I’ve been thinking lately about how many of us feel like we should be further ahead in our lives. I was talking with family recently about the different ways this shows up. Someone might think they should be married by now, have children, own a home, be further along in their career, have more money saved, or simply have more of their life figured out. There’s often this picture in our heads of where we thought we would be at a certain age, and when our actual life doesn’t match it, it can feel like we’ve somehow fallen behind. But behind according to whom? I’m 40 now, and if you had asked me at 25 or 30 exactly what I thought my life would look like at this age, I’m not sure I could have told you. I was never someone who planned decades into the future. I probably would have assumed I’d be with someone, although marriage was never particularly important to me. I definitely thought I would have a successful business and a lot of money by now. I think I assumed I’d still be living in Toronto too. My actual life looks very different. I’m single. I don’t live in Toronto anymore. I’m building a business I deeply believe in, but it hasn’t reached the level of financial success I know I want for myself yet. I’m living a life I genuinely love in many ways, and at the same time, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t occasionally some shame around the things that haven’t happened yet. That’s something I think we need to be more honest about. You can be happy with your life and still wish parts of it were different. You can love being single and still hope you eventually meet someone. You can believe deeply in the work you’re doing and still feel discouraged that it isn’t paying you what you hoped it would by now. You can be grateful for where you are and still grieve the life you thought you might have. Those things can exist together. I remind myself all the time that I’m on the journey I’m on and that I’m getting where I’m going in the way I’m meant to get there. Most days, I believe that. Some days, it still hurts. I think the danger begins when we take the gap between where we are and where we thought we’d be and turn it into evidence about our worth. Instead of My business isn’t where I want it to be yet, it becomes I’m not successful. Instead of I haven’t met the right person yet, it becomes There must be something wrong with me. Instead of My marriage ended, it becomes I failed. Instead of I don’t own a home, it becomes Everyone else is ahead of me. That’s where shame sneaks in. It makes us smaller than we actually are. We hide the parts of our lives we think don’t measure up. We compare ourselves to other people. We explain ourselves when no explanation was required. We might even downplay the things we’re proud of because some other part of our life doesn’t look the way we think it should. I know that feeling. For me, the place where I’ve carried the most shame has probably been my career. I do believe in myself and in what I’m building, but that doesn’t mean I feel confident about it all the time. Some days I feel incredibly sure of where I’m going, and other days the doubt creeps in and I wonder why it’s taking me so long to get there. Why am I not there yet? The interesting thing is that I don’t remember deciding when “there” was supposed to happen. Who gave me the deadline? When I think back to my late twenties and early thirties, I can see how easily these invisible timelines start forming. I was in a long-term relationship, and people around me were getting married. I remember wondering whether we should get married too. Not necessarily because I had some enormous desire to be married, but because everyone else seemed to be doing it. I had always known, on some level, that I probably wasn’t going to live exactly like everyone else. Yet even I found myself checking my life against theirs. Social media has made that so much harder. We can now wake up in the morning and, before we’ve even had coffee, compare our lives with dozens or hundreds of other people’s. Someone bought a house. Someone got engaged. Someone is pregnant. Someone’s business had its biggest month ever. Someone is travelling through Europe. We take tiny windows into other people’s lives and use them as measuring sticks for our own. We don’t know what happened before the photograph, what’s happening outside the frame, how long it took, what it cost, what they sacrificed, or whether we’d even want their life if we had to live all of it rather than the tiny piece we’re being shown. Still, somehow, we decide we’re behind. I wonder how much energy we lose trying to catch up to timelines we never consciously chose in the first place. There’s another problem with constantly believing you should be somewhere other than where you are: it makes it very difficult to build from where you actually are. This is something I’ve been thinking about in relation to aligned action. We often create plans for the person we think we should already be rather than the person standing here today. We expect ourselves to have more energy, more money, more confidence, more time, more experience, or more capacity than we actually have. Then when we can’t maintain the plan, we decide we lack discipline or that we’ve failed again. But you can’t begin from an imaginary starting point. You can’t take the next step from the life you think you should have. You can only take it from the life you’re actually standing in. That doesn’t mean giving up on wanting more. I still want my business to grow. I still want financial success. I’m open to falling in love again. There are places I want to go, things I want to create, and versions of my life I haven’t experienced yet. Accepting where I am doesn’t mean deciding this is where I’ll stay. It means telling the truth about where I’m starting. When I stop looking at my actual life as the disappointing version of the one I was supposed to have, something else becomes visible. There are things here I never knew to want. I never expected to be living where I do now, but moving here helped me discover how deeply I love nature. I’ve learned that I genuinely enjoy spending time alone. I don’t want an incredibly busy life. I like having room to think, research, learn, make art, write, coach, putter around, go for walks, and follow my curiosity. I know myself in a way I didn’t when I was younger. The ending of my relationship was incredibly painful, but what came afterward changed the relationship I have with myself. When I first started dating again, I can see now that there was a part of me looking for someone else to choose me. I wanted to be liked. I chased things I wouldn’t chase today. I don’t do that anymore. I’m my own best friend now. Nobody throws you a party for that. There’s no culturally approved milestone for becoming someone you genuinely like spending your life with. There’s no announcement card or registry. Nobody asks to see the ring (ha!). Yet when I think about everything I’ve gained from the life I actually lived, rather than the one I imagined, that might be one of the things I value most. I’ve also learned that I’m resilient. I’ve had businesses that didn’t work the way I hoped. I’ve had to change direction. I’ve had my heart broken. I’ve fallen off the wagon more times than I can count, and I’ve climbed back on just as many. That creates a kind of faith in yourself that you can’t get from everything going according to plan. None of this means I have to pretend I’m grateful for every painful thing that’s happened. I don’t think we need to turn every disappointment into a lesson or convince ourselves that everything happened exactly as it should. Sometimes something just hurts. Sometimes you wanted something and didn’t get it. Sometimes a chapter ends that you desperately wanted to keep. Sometimes you look around and think, This really isn’t where I thought I’d be. You’re allowed to feel that. What I don’t want anymore is to use where I am as evidence that I’m failing. Maybe you don’t need to either. Maybe the question isn’t Why am I not further ahead? Maybe it’s: Where am I actually standing, and what can I build from here? Look around for a moment. Not at your friend’s life, your sibling’s life, the person you went to high school with, or the stranger on Instagram whose life seems impossibly polished. Yours. What has this life given you? What have you learned because things didn’t go according to plan? Who have you become because you had to begin again? What do you know about yourself now that you couldn’t possibly have known at 25? Maybe there are things in your life today that weren’t part of the original plan because you didn’t know enough about yourself yet to put them in it. You are not living the failed version of the life you were supposed to have. You’re living this one. This is where your feet are. This is where you get to choose from. This is where you get to begin. So instead of asking yourself where you should be by now, I want to leave you with a different question: What have you gained from the life you actually lived that wasn’t part of the original plan? You might be surprised by how much is already here. If these articles are resonating with you and you’d like to explore this work more deeply, I’d love to support you. Come Home to Yourself is my three-month coaching program for people who want to build healthier habits, strengthen self-trust, and create meaningful change that lasts. Learn more here: www.lianasoper.com/coaching Take good care of yourself, Liana This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lianasoper.substack.com/subscribe
