If I Could Sit Down With My Younger Self
For a long time, I didn't really know what I wanted.
Not in the big ways. Not in the small ones either. What to order at a restaurant. Where to travel. How to spend a Sunday. I had spent so many years attempting to make sure the people around me were comfortable and ‘going with the flow’ that I had quietly lost the thread of my own preferences. I didn't notice it happening. That's the thing about losing yourself slowly. You don’t feel it until one day you’re standing in your own life and realize it’s not reflective of you.
About a year and a half ago, my life changed. And for the first time in a long time, I found myself truly alone with myself.
Suddenly, every decision was just mine. What to cook for dinner. How to arrange the furniture. What to watch, where to go. Small things. Ordinary things. Things I had been quietly deferring to other people for years without even realizing it.
Slowly, in those small ordinary things, I began to discover who I actually am.
I’m still figuring it out. I still hesitate when someone asks me where I want to eat dinner. These habits don’t disappear just because you notice them. But noticing them is where it begins.
I’m still a work in progress. I don’t have everything sorted out. I just wanted to write down a few things I’m finally beginning to understand.
Things I would tell my younger self, if I had the chance.
Making Decisions for Yourself Is Not Selfish.
I used to treat my own preferences like they were an inconvenience to everyone around me.
Where do you want to eat? Oh, I don't mind. What do you want to do this weekend? Whatever you want. It sounds easy-going. It sounds considerate. But underneath it was a quiet fear that if I said what I actually wanted, I would disappoint someone. That my preferences would be wrong, or too much, or not worth the conversation.
So I stopped voicing them. After a while it felt like I had stopped having them.
Growing up I played sports and I was good at it. I kept playing season after season, not because I loved it, but because I genuinely could not imagine a world where I stopped. I said it out loud a few times, that I wanted to quit. But I didn't believe it when I said it. Stopping felt so far outside the realm of possibility that I never really let myself consider it.
And that pattern showed up everywhere. I would feel something, know something, want something different, and then talk myself out of it before I'd even finished the thought. Not because I didn't know what I wanted. Sometimes I knew exactly. But I couldn't see a way to say it without disappointing someone, and so I just kept going. Logical step after logical step, in a direction that felt fine but never quite felt like mine.
I eventually did choose not to play in college. But I wonder sometimes, if I had listened to that feeling earlier, what I might have discovered about myself. What passions I might have stumbled into. What I might have found out I loved, or was good at, or needed.
I think a lot of us have a version of this story. Maybe it was a sport. Maybe it was a career path, a relationship, a city you stayed in too long, a version of yourself you kept performing because it was expected. A feeling you noticed and then quietly talked yourself out of.
You'll never know what was on the other side of that. But I think the more important question is what's on the other side of the next one. Because that feeling doesn't stop showing up. And the sooner you learn to listen to it, the less you have to wonder.
What Other People Think of You Is Not the Whole Story.
I grew up caring a lot about what people thought of me. Too much. I was picked on enough as a kid that I learned early to adjust, to shape myself into whatever version felt safest in the room.
Most of the time that meant being quiet. Going with the flow. Making myself small enough that there was nothing to point at, nothing to tease, nothing to question. If I could just be agreeable enough, unnoticeable enough, maybe I could blend in. Maybe I could avoid being singled out altogether.
It worked, sometimes. But it also meant I spent a lot of years not really showing up as myself.
The comments that stuck weren't always the big ones. Sometimes it was small things, offhand things that people probably forgot the moment they said them. Sadly. I couldn’t. They settled in quietly and shaped, more than I'd like to admit, how I moved through the world for a long time after.
It's still a struggle. Not just about what people think of me now, but about who I used to be. The things I've done that I'm not proud of. The people I hurt. The choices I made, the versions of myself I wish certain people hadn't witnessed. There are nights I lie awake replaying them.
But I can't change them. And I can't micromanage what people think of me either. I can't reach into someone's memory and replace an old version of me with the one I am now. All I can do is keep becoming someone I'm proud of, and trust that the people meant to see it will.
You get to keep evolving. You don't have to stay who you were.
Comparing Yourself to Others Is Expensive. It Costs You More Than It Ever Gives You.
I’ve surrounded myself with brilliant, talented, driven people my whole life. And for a long time, I let that make me feel behind instead of grateful.
I was always measuring. Always looking at what someone else had figured out, what someone else seemed to be doing so effortlessly. And in my own mind, I was always a little short of wherever they were.
The measuring never gave me anything useful. It just pulled my attention away from my own life, my own progress, the things that were quietly building right in front of me while I was busy looking sideways.
I'm still working on this one too. But I've found that when I shift from asking "why don't I have what they have" to "what can I learn from them," everything changes. It goes from a dead end to somewhere worth going.
Take the Risk. The "What If" Haunts You Longer Than Failing Ever Does.
Fear kept me small for a long time.
Fear of failing. Fear of being judged. Fear of wanting something openly and not getting it. It felt safer to stay where I was than to reach for something and come up short in front of people.
But staying put has its own cost. A quiet one. It lives in the back of your mind as a question that never got answered, a door that never got opened, a version of yourself you never got to meet.
The risks I've taken that didn't work out still moved me forward. The ones I talked myself out of just left me wondering.
Say the thing. Apply for the position. Book the trip. Try.
The Ordinary Days Are Not the Waiting Room. They're the Whole Thing.
I spent a lot of time waiting for my life to look a certain way before I let myself feel settled in it.
I was so focused on a picture of where I thought I was supposed to end up that I wasn't fully present in where I actually was. The ordinary Tuesday. The quiet evening. The small decision made just for me. I treated those things like filler between the moments that actually counted.
What I know now is that those are the moments that actually count.
I have learned more about myself in a year and a half of quiet, ordinary days than I did in years of chasing something I thought I was supposed to want. Cooking something I actually felt like eating. Investing time in a series I want to watch. Decorating a space that felt like mine. Small things. But they added up to something that feels, for the first time in a while, like a life reflective of me.
I'm not writing this from the other side of having figured it all out. I'm writing it from the middle, from a season where I'm finally asking questions I should have asked a long time ago, and finding that the answers were never as complicated as I made them.
I could have spoken up more. Taken up more space. Spent less time worrying about what people thought and more time thinking about how I was showing up for them, and for myself.
I'm working on it. Some days more successfully than others.
But I'm showing up now. And that feels like a start worth writing down.
