There's a conversation I keep having with myself. It usually starts somewhere around midnight, when everything's quiet and the to-do list has finally stopped screaming at me. It goes something like: is this what I actually want, or is this just what made sense to want?
I don't always have an answer. Most nights I don't. And for a long time, that bothered me — the not knowing. The feeling of being genuinely unsure whether the path I'm on is the one I chose, or the one that just happened to be in front of me when I needed to pick something.
I think a lot of people my age live like this. Two lives running in parallel. One is practical — the assignments, the deadlines, the plans you make on paper. The other is something quieter, something you can't really explain to anyone without it sounding either ridiculous or incredibly sad. The other life is made of things like: what if I'm capable of something I haven't tried yet? And: what would I do if I wasn't afraid of being wrong about myself?
The weight of wanting more
I've sat in placement sessions watching people walk in confident, knowing exactly what they want to pitch and why. And I've sat there thinking — I have a version of that. I have ambition. I have things I want. But mine feel somehow harder to explain, harder to fit into a two-minute introduction. They're bigger in some directions and smaller in others, and they don't really match any job description I've ever read.
The hard part isn't the wanting. The hard part is wanting things while still being in the middle of becoming someone who's allowed to want them. The gap between who you are and who you're trying to be is a strange place to live. Not terrible. Not hopeless. Just — unfinished. And being unfinished while the world keeps asking you to present a final version of yourself is genuinely exhausting.
I've had days where I felt completely behind. Where I'd scroll through someone's achievements and feel that specific kind of heavy that's not quite jealousy and not quite sadness — it's more like a reminder. A reminder that time is moving and the distance between where I am and where I want to be hasn't shrunk as much as I thought it had.
What I keep coming back to
But here's the thing I've started to notice — the people I actually respect most aren't the ones who got there fastest. They're the ones who went after something real, even when they weren't sure it would work out. Even when it looked uncertain from the outside. Even when they had no guarantee.
I think that's what I'm trying to do. Not have it all figured out. Not perform certainty I don't have. Just — keep going toward the thing I actually want, even while I'm still figuring out what exactly that is. Keep both lives running. Keep the practical one honest and the hidden one alive.
"The gap between who you are and who you're becoming is not empty. It's the most full place you'll ever be."
Some days that feels like enough. Some days it doesn't. But I'm still here, still asking the midnight questions, still trying to close the distance — and honestly, I think that's the whole story.
If you feel this tension too — you're not alone in it. Head over to Thoughts for more honest fragments.
