What Are You Going to Do With This One Wild and Precious Life We Have?
I think one of the saddest things a person can do is build their entire life around what is easiest to explain to people who were never meant to understand it. Not what is most alive or what is most hers. What I’ve noticed about myself is I default to what is easiest to defend. And I don’t mean just defending your decisions to others, but also yourself. It’s the sensible job you don’t love enough to brag about and don’t hate enough to leave.
The relationship that isn’t terrible, and so comfortable it’s uncomfortable, which somehow becomes the highest compliment anyone can offer it.
The city you never meant to stay in this long.
The version of you who became legible, polished, productive, slightly dead behind the eyes, and a total fucking liar to your friends, family, and most importantly yourself.
I’ve had seasons of that life, and with some of them, years… even decades. I want to be clear, it’s not because I didn’t want more. It’s usually because wanting more requires a kind of honesty that is very inconvenient.
Because once you admit you want a different life, you have to notice all the ways your current one is costing you. Costs can come in all different currencies, like the cost of your aliveness and perfect tits, one underwhelming week at a time. No biggie, right? 🙃
Convenience is not the same thing as peace
I realized that convenience is not the same thing as peace. It just looks similar from a distance and can have similar feelings of calm. It’s easy to confuse the two.
According to the Lexi-Webster: America’s Most Trusted Dictionary:
Convenience is when nothing is openly on fire.
Peace is when your body isn’t quietly begging you to stop abandoning yourself.
Convenience says:
stay because it’s easier
Keep the job because the title sounds respectable
keep dating him because starting over sounds annoying, hard, expensive…
it’s easier to just stop talking about what you really want because everyone has already got used to this version of you
Peace says:
This no longer fits.
This version of success feels like wearing Forever 21 in your mid-30s.
I’m tired of negotiating with my own desire.
I don’t want a life that only looks good from across the street.
Those differences matter when you look back at those underwhelming weeks that may have already turned into years. When I think about what convenience looks like, I think it looks “fine,” and “fine” is one of the scariest and most daunting words you can use to describe your life.
Desire is data
Desire is data. Not drama. Not delusion. Not something to apologize for. Information.
This took me a while to figure out. But I realized that feeling of desire shouldn’t just be used to choose who I sleep with. It can tell me what kind of work makes me feel elegant instead of depleted. What kind of love feels generous, what kind of city makes me curious, and one of my favorites that I realized was what kind of pace feels rich instead of frantic.
If you keep feeling pulled toward something, that matters.
Good. Run to it, no matter how different, wild, scary, or random it might be. Just remind yourself that others will be confused and maybe concerned, but they do not have to understand it. You are the one who has to live it.
And honestly, most people are not confused. They are just negotiating with a life they have already outgrown.
The life you want will require a version of you that scares the current one
I love this one. The older I get, the scarier everything is, so I make it a point to do something that scares me, from physical things like riding a roller coaster to more mental things like giving a speech. It’s totally normal to be scared, and I think it’s kind of healthy.
However, the peace-seeking, desire-filled version of you is not available through small adjustments alone.
She needs different standards. Different courage. Different habits. Different tolerance for misunderstandings.
You don’t become her by waiting until everyone approves, the money is perfect (unless you are looking for that in a partner 😉), the timing is pristine, and your skin looks amazing in natural light.
This happens after making a series of decisions that make the old version of your life harder to return to. It’s like being gifted a designer bag for the first time. The thought of having to buy my own is beyond comprehension. I would probably be like Barbie and Ken, walking out of the store not paying for anything because that’s how it works in their and my world.
Don’t expect most of your reinvention to be one huge cinematic moment. They’re usually a chain of honest ones that make you wake up one day and say, “I did it.” I totally deserve everything I desire because I get it all eventually, including the Hermès Kelly Sellier 25 Black Epsom with gold hardware. Thank you, future Daddy. Be patient, be kind to yourself, and love yourself and others, even those who are confused about whose life you are living.
You are allowed to outgrow a life you once begged for
You are allowed to be grateful and still want something else. You can appreciate a season without staying trapped inside it forever like it owes you permanence.
But before you totally move on, I think it’s important to appreciate what that life taught you, how it helped you, how it carried you, and accept why it made total sense that you lived it… But moving on because you’ve learned and you want more—that’s movement, baby.
And movement is how we know our body is alive. I think stagnation gets romanticized because it looks loyal, grounded, and responsible. But sometimes stagnation is just fear in a very tasteful outfit.
Ask the ugly, clarifying questions
When I feel stuck, I ask myself questions that make me slightly uncomfortable but have been useful.
If I woke up one day and no one knew me, what would be the first thing I would tell them? Would it be the version I am right now, or would I change something?
What part of my life am I defending the most?
Where am I pretending not to know what I know?
Am I giving convenient answers, or do these answers actually give me peace?
I don’t want a smaller life just because it’s easier to maintain
That’s what this really comes down to, at least for me. Sometimes I’m just a lazy girl. But I also don’t want a life that is messy, unmanageable, under-stimulating, and sexually frustrated.
I want beauty.
I want money.
I want plots—and I mean stories and land.
I want depth.
I want rooms that wake me up.
I want “work” that feels like mine.
I want love that fills me. And I want travel so magnificent it makes one single tear run down my cheek so I can blot it with the Chanel handkerchief my husband hands me because he knows how to make me cry in all the best ways.
I want a life that feels chosen. And I think a lot of people want that too, but we keep translating it into something more acceptable before we say what we want out loud.
So I want you to make a no-pressure space to just say it in the original language, the entire thing. It doesn’t have to be perfect—just what you know now, because you can edit logistics later.
So…what are you going to do with this one wild and precious life we have?
Not theoretically.
And not someday.
Maybe start by admitting it.
**Full disclosure, I'm currently in this process, asking myself these questions.
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