An Open Letter To Women Who Feel Restless (And Don’t Know Why)

You feel restless and uncomfortable, even when everything around you is going well and you should be happy, because you’re chasing someone else’s definition of happiness. You’ve been following their roadmaps and misplaced yourself. You’re like a puzzle piece jammed into the wrong position. You are trying to make yourself fit with minor changes when you’re stuck in a space that’s never going to work for you. You need to make bigger shifts in order to break out from this rut. You need to change the unchangeable. Otherwise, this uneasy feeling will persist. You will keep staring at the ceiling, night after night, wondering why you can’t seem to find your footing.

You feel unsatisfied deep in your core because you aren’t doing what you want. You’re doing what you’ve been trained to want. What you’ve been taught is important by the people surrounding you, the people who raised you, the people who were trying to guide you in the right direction but muddled your priorities instead. You don’t even realize what you, as an individual, desire from this world because you’ve had this idea of what a perfect life looked like for so long that it’s impossible to revise the image. It’s impossible to untangle what happiness looks like for you verses everyone else you have ever known. Maybe a nine-to-five, picket fenced life works for them, but that doesn’t mean it has to work for you. You don’t have to follow in their footsteps. You don’t even have to head in the same direction.

Remember, you should never allow social pressure to get to you. Even though you care deeply about making your loved ones proud, you should never allow them to build your life for you. The path you choose to follow belongs to you and you alone. If you’re looking to others to give you the answer, you’re going to find the wrong one.

If you’re convinced there’s something wrong with you, that a piece of you is broken, it’s because you’re not feeling the way you think you should. But there is no should. Instead of listening to outside advice, listen to what your own heart is telling you. Listen to the pull in your gut. This is your life and if you’re not happy with it at the end of the day, what the hell are you doing? Who are you living for? If it’s someone else, you’ve made a grave mistake. You can’t make your parents proud if you’re lying whenever they ask if everything is fine. You can’t be the best role model for your children if you aren’t showing them what authentic happiness looks like firsthand. You can’t be a perfect partner if you aren’t fully invested in your half of the relationship. Even if you could make these people happy with your lies, with living your life half-way, you shouldn’t want to. You should want to taste happiness for yourself. You deserve it. You can keep telling yourself you don’t, but you do. You do. You do.