Will I Ever Make it Downstream?

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There’s a capitalization-averse Substack called “Milk and Cookies” by a woman named Ayushi Thakkar. I found it a month or so ago, and I have to say, she’s been publishing some really incisive reflections. There’s one I’ve had open for days that I want to share with you today.

The post is called, “why feeling lost might mean you’re finally doing it right,” and while it would be very pretty to think so, I’m not nearly so sure for myself.

And yet…there’s something in it.

Let me start by saying that I’m trying to find my feet, but yes, I’m still lost.

Today, for some reason, has been a really rough day.

I woke up feeling lost, depressed, purposeless, unwanted.

I found it extremely hard to drag my mysteriously aching body out of bed. To do what? Phone it in? Show up in insufficient ways? Question what the hell I’m even for? Watch as others with focus and direction build things they can be proud of, while I do ontological snow angels in the fever swamps of my mind?

I’ve been trying to work through all of this on my own without broadcasting it here like a livestreamed heart surgery.

Some days, I can put the mask back on long enough to write a halfway decent post that isn’t obnoxiously self-referential.

On the days that I can’t, I usually just…don’t.

But consistency matters. Showing up matters. At least, that’s what I keep being told.

Allow me a lame analogy:

I hate carrots. Despise them. Actually, most root vegetables. I also find beets utterly revolting. I am not a picky eater, but there is something in my DNA that views this category of plant life as a hostile alien threat, and on those occasions where I find them in my meal, I have to force myself to choke down just enough that I do not insult the cook.

It’s the culinary equivalent of listening to nails on a chalkboard.

So today, when I sat down to take a crack at a post, I felt like someone had stuck a giant bowl of carrots in front of me. [shudder] I couldn’t make myself suppress the gag reflex and eat. Instead of chowing down, I decided to let someone else do most of the eating. And by eating, of course, I mean writing:

there’s a strange ache that comes with outgrowing a version of your life that you worked hard to create. it’s the kind of feeling that doesn’t announce itself as grief but hums in the background of your daily routine — in the moments when the things that used to feel important start to feel hollow, when your goals no longer excite you, when you’re not quite burnt out but can’t seem to care either. it’s not depression, not exactly. it’s disorientation. and for many people, especially in their mid- to late-twenties or early thirties, it’s the quiet emotional truth behind the phrase “i feel lost.” but what if being lost isn’t a failure to find yourself — what if it’s the beginning of finally doing it right?

God, I wish this had happened to me in my mid-to-late twenties or early thirties, instead of my mid-to-late forties, when I’m supposed to have all this shit figured out.

I am so damn tired of being lost.

I’m exhausted from trying to figure out what the mission is. I want something to pursue with everything I’ve got.

I have the skills. I’m not afraid of the work. But the compass won’t stop spinning. Which the hell way am I supposed to go?

we are raised in cultures that love clarity. clarity is productive. clarity is bankable. clarity can be monetized and measured and turned into content. it makes you easier to explain at dinner parties. it makes your existence easier to post. and when clarity disappears — when the relationship doesn’t fit anymore, when the job makes your chest feel tight, when the apartment you manifested starts to feel like a set — we panic. we look for a new label, a new goal, a new structure to stabilize us. but sometimes the most important thing we can do is let ourselves stay blurry. to be unbranded, unpositioned, undone for a while. because real self-knowledge is a slow, unmarketable process. and the lost feeling might just be the first sign that you’ve finally stopped performing someone else’s idea of a good life.

Religion, for me, was the main source of clarity. Black and white, the-buck-stops-here, I-don’t-have-the-answer-but-I-can-look-it-up-in-a-book clarity.

But whatever you can call my weird, furtive, futile interactions with that space in mind my tuned to the channel I’ve always called “God,” religion it is not. Clarity? More like total obscurity. I have no idea what to take away from this exercise.

And yes, for me, the zealous pursuit of actively-practiced and promoted religion was an unexamined manifestation of “someone else’s idea of a good life,” in which I had been given my own starring role. As a cradle Catholic, it wasn’t something I ever actually chose. It was chosen for me, and idolized to the point where being a good little altar boy was the only way I thought I could be accepted, respected, and affirmed. There was also the fear part — to whom much is given, much is expected, after all — but it was not the path I chose for myself. My feet were placed on it before I had learned to walk.

And now, adrift both from that and the people who put me there, I am trying to find my way through this tangled bramble. I am Dante in the darkened wood with no Virgil, I am a sailor without a North Star. Every direction seems equally invalid, and nothing is whispering to me on the wind, beckoning me forth.

So yes, there are a great many questions:

what would i choose if i wasn’t trying to impress anyone?

what would my life look like if i wasn’t addicted to clarity?

what kind of person am i becoming — and do i like her?

culturally, we’re not given permission to ask these questions unless we’re in a crisis. but they often show up subtly: in your aversion to a schedule you used to love, in your inability to finish books, in your boredom with your own narrative. the timeline doesn’t make sense anymore, and the metrics of success start to feel like someone else’s homework. you begin to want things you don’t know how to name yet. and when you try to explain it to people, they worry. they tell you to find something stable, to go back to what works, to stop overthinking it. but the truth is, you’ve outgrown the person who fit neatly into that older life. and this loss of identity isn’t the problem — it’s the path.

My crisis came late. At least a decade and a half overdue. But the pattern is still the same. And people still don’t understand how this particular clock ticks. It’s not in rhythm with the rest of the world. It chases meaning like a paperclip is drawn to a magnet. I can’t explain where or why something pulls me and grabs my attention, I only know when I’m shooting off in that direction, like a puppet on a string.

But if my older life has been outgrown — and it most certainly has — the loss of identity is obscuring the path. I still can’t see it through the suffocating darkness of the forest in the dead of night.

we’re terrified of being directionless. we pathologize stillness. we treat confusion like a flaw in the system instead of a sign that the system no longer fits. especially in wellness culture — where even healing becomes a brand strategy. you’re expected to optimize your nervous system, journal your limiting beliefs, and manifest your next season, all while looking like you’ve figured it out. but what if you haven’t? what if you don’t want to manifest anything just yet? what if you’re exhausted by the idea of becoming? what if you just want to be?

I know, in my bones, that I need to just be. To sit in stillness. To stare aimlessly out the window and listen to the rain. To take slow, measured sips of coffee or tea. To leave my phone face down in the other room. To go for long drives and sit in nature.

But there’s always the pressure to perform. Another task that needs doing. Another child who needs to be dropped off or picked up from school or work. Another meal that needs to be made. Another bill collector blowing up my phone, wanting money I don’t have. Stillness is a luxury for those who can afford it. Even when I try, I wind up like a leaf on the surface of whitewater rapids, twisted and spun and flipped around, caroming in every direction, being pulled under at times.

Will I ever make it downstream?

being lost is the body’s way of saying: wait. before we climb another ladder, can we check where it’s leaning? can we stop and ask if this was ever mine? maybe you used to dream of a corporate job and now fantasize about slowness. maybe you built a business and now want to burn it all down and take a gap year in your own life. maybe you’re the kind of person who can make anything work — and that’s precisely why everything feels like a trap. this isn’t dysfunction. this is discernment.

I could read that paragraph a dozen times and it would feel more true with each repetition. But how often do we get to stop and discern? When do any of us really get the chance to listen to our body when it says wait?

and if you’re reading this in the thick of it or if your mornings feel like molasses and your thoughts don’t organize into clean bullet points and your future feels like a smudged watercolor — please don’t rush to fix it. please don’t bypass this with a pinterest quote or a productivity hack. sit in it. trust it. let yourself be slow. make a cup of tea and stare out the window for as long as it takes. listen to the part of you that’s whispering “this isn’t it anymore.” it’s not drama. it’s data.

Ha. I hadn’t read the post I’m quoting in several days. I had no recollection that she mentioned staring out the window, sipping tea. It’s just archetypical. It’s what we all NEED to be able to do. And very few of us ever get the chance to “sit in it” or “trust it” or “let ourselves be slow.”

because one day, not all at once, but gently — the fog lifts. you wake up and realize you want to paint again. or journal. or move cities. or stop performing certainty. and slowly, a new kind of clarity emerges. not the kind that’s marketable or impressive. the kind that’s rooted. quiet. yours. you stop measuring your worth by momentum. you start finding joy in the mundane. you fall in love with your actual life, not the one you perform. and maybe — just maybe — you begin to see that feeling lost was never the enemy. it was the invitation.

It has been four years since this fog settled in. Five, if you count the final year of burnout before I left the thing I built that was the only thing I’ve ever really been successful at. The thing I truly believed was my life’s work. The thing I was made to do. Right up until it wasn’t. Right up until I realized it was strangling me with one hand, and draining the life right out of me with the other.

And now I don’t know how to believe again. Not just in something else, but in myself. How can I trust my instincts the next time they say, “this is it,” if they ever make it that far? We are not juke boxes or vending machines. We are not a transactional beings.

We were meant for more.

Certainly, there are those who can put their heads down and do work purely as a means to a financial end. But I am not like them. For me, the work is the end, and if it is also the means, that is secondary. The ancillary benefit to doing work you love, it seems to me, is the financial success and provision that follows from such a dedicated, passionate pursuit.

But when you can’t find the thing that matters, when your body and mind and soul are all begging you to slow down but life is shoving you like a bouncer at a bar where you’ve overstayed your welcome, what do you do? How long must you be buffeted about, waiting to find a destination you can run towards?

I don’t want to go through more things that don’t kill me but make me stronger. I want to believe this is a liminal phase. I want to believe that all this mess, this chaos, this pain, this loss of sense of self, is all for some greater good. I want to believe the universe, or God, or fate have some plan for me, and this is all just a very long moment of realignment.

But if so, I would very much like to get to the other side.

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