The life that was never yours
The Weekly wholistique #8
When I was 24, living in China, I landed the job I thought I wanted.
Prestigious title. International business trips. The kind of role that made people nod approvingly when I told them what I did.
I remember calling my parents to share the news.
They were proud. I was supposed to be too.
But I wasn’t.
Something felt off. Not dramatically wrong. Just quietly misaligned. Like I had stepped into a role someone else had written for me.
And I had.
Most of us live according to "life scripts", culturally shared expectations about the order and timing of major life events.
Go to school. Get a job. Get married. Buy a house. Have kids. Retire.
Deviating from the script? That feels risky. Shameful, even.
So we follow the script.
We pursue career paths not because they fit who we are, but because they signal prestige.
We confuse admiration with alignment. We confuse being impressive with being fulfilled.
I did this for years. It took me four of them to admit that I was chasing the wrong things.
Eventually, I made a change. I walked away from that path and built something aligned with what I valued most: freedom, family, and sanity.
Not money. Not status.
Here’s what I’ve learned: The longer you follow the wrong script, the harder it gets to recognize your own voice.
Tearing it up isn’t easy. It can look like failure. Feel like rebellion. People will question your choices.
But the alternative is living a life that was never really yours.
If something in your gut feels off, listen.
Not everything that makes you uneasy is wrong.
Sometimes it's your quiet self trying to get a word in.
Tear up the script. Write a new one.
Even if no one claps.
Especially then.
“It is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” - John Maynard Keynes
One Book
“Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation” by Parker J Palmer.
A short but profound book about vocation, integrity, and inner listening. Palmer challenges the reader to distinguish between roles imposed by the world and a life truly rooted in personal meaning.
This is my experience as well. I tore up the script and never looked for it again. Beautifully expressed.
Your thoughts resonate with me. I was born on an island, and I'm vagabonding in Baja these days. My husband and I decided fifty was a good age to get off the 9-5 hamster wheel and go live in exploration. So, I often see wisdom in the ocean.
What you so eloquently express here reminds me of snorkeling. You get in the water (the hamster wheel), go find a reef, and start following the pretty fish and colorful coral (the script).
At some point, the tide turns, the wind shifts, and the current takes you further and further offshore (away from an intentional life), and if you're inexperienced, you don't realize it because you're following your mission and keeping your face in the water to see what other snorkelers describe as amazing sealife (follow the script).
The longer you wait to take their eyes off the reef and come up for air to see how far you've strayed from dry land (intentional living), the harder it is to swim against the current and reconnect with terra firme.
And if you're lucky, you haven't drifted so far offshore that you've completely lost your sense of direction and can no longer see your way back to dry land on the horizon.
I learned to snorkel as a young child. The sooner you learn, the better you get at flowing effortlessly between coral and dry land.