I don't have a neat explanation for what I want. Only a vision — hazy but real — of who I'm growing into.
I read a book once called My Berlin Kitchen — about a woman who broke off her engagement and moved to Berlin. Just upped her whole life and started over. I'm not engaged to a handsome New Yorker, and I'm not cooking my way through anything. But I understand her now in a way I didn't when I first read it. I understand what it feels like to look at the life in front of you and think: this doesn't fit anymore.
Growing up, I wanted love and marriage. Maybe kids, maybe a home. The whole picture. And at 26, I can tell you with complete certainty that none of those things excite me — not even close. Not even a little. Even in my early twenties, when that was still the dream, something in me was already quietly questioning it. Now I've stopped pretending otherwise.
The honest truth is I don't have a neat explanation for what I do want. Only a vision — hazy but real — of who I'm growing into.
That vision sits in complicated tension with where I come from. I grew up middle class, never wanting for anything, raised to understand the value of education and security — raised to prove something to the world. To be someone. And I am still, slowly, unlearning the idea that being someone has to look a certain way.
The life I was supposed to want was never really mine. It was inherited. Borrowed from expectations I never examined closely enough to question. And now that I am examining them — really sitting with them — they don't hold up.
I come from people who worked hard so I wouldn't have to want for anything. And I am grateful — genuinely, deeply grateful. But somewhere in that gratitude I confused security with direction. I mistook the safety of the expected path for a sign that it was meant for me. It wasn't. It just fit neatly. And neat has never been how I'm built.
She just has a direction. And she is learning — slowly, imperfectly, with more resistance than she'd like to admit — to trust that. To trust that outgrowing something is not the same as failing it. That wanting a different kind of life is not ingratitude. That the fact that something once fit doesn't mean it was meant to stay.
She embodies freedom. Faith. Genuine happiness. Full autonomy over her own life. And she is still becoming all of those things — one honest, uncomfortable choice at a time.
I don't know exactly where I'm going. But I know what it feels like when something no longer resonates, and I have learned — finally — to trust that feeling. Not to perform certainty I don't have. Not to shrink the vision to fit the expectations. Just to keep moving, keep becoming, and trust that the right life is being built in the moving.
And right now, that is enough.
Written in love, and in the very slow, very ongoing process of becoming —