The Slow Way (But Really, It’s the Fastest)
There’s a version of my own separation agreement on page five that laid out my plan to get my old career back. It was there because everyone around me, lawyers, family, well-meaning friends, assumed that was obviously the right direction. I assumed it too, for a while. It took me years to notice that plan wasn’t actually mine. It was just the most well-worn path in sight, and I’d stepped onto it without really choosing it.
I think that’s how most people get stuck. Not because they lack options, but because the only paths they can see are the ones everyone else is already walking.
From what I’ve seen, people generally try one of three ways out.
The first is waiting to be rescued, waiting for someone, a partner, a job, a lucky break, to show up and fix what feels broken. This rarely works, mostly because there are always more people waiting to be rescued than people available to do the rescuing. And even when it does work for a while, a new relationship, a new hobby, a fresh distraction, the lift is usually temporary. Eventually you’re back where you started, except now there’s one more person or pursuit tangled up in the mess too.
The second is fixing yourself to match somebody else’s picture of a good life. This was my path. I had a version of my future handed to me, mostly built from other people’s expectations, and I spent real effort trying to make myself fit it, rather than asking whether it fit me. This path can look like real progress from the outside: you’re working hard, achieving things, checking boxes, but it’s often just as unmoored as staying still, because none of it is actually pointed anywhere you chose. The particular cruelty of this path is that even when you reach the destination, you can find out you’re still unhappy, and now you’ve spent years getting there.
The third is blowing it all up. Something dramatic, a sudden decision made out of built-up anger or exhaustion from the first two paths not working. It does get you moving. But you rarely get to choose what happens next, and the fallout from that kind of change can take years to clean up, sometimes longer than it would have taken to walk away from the wrong path more carefully in the first place.
There’s a fourth way, though it’s harder to spot, because it doesn’t look like movement at all. It looks like standing still.
I eventually got off my own version of path two, but only once I noticed it wasn’t actually mine. That noticing took time. It required standing still long enough to actually look at where I was, instead of grabbing the next visible direction to feel like I was moving.
The other three paths just feel faster. They rarely are. Path one costs you the time spent waiting. Path two costs you years spent becoming someone you weren’t. Path three costs you however long it takes to clean up afterward. The slow way looks like it’s taking forever because you can actually see it happening while you’re in it. The other three just hide the cost until later.
No dramatic turning point. Just a slow, deliberate process of asking what I actually wanted, one decision at a time, and building a path that looked less like anyone else’s the further I got down it. Slow and steady doesn’t feel like much while you’re in it. Most days it just feels like standing still.
