I’ve long struggled with my desire for everything to be “perfect.”  

For a while, I tried to search for the right moment where everything just clicks. Ideally, I’d be on top of my responsibilities and caught up on sleep — operating at some peak version of myself that I’d seen clearly in my head since I was probably twelve. That moment never came, but I continued waiting for it anyway. 

Throughout high school, I’ve always felt like I could be more “in control” of my life, but the finish line kept on moving out of reach. Tests and essays piled up, and before I knew it, I was treating my life like a series of hurdles to jump over rather than a path to just walk through. 

So naturally, I glamorized the idea of escape. My version of peace was specific: an afternoon spent lying on a beach with a book — no obligations, no clock and nowhere to be. I’d daydream about it during class, during the exact moments I was supposed to be present, thus never actually being happy within my current reality. I was basically fantasizing about being unemployed, which is strange for someone whose only job is going to school and doing homework.

The problem wasn’t necessarily my responsibilities, but rather, my belief that real life could only start once they were gone. 

Sometime this year, I just got tired of waiting. I started noticing that the long awaited breaks I had idealized didn’t actually feel like relief. I still found something to be anxious about and my only accomplishment that felt “productive enough” was going to Solidcore. Relaxation felt conditional, like something I needed to earn by completing my to-do list, which was genuinely never-ending. And thus, I realized that my restlessness came from how my idea of peace required a clean slate. 

This revelation didn’t make the tasks in front of me disappear, but they felt less suffocating once I stopped treating my happiness as contingent on their completion. And ultimately, I realized that there’s no divine rulebook that determines the conditions in which of my happiness could exist. 

Here’s what nobody tells you, or maybe you just don’t hear it until you’re ready: after college there are jobs, then mortgages, then aging parents and health insurance and approximately hundreds of other ongoing situations that do not resolve. Life does not reach a state of completion. The clean slate is not coming. At some point, you have to make peace with the fact that about seventy percent of any day is just stuff you have to get through, whether it’s errands or obligations. Things that aren’t fun but need to be done. That’s not a bad life, just real life. 

The other thirty percent, moments for yourself that actually feel good, become more satisfying when you’re not preoccupied with wishing that they were longer.

My mindset, I’ve learned, is just procrastinating on being happy. It tells you that you’ll enjoy your life when things are in order, but they never are. So you wait to feel happy, and that moment is always just past the next deadline, just on the other side of whatever’s making this week feel impossible. The only way out is to love life as it is, wherever we’re at.