Why Don't I Recognise My Own Life?

You look around at the life you are living, the job, the marriage, the town, the shape of your days, and none of it looks like something you would have chosen if you had chosen it all at once. That is the strange part. You cannot point to the moment you agreed to this, because there was no single moment. There were a thousand small yeses, each reasonable on its own, each said to keep something else from falling over.

This is how most lives get built. Not by a decision but by an accumulation of accommodations. You took the job because it paid. You stayed in the town because the children were settled. You kept the peace because a fight was expensive. Each accommodation made sense in the year you made it. The problem is that they compound. You wake up two decades later inside the sum of them and the sum is a life you never actually decided to live, wearing your name.

Underneath that is a harder thing to look at. Somewhere in there you stopped consulting yourself. It became easier to ask what the situation required than what you wanted, and after enough years the muscle that knows what you want goes quiet from disuse. So the life feels unrecognisable partly because the person who would recognise it was set aside a long time ago to keep the machine running.

The cost of leaving this unexamined is that the accommodations keep compounding. You add more of the same, and the distance between the life and the person living it widens until something breaks, often loudly and late. The alternative is not to burn it all down. It is to go back through the accumulations and find which ones you would still choose, which you kept out of fear, and where you disappeared. That is slow work, and it is the honest kind.

If you want to begin tracing how the life got built, the free book Before Approaching the Threshold is written to help you look without flinching.