Tomorrow I turn 35.
And you can help one of my birthday wishes come true just as you are right now. Simply, read or listen to this in full, enjoy the impromptu art exhibition I’ve sprinkled throughout, and let it all sink into the deepest parts of you. Deal?
I’m writing this to myself, but also to us as a collective.
We are on the brink of collapse: war, famine, political unrest, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, claustrophobia, so many phobias. I joke, but I digress.
The world around us is fracturing in ways that can feel beyond repair. And yet somehow, every morning, we wake up. We brush our teeth. We answer emails. We sit in traffic. We buy groceries. We ask people how they’re doing and accept “fine” as an answer. We clock in, clock out, make dinner, scroll ourselves into oblivion, go to sleep, and wake up to do some version of it all over again. And I started wondering:
What exactly are we f***ing doing?
Not in a doom-and-gloom, abandon-all-hope kind of way, I know it got dark for a second. What I’m asking is something much more personal.
Are we actually living?
Are you living?
Or have you simply become incredibly good at participating in a life you’ve inherited?
The job you were told would make you successful. The house you were told would make you feel secure. The milestones that supposedly signify you’ve “made it.” How much of your life did you actually choose?
That’s a rhetorical question for now.
And a question I’ve had to ask myself repeatedly over the past year. And on the eve of 35, I think I’m finally beginning to understand my answer.
34 was hard.
Unmistakably, the most difficult year of my life thus far. I won’t bore my up-to-date subscribers with the tired retelling of Kasim’s fall from the Sun, but it was a year of loss.
For color, imagine spending years building your perfect version of a castle, outfitted with the “best” your money could buy. The moat you dreamt of since childhood. Towers capped with the finest wood. A great hall lined with a spread of the finest foods available at your desire. You aren’t quite royalty, but you’ve reached a pinnacle of status your family couldn’t have even dreamt of.
Then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, the castle begins to crumble. A crack becomes another crack, a tower falls, then another, until eventually you’re standing in the rubble of the life you worked so hard to build.
Naturally, you look for something to blame. Damn, the weather. Damn, the builders. Bad luck? Shitty timing? Anything that might explain how something so beautiful could collapse so quickly.
Until you finally look inward and realize you built the perfect castle on someone else’s foundation.
That was 34 for me. Not simply watching the castle fall, but sitting among the rubble long enough to muster the courage to inspect the foundation underneath it.
And I wonder what yours is made of. Really.
If you stripped away the job title, the salary, the house, the relationship status, the accolades, the external things you’ve accumulated, and all the other convenient shorthand we use to explain who we are, what would be left?
And how much of what remains did you actually choose?
Maybe your foundation was poured by parents who loved you deeply and wanted you to have the security they never had. Or maybe it was reinforced by teachers who saw potential in you and pointed you toward the sensible path. Maybe religion laid a few bricks. Culture added some more. Capitalism showed up with an entire truckload and got to work.
And of course, somewhere along the way, your own desires were mixed in there, too.
That's what makes the foundation so difficult to inspect.
Not everything we inherit is bad. Everything we're taught is not wrong. And not every expectation placed upon us comes from someone trying to control us. Sometimes people love us so deeply that they dream for us.
But sometimes we live inside those dreams for so long that we mistake them for our own.
I did. And when I finally started excavating my own foundation, I found ambition. A whole lotta it. I found achievement, productivity, and an insatiable desire to prove myself. I found the belief that success meant more. More money. More recognition. More things. More people knowing my name. More. More. More. Some of those bricks were mine. Others had been handed to me so early that I couldn’t tell you exactly when I picked them up. Maybe that’s also true for you.
Have you ever stopped to ask why you want the things you want? Why that career? Why that salary? Why marriage by that age? Why the house, the title, the promotion, the children, the retirement plan, the carefully manicured version of a good life?
Who told you that’s what happiness looks like?
Now here’s where things get a little uncomfortable: what if you got all of it?
What if the promotion comes? The zeros accumulate in your bank account. You buy the house. You marry the person. You reach whatever mountaintop you’ve been climbing toward for the last decade.
Would the life waiting for you at the top actually feel like yours?
I think some part of me knew my answer long before I was courageous enough to acknowledge it. Call it intuition. Allah. HaShem. God. Your gut. That tiny voice buried underneath all the noise. I don’t particularly care what name you give it. I just know there is something within us that seems to recognize misalignment long before our conscious minds are willing to admit it.
Mine had been talking for years, and I just kept turning the volume down.
Listening to your intuition is only easy when it confirms the life you’re already living. It’s a hell of a lot harder when it asks you to question it. To me, that’s where awakening really begins. Not with suddenly having all the answers, but with finally becoming brave enough to question the ones you’ve been given.
Who am I beneath all of this? What do I actually want? What am I holding onto simply because I’ve held it for so long? What would my life look like if I trusted myself enough to find out?
I don’t have clean answers to all of those questions yet. And more importantly, I don’t need them anymore. That’s probably the greatest gift 34 gave me.
I entered this year desperate for certainty and received just about everything but. Delay. Discomfort. Disappointment. Doubt. Detours. Dead ends. A dash of d-d-d-d-espair.
All of the Downer D’s.
Initially, I saw it as one of the worst years of my life. And in many ways, it was. It really was. But there was also so much beauty growing in places I’d initially mistaken for hardship, delay and unease. Somewhere along the way, I stopped waiting for uncertainty to end and started living inside of it.
I followed what pulled me. Trusted what felt true. Walked through doors without knowing what was waiting on the other side. And little by little, I realized there was light here, too. So I’ll leave you with the same questions I’ve been asking myself.
Question what you’ve been taught to want.
Listen closely to what pulls at you. Trust yourself enough to wander beyond the life you inherited and toward whatever might be waiting underneath it.
I’ve found light and truth in the uncertainty. It’s where I choose to live now.
Don’t be afraid to wander into your own.
Sincerely,
A human reminding other humans they’re human