Somebody paid me for a web architecture and SEO audit.
Two hours of work.
An assessment, a set of recommendations, done inside an afternoon.
I had spent most of the year before that thinking very carefully about what to do with my life, and I had arrived nowhere in particular.
Two hours of fairly ordinary work told me more than the whole year had, and I am still slightly annoyed about it.
Not because the work was profound. It was a document and some sensible suggestions about how a website was put together.
It was that somebody had put money on a version of me I had not been thinking about at all.
A year of thinking
Here is what that year actually consisted of.
Reading.
Making lists.
Opening a document called “options” and closing it again. Talking it over with people who were kind about it. And deciding, roughly every six weeks, that I probably needed a bit more information before I could decide anything.
None of that produced a single new fact. It reorganised the facts I already had, over and over, in slightly different orders.
I think that is the part nobody warns you about during the thinking stage.
It feels like progress because it is effortful, and effort and progress have been the same thing for most of our working lives.
You put the hours in, something moves. Except here nothing moves, and the hours still feel like they should count for something.
It also cost me a kind of confidence, because the longer I went without deciding, the more I suspected the problem was me rather than the method.
I thought, somebody who cannot answer a simple question about her own life after twelve months of trying must, at some level, be avoiding the answer.
That was not quite right either.
I was not avoiding an answer.
I realised I was asking a question that thinking cannot answer, and then being disappointed in myself for not thinking harder.
Nothing had gone wrong
Which was most of the problem.
It is much easier to question a life that has failed than one that is working.
If the job is terrible, leaving is a story anyone can follow.
You say the words and people nod.
If the job is objectively fine and the money is fine, and you are reasonably good at it, and you still do not want to spend the next decade doing it, there is no sentence for that which does not sound ungrateful.
So you do not say it. And because you do not say it, you do not really examine it either, and it stays a mood rather than a question.
There is a specific flatness that comes from getting the thing you were supposed to want and feeling almost nothing when it arrives.
Not disappointment exactly.
You get the outcome, you notice you are pleased for about a day and a half, and then you notice you have already started scanning for the next item, and that the scanning is the part that feels familiar.
What I eventually worked out is that I had never really been chasing the thing.
I had been chasing the moment where somebody else confirms the thing. And confirmation has a very short half-life.
How a life gets built
The awkward thing is that none of the individual decisions were wrong.
Taking the job made sense.
Staying made sense, because I was learning and the money went up.
Specialising made sense. Years earlier, choosing medical science made sense too, and I would have argued for it properly at the time because I had built the argument myself and it was a good one.
If I am honest, it was also a field I had partly picked because it was esteemed, and then talked myself into the rest.
Every one of those held up on its own. What I never did was ask whether they held up together.
You can get extremely good at answering what makes sense without ever getting equally good at answering what you want. They use different muscles, and only one of them gets exercised very much at work, and it is not the second one.
The other thing that happens is that each sensible decision makes the next one slightly more constrained, so the range of available lives narrows without anybody announcing that it has narrowed.
At twenty-two almost everything is technically possible and almost nothing is legible. By the middle of a career it has reversed.
Everything is legible and the possible has quietly shrunk to whatever sits adjacent to what you already do.
Nobody sends you a notification about that.
You just find, at some point, that when you try to imagine a genuinely different life, the imagining itself has got harder.
When it works but doesn’t fit
A life can be financially sensible, professionally successful, stable, admired by people whose opinion you care about, and still not fit the person living inside it.
I am not making the argument that success is a trap, because I do not believe that, and I have noticed that the people who say it loudest usually have some.
The question is smaller and more uncomfortable than that.
Is the scoreboard you are currently winning on one you ever chose to play on?
Mine was other people being able to explain what I did.
I did not know that until much later, and it explains an unreasonable number of my decisions.
It explains why I picked the degree with a name. It explains why I stayed in roles a year longer than the learning lasted. I was not building anything.
I was making something other people could place.
What moving actually changed
I live in Japan now.
I quit my job and said I was going for a few months and what I remember most clearly is not the flight or the paperwork.
It was the questions.
Nobody was unkind about it and it’s worth mentioning because the version of this story where everybody is against you is a much easier one to tell.
What I got instead was, ‘what are you in Japan for.’ And, ‘why do you want to go?’ And, ‘what is it for, exactly?’
Fair enough. They are my family. They wanted to understand. Parts of me feel that they deserve to know too?
But underneath the questions was the one nobody said out loud.
Spefically: ‘Your family is here. Your life is here. Australia is amazing. Why would you move your life?’
All of that is true. Australia is amazing. My life was and is in some way still there.
None of it was wrong, and none of it changed what I wanted, which is the part I had no idea how to explain at the time.
I do not think anybody can really understand what you are going through if they have never been in the arena.
I learned that the hard way and I do not say it with any resentment, because it is just how it works.
People can love you completely and still only have their own map to read you with.
The thing that actually changed is not geographic.
I grew up keeping the peace. I was the one who made everybody comfortable, who smoothed the thing over, who read the room before she read herself. And somewhere in the middle of all this I got to a stage where I am okay with making people uncomfortable.
Their discomfort is theirs to go through. I no longer want to rescue them from it.
I think of it a bit like weather now. I put the thing out there, and people manage it the way they manage a forecast.
Some days it is sunny. Some days it rains, or it is humid, or there is a thunderstorm coming. The weather is not going to solve that for anybody.
You work out what to wear and you go outside anyway.
It took me a long time to get here.
The things I ignored
I was not unhappy, which is why this took so long.
I was, looking back, doing a lot of small things that I would now read differently.
I was more interested in other people’s lives than in my own, and specifically in people who had done something slightly irregular, and I would find myself asking them unnecessarily detailed questions about how it had actually worked.
I felt genuine relief when things got cancelled.
I kept picking up interests and not finishing them. I could describe what I did not want in considerable detail and go completely vague when asked what I did want.
And I could imagine wanting something different far more vividly than I could imagine my own life five years out, which I now think was the loudest signal of all, and the one I explained away most efficiently.
None of those are diagnoses. Plenty of contented people cancel plans.
But they were all pointing the same way for long enough that ignoring them took active work, and I was doing that work daily without once calling it that.
What have I noticed three times this year and explained away three times?
Momentum, not commitment
There is a question I did not ask for years and it is not a dramatic one.
If I came across this life today with no history in it and nothing already invested, would I pick it up?
