to tell the difference between moving toward something and moving away from yourself.

i’m not sure i’m there yet. but i’m asking the question. and i think that’s where it starts.

if you’ve ever looked up apartments in a city you don’t live in just to feel like you had options — this one is for you. you’re not broken. you’re just someone who learned very early that the next place might be better. we’re all unlearning that together.

i have a habit of treating my life like a waiting room.

not consciously. i don’t sit down and decide: this chapter doesn’t count yet. but i do it anyway. i move through the uncertain periods with my eyes on the exit, telling myself that the real thing starts when i get through this part. when the thesis is done. when i know what i want. when the city finally feels like home. when i stop feeling like i’m in between versions of myself and actually arrive at the next one.

i’ve been waiting for the next one for a while now.

and somewhere recently, i started wondering: what if the waiting room is the room?

the urgency of the in-between

there’s a particular kind of restlessness that lives in uncertain seasons.

it’s not sadness, exactly. it’s more like impatience — a low-level hum of not yet, not yet, not yet that runs underneath everything. you’re not unhappy. you’re just acutely aware that things haven’t settled yet. that the questions outnumber the answers. that you’re somewhere between who you were and who you’re going to be, and that gap is deeply uncomfortable to inhabit.

so you try to move through it faster. you make plans to get to the other side. you treat the uncertainty like a problem to solve rather than a place to be.

i do this constantly. i plan my way through discomfort. i tell myself: once i finish this, once i decide that, once i figure out the next thing — then i’ll be able to breathe. then things will make sense. then the story will start.

but the story is already happening. i just keep skipping the pages i’m on.

what zeva bellel said

i read an essay recently by a writer called Zeva Bellel. she writes about liminal spaces — those in-between periods where nothing fits, nothing holds, and you’re desperate to get to the other side. and she asks, quietly, in the middle of the piece: what if the other side isn’t the point?

she references an idea from Jewish thought — that growth lives in the space between the known and the unknown. not at the destination. in the crossing. the threshold itself is where transformation happens. not before it, not after it. in it.

i read that and had to put my phone down.

because i have spent so much energy trying to get through the threshold that i haven’t considered the possibility that the threshold is the whole thing. that the in-between isn’t the interruption to my becoming. it is the becoming. the restlessness, the not-knowing, the feeling of being between versions of yourself — that’s not a problem to solve. that’s what transformation actually feels like from the inside.

uncomfortable. unresolved. ongoing.

what we miss when we rush

when you’re in a hurry to get through something, you stop paying attention to it.

you stop noticing what it’s teaching you. you stop sitting with the questions long enough to hear what they’re actually asking. you move through the days on autopilot, waiting for the chapter to end, and then one day it does end — and you realise you weren’t really there for it. you were present in body and absent in attention, already half-living in the next thing.

i think about the last eight months in vancouver. how much of it i spent waiting to feel at home rather than actually trying to be here. how many mornings i moved through quickly, looking past the city i was in toward the version of it that would eventually feel like mine. i was so focused on the arrival that i kept missing the place i was already standing.

the uncertain chapters are the ones that shape you most. not because suffering is noble — it isn’t — but because uncertainty is where you actually find out who you are. when the plan falls away and the path isn’t clear and you can’t perform your way through it, what’s left is just you. what you actually think. what you actually want. what you’re actually made of.

that’s not a waiting room. that’s the whole education.

staying in the room

i’m trying to learn how to stay.

not to wallow. not to make a home of the hard parts. but to actually be present in the uncertain seasons instead of spending them with one foot already out the door. to let the questions be questions without immediately trying to answer them. to trust that the chapter i’m in is doing something to me even when i can’t see what it is.

this is harder than it sounds. the urgency doesn’t go away just because you’ve named it. i still feel the pull to fast-forward. to get to the part where things make sense. to skip ahead to the version of myself who has it figured out.

but i’m starting to think that version of me — the settled one, the certain one, the one who finally knows — she’s being built right here. in the uncertainty. in the staying. in the willingness to be in the in-between without treating it like a problem.

the discomfort you feel right now isn’t a sign that something’s wrong. it’s a sign that something is happening.

you’re already in it

here’s what i want to say to you, if you’re in a season that feels like a waiting room:

you don’t have to rush through this.

the story isn’t waiting for you on the other side of the uncertainty. it’s not starting when things settle or when you figure it out or when the chapter finally ends. it’s happening now. in the questions you’re sitting with. in the slow, unglamorous work of becoming someone you haven’t fully met yet.

the space you’re trying to rush through might be the story itself.

stay in it a little longer. pay attention to what it’s asking you. let it do what it came to do.

you’re already in it. you’re already becoming. and that — even when it doesn’t feel like enough — is exactly where you’re supposed to be.

when i was eighteen, i made a timeline.

not a written one. just the kind that lives in your head, that you build without realising you’re building it. quietly, over years, assembled from things people said and things you absorbed and the general sense that life was supposed to follow a certain shape. by twenty i’d know what i wanted. by twenty-two i’d be doing it. by twenty-five i’d be settled — not done, but settled. secure in something. pointed somewhere that felt like mine.

i am twenty-three. i feel more lost than ever before.

and for a long time, i thought that meant something had gone wrong.

the story we tell ourselves

Joan Didion wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

i’ve been sitting with that for months. because the timeline i made at eighteen wasn’t really a plan. it was a story. a story i told myself so the future felt survivable — so the uncertainty had a shape, even if the shape was invented. i needed to believe that if i did the right things in the right order, the feeling of having figured it out would eventually arrive. like a package you’ve been waiting for. like something you’d earned.

we all do this. we build these quiet internal timelines before we’re old enough to know that life doesn’t read them. by this age, i’ll have this. by this year, i’ll feel like that. we construct the narrative because the alternative — not knowing, not having a map, standing at the beginning of your twenties with no clear sense of where you’re going — is too uncomfortable to sit with for long.

so we make the story. and then we live inside it. and then, somewhere along the way, the story stops fitting. and we don’t know what to do with ourselves when it does.

the problem isn’t that we make the story. the problem is forgetting that we wrote it.

the feeling that didn’t come

i did everything the eighteen-year-old version of me thought would lead to the feeling of having figured it out.

i did the degree. i made the move — 16,000 kilometres, two suitcases, a one-way ticket. i showed up to the thing i thought i wanted, in a lab, in a city i didn’t know yet, doing work i’d told myself i cared about. i followed the timeline almost exactly. i was, by every external measure, on track.

the feeling didn’t come.

what came instead was a more complicated version of the question. not what do i want to do with my life but who do i want to be, and is the life i’m building actually for her. harder question. no clean answer. not something you can put on a timeline. i’d sit in the lab and think: i don’t know if i like this. and then i’d think: but i’m supposed to. i planned for this. i moved across the world for this. and then i’d think: maybe i just need more time. maybe the feeling is coming. maybe i’m just not there yet.

i waited. the feeling didn’t come.

maybe you know this specific disorientation. the one that arrives not from failure but from doing everything right and still not landing where you expected. you followed the plan. you showed up. you did the thing. and now you’re standing in the middle of the life you constructed and something about it doesn’t fit the way you thought it would. it’s not bad, exactly. it’s just — not quite yours.

that gap between the life you planned and the life you’re actually living is one of the stranger places to find yourself. because there’s no one to blame. you made good choices. you just made them based on who you were at eighteen, and you are not eighteen anymore.

what she couldn’t have known

the eighteen-year-old who made the timeline was doing her best.

i want to be clear about that. she wasn’t naive or foolish or setting me up to fail. she was trying to protect me from exactly this — the uncertainty, the not-knowing, the particular discomfort of being in your early twenties and still mid-question. she thought that if she planned hard enough, the uncertainty wouldn’t come. she thought clarity was something you could build your way toward, one good decision at a time.

it doesn’t work like that. but she didn’t know that yet.

what she also didn’t know: the uncertainty isn’t a sign that you got it wrong. it’s a sign that you’re in it. really in it — the actual, unglamorous, ongoing work of figuring out who you are, which is messier and slower and less linear than any timeline can hold. you can’t plan your way to knowing yourself. you can only live your way there. and living your way there takes longer than eighteen-year-old you expected, and it looks different than she imagined, and that’s not a failure of vision.

that’s just how it works.

the long middle

nobody talks about the long middle.

they talk about the beginning — the decision, the leap, the exciting terrifying moment of starting something new. and they talk about the arrival — the moment you figure it out, the clarity, the sense of finally being where you’re supposed to be. but the long middle — the part where you’re past the beginning and nowhere near the arrival, where nothing is resolved yet and everything is still becoming — that part is mostly silence.

i’ve been in the long middle for a while now. it’s not dramatic. it doesn’t make for a good story, which is part of why nobody tells you about it. you wake up and you go to the lab and you come home and you write and you try to figure out what you actually want and some days it feels like progress and some days it feels like standing still. you can’t tell, from inside it, which days are which.

but i’ve started to think that the long middle is actually where most of life happens. not the beginning, not the arrival — the in-between. the accumulation of ordinary days that don’t feel like anything until, suddenly, they’ve added up to something. the quiet, unremarkable work of becoming. it doesn’t look like much while you’re in it. it only makes sense later, when you look back and the dots have finally connected.

we are not behind. we are just in the part they don’t show you.

now is not a deadline

you don’t have to have it figured out by now.

i mean that in the most literal way. now is not a deadline. it was never a deadline. it was a date the eighteen-year-old version of you circled in her head because she needed the uncertainty to have an end point — because the idea that you might still be figuring it out at twenty-three, at twenty-five, at thirty, was too vast and too uncomfortable to hold. so she gave it a deadline. and you’ve been measuring yourself against it ever since.

the deadline was always fiction. the timeline was always fiction. a hopeful, well-intentioned fiction. it was never a promise.

what’s real is this: you are here. you are still going. you are asking harder questions than you knew to ask at eighteen, which means you are further along than you think, even if it doesn’t look like it from the outside. you are building something — slowly, uncertainly, without a clear blueprint — and that counts. it counts even when you can’t see it. it counts even when it doesn’t feel like enough.

you can let the timeline go. not because it doesn’t matter, but because you’ve outgrown it. you are not the person who made it anymore. and the person you’re becoming deserves a story that actually fits her.

start from here. that’s enough.

society tells us life is short. that every second counts. that we need to squeeze meaning out of every moment we’re given. and maybe for some people that’s motivating. for me, it’s always felt like a quiet threat.

for the last year i’ve been studying to become a cancer researcher. i thought it was my dream. i moved 16,000 kilometres from home for it. left everything and everyone behind. so you can imagine the specific kind of disappointment that arrived three months in when i realised the truth — research is not something i enjoy. not even a little. not the lab, not the literature, not the hours of staring at data that means nothing to me. none of it.

i considered dropping out. almost did. and then reality caught up with me: graduation was my work permit. my ticket to staying in canada, to the life i’d uprooted everything to build. dropping out would mean going home. back to everyone who had been counting on me to become this world-renowned researcher. so i stayed. not because i wanted to. because i had to.

and here i am — working on a thesis that feels completely disconnected from anything i actually want, showing up to something i didn’t choose, inside a life that looks right from the outside and feels off from the inside. with society’s voice somewhere in the back of my head going: you aren’t making the most of this. what the fuck, kiki.

i felt lost. uncertain. stuck in a way i didn’t have words for.

until a random tuesday morning.

i was reading Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things — not looking for anything in particular, just reading — when one line climbed off the page, put its hands on my shoulders, and shook something back into me.

“the useless days will add up to something.”

i’ve been afraid of the word useless for as long as i can remember. it always sounded like a moral failing. like somewhere along the way i’d absorbed the idea that my worth was proportional to my output. that every hour needed to be earning something — a skill, a credential, a story worth telling. that to simply exist inside a chapter without extracting meaning from it was a kind of failure. a betrayal of the one life i’d been given.

no one had ever given me permission to just have useless days. to sit with a thesis i don’t believe in and still call it a step. to be somewhere i didn’t choose and trust that it’s not wasted. to move through a season that doesn’t make sense yet and believe — really believe — that it’s still part of something.

Cheryl Strayed gave me that permission. and i think she’s giving it to you too.

i don’t know where you are right now. maybe you’re working a job you didn’t plan for to fund the thing you actually want. maybe you’re showing up to a degree that doesn’t make sense to you yet, getting through it anyway. maybe you’re in a city that isn’t quite home, or a relationship that’s teaching you something you didn’t ask to learn, or a chapter that doesn’t feel like yours at all. maybe you’re doing the thing that needs to be done rather than the thing you dreamed about — and the gap between those two things sits heavy.

whatever it is — the useless days will add up to something.

the meaning isn’t always available in real time. sometimes you only see it years later, when you look back and the dots have finally connected. and what felt like treading water turns out to have been the stroke that got you there. the chapter that felt pointless becomes the one that made everything after it possible. you couldn’t have known that at the time. that’s not a failure of vision. that’s just how it works.

you don’t have to be making the most of it right now. you just have to keep going.

that’s enough.