Unfinished Thoughts, Vol. 2

A handful of real-time thoughts, questions, and half-formed realizations pulled from the chaotic depths of my journal and Notes app.

A few weeks ago, instead of writing my usual long-form essay, I shared something called Unfinished Thoughts: a collection of reflections, questions, observations, and half-formed realizations pulled pretty directly from my brain, journal, and Notes app.

I received so many messages from people saying they loved the format, which honestly makes sense because most of life is lived in the unfinished.

Some weeks, the thoughts come together into a polished essay. Other weeks, they exist as scattered notes, lingering questions, and ideas I’m still trying to make sense of.

So without further ado, here are a few unfinished thoughts I’ve been carrying around lately.

Unfinished Thoughts:

• I’ve always thought my drive for growth came from a healthy desire to become the best version of myself. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering how much of it was actually driven by the belief that who I was wasn’t quite enough yet. These days, I’m less interested in becoming a better version of myself and more interested in becoming a more honest one.

• For most of my life, I’ve been motivated by success, achievement, and creating a life that looked impressive from the outside. But the older I get, the more I realize what I actually crave is freedom. Freedom to be myself, freedom to change my mind, and freedom to live a life that feels true to me even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else.

• I don’t think the hardest part about struggling with body image is what it does to your body. I think it’s what it does to your attention. It’s like having a dozen tabs open in the background of your mind at all times, quietly draining your energy whether you realize it or not. So much life can be missed when part of your attention is always occupied by monitoring, evaluating, or trying to fix yourself.

  

• Sometimes I imagine what would happen if we made life resumes instead of professional resumes. Mine would probably include things like traveling alone, surviving heartbreak, navigating addiction and recovery, starting over, changing my mind, letting go of old identities, getting lost, and finding my way back. Most of the experiences that have shaped me the most wouldn’t fit neatly under “work experience.”

• I think one of the hardest parts of growth might be that your old coping mechanisms stop working long before your new ways of being feel natural. There’s this weird in-between period where nothing fits quite right anymore.

• One of the stranger parts of recovery has been realizing how much of my personality was built around avoiding pain, discomfort, uncertainty, or difficult emotions. Sometimes I can’t tell what’s actually me and what’s just a survival strategy I got really good at.

• I’m beginning to realize there’s a fine line between what I intuitively know to be true and what feels true simply because I’ve spent years repeating the same patterns. Sometimes what’s familiar disguises itself as what’s right. Oftentimes the hardest part is learning to tell the difference.

• I’ve spent so much of my life trying to make the right decision. Lately I’ve been wondering if there are fewer “right” decisions than I think and more decisions that simply become right because we commit to them.

• This season of life is making me realize growth isn’t actually about becoming someone new. More and more, it feels like it’s about shedding the things that were never really me in the first place.

• Lately I’ve noticed that when I’m tired, my instinct is almost never to rest. It’s to fix, push through, and find a solution. As if exhaustion is a problem to solve rather than a message to listen to.

• I’m wondering if what we call overthinking is often just a more socially acceptable way of avoiding feeling.

• I’m starting to realize there are seasons where your only job is to keep showing up before any evidence arrives. Before the momentum, opportunities, recognition, or results. Just continuing to show up because you’ve decided the thing matters. Not because anyone else has.

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