Live the life you would choose

For much of my life, I was asleep at the wheel. I unconsciously built my life according to a blueprint inherited from my parents, my community, and society at large, never pausing to ask whether the life I was constructing was the one I actually wanted. During those years, a consistent sense of satisfaction eluded me. I wrestled with anxiety. I felt uncertain, unmoored, vaguely listless — as though some imperceptible gap existed between who I was and who I was meant to be, and I couldn’t quite name it, let alone close it. I hadn’t hit rock bottom, but my life was persistently shadowed by a quiet discontentment.

My escape from that psychological fog wasn’t sudden, but it was sparked by a single, oddly specific moment. It arrived while I was sitting on the toilet.

I’ve since dubbed this my “toilet bowl revelation.” What struck me, in that unremarkable setting, was the realization that this moment was the same portion of my life as any other moment that I had or would ever experience. That simple thought was unexpectedly arresting. I was spending my finite supply of moments haphazardly, and I realized that I wasn’t spending them well. It was the first time I seriously considered what kind of life I actually wanted and recognized that I didn’t have to follow the path that had simply been handed to me.

In the years that followed, I thought deeply about what life is, how we infuse it with meaning, how readily we squander it, and how I might live mine more deliberately. That journey of reflection and self-discovery was painful and costly. I won’t pretend otherwise. But it was also profoundly liberating. My life isn’t perfect, but it is the one I have chosen. That distinction is everything.

If you’ve read this far, there’s a good chance some part of my story resonates with you. Perhaps you’ve already broken free from a similar rut. Perhaps you’re still in it. Either way, I don’t think this tendency is a coincidence of personality or circumstance. I think it’s a feature of human nature — one we all share. We tend to drift toward what’s familiar and accessible, toward the path of least resistance, whether or not that path is actually right for us. Sometimes it is. Often it isn’t. And that gap — between the life we’re living and the life we’d choose — is precisely where discontentment and regret take root.

Ultimately, this isn’t about me. My story is only relevant because the pattern it reflects is far too common, and because I genuinely want to help people recognize the choices available to them. If we better understood our own nature, and the degree to which our lives are actually shapeable, I believe we would each live better — by whatever definition of “better” we’d choose for ourselves. The challenge is that doing so requires understanding two deeply complex things: ourselves, and the lives we’re capable of building. That, at its core, is where my passion lies: helping people understand themselves and their lives well enough to choose, deliberately, how they want to live.