SOMEWHERE BETWEEN HOME

For most of my life, I thought I was supposed to figure out what I wanted to be.

It’s one of the first big questions adults ask you: What do you want to be when you grow up? And somehow, “happy” isn’t an acceptable answer. You’re supposed to say doctor, lawyer, teacher, engineer. Something that can eventually become a neat little title underneath your name.

Nobody really asks what you want an ordinary Tuesday to feel like. Where do you want to wake up? Who do you want to have time for? Do you want slow mornings or busy ones? Do you want to stay in one place or see as much of the world as you can? How much money is enough, and how much of your time are you willing to exchange for it?

Those questions seem much more important to me now.

Because your job is one part of your life, but somehow we’ve built our lives as if everything else is supposed to fit around it.

And I don’t think I want that anymore.

I never really had a dream job

I’ve had jobs. I’ve hated jobs. I’ve lost jobs. I’ve spent ridiculous amounts of time scrolling through job listings, trying to imagine myself doing things I didn’t particularly care about for companies I definitely didn’t care about.

Now, at 29, I’m studying computer science.

Do I wake up every morning overwhelmed with passion for computers? No. 😂

There are parts I genuinely enjoy. I like learning how things work and solving something that made absolutely no fucking sense to me two hours earlier. I like realizing I can understand things I once assumed were beyond me.

But if you asked me whether sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day is what I’ve dreamed about since childhood? Absolutely not.

For a while, I thought that meant I still hadn’t figured out what I wanted to do with my life. Now I wonder if I’ve been trying to answer the wrong question.

Maybe I don’t need work that becomes my life. Maybe I need work that makes the rest of my life possible.

I actually do know what I want

I want freedom. That’s probably the clearest answer I have.

I want to be able to travel without begging someone for permission to use five of my precious vacation days. I want to spend enough time somewhere that I get bored there. I want to buy groceries in another country, figure out the train system, find a restaurant I like enough to visit twice, and have a favorite little place that would mean absolutely nothing to someone who was only there for a weekend.

I don’t just want to see places. I want enough time to exist in them.

I want to visit people I love even when they live on the other side of the world. I want mornings when I can drink my tea slowly. I want time to write things like this. I want to make things that don’t need to become businesses. I want enough money that I’m not constantly calculating how much life I can afford this month.

And maybe someday I’ll want something completely different. Maybe I’ll want roots. Maybe I’ll want the same view outside my window for twenty years. Maybe the woman I am at 40 will laugh at some of the things the woman I am at 29 thought she wanted.

She can.

I want to build a life with enough room for her to change her mind.

I’m tired of waiting

I’ve also started realizing how much of life we can lose waiting for other people.

There are things I’ve wanted to do that I used to automatically imagine doing with someone else. Going somewhere new, trying something, traveling, even just going out. I’d do it when someone wanted to come with me, when our schedules lined up, when they had the money, when I had the right person in my life.

But people have their own lives. Their own jobs, money, fears, responsibilities, relationships and dreams. If I wait until someone else is ready every time I want to experience something, I could be waiting forever.

So lately, I’ve been doing more things by myself.

It can feel weird at first. You become painfully aware that you’re alone. You wonder if everyone notices. You suddenly have no idea what the fuck you’re supposed to look at while sitting at a table by yourself.

And then eventually you realize nobody cares.

More importantly, you realize the experience is still yours.

The food doesn’t taste worse because nobody came with you. The view isn’t less beautiful. The place doesn’t disappear. Your life doesn’t become less meaningful because nobody else was standing beside you while you lived it.

I want to travel alone too. The idea scares me a little, obviously. There are places I’d probably feel more comfortable experiencing with someone else, and there will always be moments that are better when you can turn to somebody and say, Are you seeing this shit?

But I’m much more afraid of reaching the end of my life with a list of places I never saw because nobody could come with me.

I don’t want someone else’s availability to determine how much of the world I get to experience.

I can love people deeply without putting my life on hold until they’re ready to live it with me.

If I really want to do something, being alone cannot automatically be the reason I don’t.

Maybe I’ll be scared. Maybe I’ll feel awkward. Maybe I’ll get lost.

But at least I’ll be there.

Fear is really good at sounding reasonable

I think this is where all of it connects for me: the career, the travel, the independence, the uncertainty.

There are so many perfectly reasonable reasons to postpone your life.

Maybe next year. Maybe when I have more money. Maybe when someone can come with me. Maybe when I’m more confident. Maybe when work settles down. Maybe when I know what I’m doing.

None of those excuses sound ridiculous. That’s the problem.

Fear rarely walks into your life and announces itself as fear. Sometimes it sounds like practicality. Sometimes it sounds like being responsible. Sometimes it tells you that you’re just waiting for a better time.

And suddenly five years have passed.

That scares me.

I don’t want to become one of those people who spends years talking about the things they’ve always wanted to do as if those things belong to some imaginary future version of their life. I don’t want to keep watching other people do things I dream about and automatically think, I could never do that.

Why not?

I don’t want fear making decisions for me and then convincing me they were my decisions all along.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a quiet, predictable life if that is genuinely what someone wants. I don’t think you need to visit a hundred countries, quit your job, start a company or constantly chase something bigger for your life to matter.

But there is a difference between choosing a simple life because it fulfills you and settling for a life you don’t really want because reaching for anything else scares you.

Mediocrity, to me, isn’t an ordinary life. It’s knowing what you want and repeatedly choosing not to reach for it because you’re afraid.

I don’t want to build a life I can tolerate when I could at least try to find out what kind of life I could love.

I don’t want to become great at making a living and forget to make a life

For a long time, I thought ambition meant being willing to give more. More hours, more energy, more responsibility, more of yourself. You work hard now so you can live later. Take the promotion. Answer the email. Stay late. Save the trip for next year. Eventually things will calm down.

Maybe they do.

But what if “later” becomes the place where you store your entire life?

I’ll travel later. I’ll write later. I’ll learn that later. I’ll move later. I’ll finally do the thing I’ve wanted to do for ten years later.

We talk about wasting money all the time, but we’ll give years of our lives to things we don’t even want and call it being responsible.

Money can be earned again. I don’t know how to earn another 29.

That doesn’t mean I want to quit everything tomorrow, empty my bank account and buy a one-way ticket to Thailand. Unfortunately, landlords tend to be deeply unsupportive of spiritual awakenings.

I need money. I want a career. I want to be good at what I do. I want stability and enough money to take care of myself without constantly worrying about what happens if something goes wrong.

I just don’t want to become so good at making a living that I forget to make a life.

And maybe ambition doesn’t always have to mean climbing higher.

Maybe there are other ways to measure success. How much of your time belongs to you? Can you rest without feeling guilty? Can you afford to say no? Can you take the trip? Can you change your mind without your entire life collapsing? Can you spend a random Wednesday afternoon with someone you love? Can you wake up most mornings without wishing five days of your life away so you can reach Saturday?

I still want more money. I haven’t spiritually transcended wanting a nice bank account. I have flights to buy.

But maybe success isn’t only about having more.

Maybe it’s needing less of your life to belong to things you don’t care about.

This isn’t the waiting room

I think this is the part I’m trying hardest to unlearn.

For years, I had this feeling that my real life was somewhere ahead of me.

Once this changes. Once I have enough money. Once I figure out my career. Once I can travel. Once I’m more confident. Once I become the version of myself I keep imagining.

Then I’ll start.

But there is no starting line.

This is it.

I’m in school. I’m figuring out what kind of work makes sense for me. I’m applying for jobs. I’m writing. I’m building this website. I’m doing more things on my own. I’m thinking about places I want to see and things I want to try, and I still have absolutely no idea what most of my life is going to look like.

For a long time, that uncertainty felt like evidence that I was behind.

Now it feels a little more like possibility.

There are cities I’ve never walked through, things I haven’t been brave enough to do yet, jobs I don’t know exist, people who will matter enormously to me whose names I don’t even know, and versions of myself I haven’t had the chance to become.

Why would I want to decide the entire shape of my life before I’ve even met them?

I don’t need my career to be the great love story of my life. I want to do work I’m proud of, learn things, earn enough to give myself choices, and then actually use those choices.

I want to go. Stay. Create something. Change my mind. Waste an afternoon. Take the trip. Book the ticket even if nobody else can come. Sit at the table alone. Get lost and figure out how to get back. Try something and be terrible at it. Let myself want more without feeling ungrateful for what I already have.

I know fear will probably come with me sometimes.

Fine. It can come. It just doesn’t get to make the decisions.

Maybe I’ll find a dream job someday. I hope I do. Maybe I’ll find people who want to experience a lot of these things with me too. I hope I do that too.

But I refuse to make either of those things a prerequisite for living.

Because there will never be another version of me who gets these years back. Nobody is going to return my twenties because I was too scared. Nobody is going to give me an extra decade because I spent one waiting. There is no prize at the end for having taken the fewest risks.

So if I have to choose what I’m going to spend the next few decades chasing, I think I finally know my answer.

I don’t want a job I can build my life around. I want a life worth building my job around.

And I don’t want to wait for somebody else to start living it with me.

Maybe the question was never What do you want to be when you grow up?

Maybe the better questions are:

What do you want your ordinary days to feel like? What have you been saving for “later”? What are you waiting for someone else to do with you? And if nobody ever comes, are you really willing to miss it?

Because eventually, all the time we think we have ahead of us becomes the life behind us.

And when that happens, I don’t want to look back and realize fear kept me safe from all the things that might have made me feel alive.