Is it just me, or does nobody really feel like they have this whole life thing figured out?
I don’t mean that in a dramatic, everything-is-falling-apart kind of way.
I mean sometimes I look at my life and think, “Wait… I’m the one doing all of this?”
I’m a wife. I’m a mom of four. I own a home. I work. I’ve built things for myself. I’ve taken chances. I’ve made decisions that completely changed the direction of my life.
And somehow, there are still moments when I feel like I’m pretending to be the person who is supposed to be doing all of this.
Maybe that’s part of what makes imposter syndrome so strange.
We usually hear about it in terms of careers. You get the promotion and wonder if you’re actually qualified. You start a business and feel like somebody is eventually going to realize you don’t know as much as they think you do. You walk into a room you’re proud to be in and wonder if you really belong there.
But I don’t think imposter syndrome always looks like that.
Sometimes it looks like looking around at your own life and wondering how you got here.
Sometimes it’s looking at the person you’ve become and realizing she doesn’t look anything like the person you thought you’d be.
And that can happen whether you love where you ended up or not.
I think that’s the part we don’t talk about enough.
We spend so much time talking about dreams and goals and having a five-year plan that we don’t always talk about what happens when life takes that plan and does something completely different with it.
When I was younger, I had an idea of what adulthood would look like.
I’m sure most of us did.
There was a version of myself I imagined becoming. There were things I thought would happen by certain ages. Places I thought I’d live. Things I thought I’d accomplish. A general idea of what my family, career and life would look like.
Then life happened.
Some things worked out better than I imagined.
Some things didn’t.
Some things I never imagined happened at all.
That’s the weird thing about growing up. You can spend years trying to get somewhere and eventually realize you ended up somewhere completely different.
Sometimes you love where you landed.
Sometimes you don’t.
Sometimes you’re still figuring that part out.
I’ve had moments where I look at something in my life and think, “This is actually pretty amazing.”
Then I’ll have another moment where I’m thinking, “How did I end up here?”
Both can be true.
I’ve also learned that knowing yourself doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll never question yourself.
I actually think you can be extremely self-aware and still misunderstand yourself sometimes.
I’ve experienced that.
There have been things I’ve thought about myself that I later realized weren’t completely true. Some were conclusions I came to because of how other people saw me. Some came from experiences that changed the way I viewed myself. Some came from simply being young and trying to make sense of things before I had enough life experience to understand them.
And then there are times when people misunderstand you so completely that you start wondering if maybe they’re seeing something you can’t see.
That’s dangerous territory…
Because there is a difference between being open to self-reflection and allowing someone else’s perception of you to become your identity.
I’ve had to learn that difference.
You can listen to criticism without accepting every accusation.
You can admit when you’ve made a mistake without deciding you’re a bad person.
You can change your behavior without abandoning your values.
You can grow without becoming whoever somebody else thinks you should be.
That last part matters to me more now than it ever has.
I think one of the most important things you can do as you move through life is actually get to know yourself.
Not the version of you that makes everybody else comfortable.
Not the version that looks good on social media.
Not the version people have decided you are based on one interaction, one mistake, one relationship or one chapter of your life.
You.
What do you believe?
What do you stand for?
What are you willing to compromise on, and what aren’t you?
What kind of person do you want to be when nobody is watching?
What parts of yourself are you still figuring out?
You don’t have to have every answer.
But you should know yourself well enough to recognize when something doesn’t align with who you are.
Because the world will have plenty of opinions about you.
People will misunderstand you.
People will project things onto you.
People will tell you who they think you are.
Sometimes they’ll be right.
Sometimes they’ll be completely wrong.
And sometimes you’ll realize they saw something in you that you hadn’t been willing to see yet.
That’s where self-awareness comes in.
You have to be able to look at yourself honestly without handing over the responsibility of defining yourself to everyone else.
I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, especially while writing The Paradox.
The main character, Simone, isn’t me.
Her story isn’t my story.
But there are pieces of her internal struggle that I understand deeply.
She’s spent a lot of time trying to understand herself while also trying to understand how other people see her. She’s misunderstood by people around her, but she also has moments where she has to confront the ways she’s misunderstood herself.
That tension is part of what made her story interesting to me.
Because I think a lot of us can relate to it.
You can know exactly who you are in some ways and still have questions about yourself in others.
You can be confident in your values and still wonder whether you’re making the right decisions.
You can be very aware of yourself and still discover something new about yourself years later.
That’s not hypocrisy.
That’s being human.
And that’s a big part of why I wrote The Paradox.
It’s a story about identity, but not in the simple sense of somebody figuring out what they like or what they want to do with their life.
It’s about what happens when the person you believe yourself to be, the person other people believe you to be, and the person you’re becoming don’t always line up neatly.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about those things myself.
Who am I?
Who have I become?
What parts of me have stayed the same?
What parts have changed?
Which changes were growth?
Which ones came from trying to survive something?
Which parts of myself did I once misunderstand?
And which parts have I always known, even when other people didn’t?
I don’t think those questions have one permanent answer.
We’re allowed to evolve.
But I also think there’s a difference between evolving and losing yourself.
That’s why knowing your values matters.
Because when life gets complicated, when people misunderstand you, when your plans change, when you’re questioning yourself, your values can give you something solid to come back to.
You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going to know what you won’t compromise to get there.
You don’t have to know what the next ten years look like to know the kind of person you want to be while you’re living them.
And you don’t have to let somebody else’s version of you become more believable than your own lived experience.
I’m still figuring some of this out.
I don’t have a perfectly mapped-out future.
I don’t think anybody does.
I have goals. I have ideas. I have things I want to build and experiences I want to have.
But I also know by now that life has a funny way of making its own edits.
Sometimes the detour becomes the destination.
Sometimes what you thought was a setback puts you somewhere you needed to be.
Sometimes you get exactly what you wanted and realize it isn’t what you thought it would be.
Sometimes you become a person your younger self wouldn’t have recognized.
And sometimes you look around at your own life and think, “How did I get here?”
Maybe that’s not a sign that you’re lost.
Maybe it’s a sign that you’ve lived enough life to realize there was never going to be one straight path.
I’ve stopped expecting myself to have everything figured out.
I’d rather know myself.
I’d rather know what I believe, what I value, what I’m willing to stand on and what kind of person I want to be.
The rest can change.
The career can change.
The location can change.
The plans can change.
The timeline can change.
Even I can change.
But I don’t want to become so busy trying to fit into the life other people expect from me that I lose track of the person actually living it.
Maybe that’s the real challenge of growing up. Not figuring out exactly who you’re supposed to become, but knowing yourself well enough that when life inevitably changes the plan, you don’t lose yourself with it.
And maybe that’s part of why I wrote The Paradox.
Simone isn’t me, and her story isn’t my story. But there are pieces of her internal struggle that I understand on a level I didn’t fully realize until I was writing them. That feeling of being seen one way by the people around you while knowing there is so much more happening underneath. Being misunderstood by other people while also realizing there have been times you misunderstood yourself.
Writing her forced me to think about how often we try to make sense of ourselves through other people’s eyes. What they think we are. What they think we should be. What they remember about us. What they assume from one mistake, one season, one interaction.
And over the years, I’ve had to learn that knowing who you are doesn’t mean you never question yourself. It doesn’t mean you never change your mind, make mistakes, or discover something about yourself that you didn’t see before.
It means you have something to come back to.
Your values. Your boundaries. The things you believe even when nobody agrees with you. The parts of yourself you’re willing to grow, and the parts you refuse to compromise just because someone else doesn’t understand them.
You can evolve without losing yourself.
You can admit when you’re wrong without allowing someone else to rewrite your entire character.
You can listen to criticism without accepting every version of yourself that someone hands you.
And you can be misunderstood without spending your entire life trying to prove who you are to everyone else.
I’m still figuring some things out. I think most of us are, whether we admit it or not. But the older I get, the more I realize that maybe I don’t need to have every answer. I just need to know myself well enough to recognize when something feels like growth and when it feels like I’m abandoning myself to fit into somebody else’s idea of who I should be.
That’s a big part of what The Paradox explores — identity, perception, growth, and the uncomfortable space between who we think we are, who other people think we are, and who we’re actually becoming.
And after years of writing, rewriting, questioning whether I should even share it, and letting it sit while life kept happening around me…
The Paradox is finally coming in 2027.
So I guess this is me officially saying it out loud.
Maybe I’m not the only one still figuring it out.
