The Slowest Way (But Really, It’s Faster)
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 job 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 usually try one of three ways out.
The first is waiting to be rescued, waiting for something outside yourself- a partner, a job, a lucky break- to show up and fix what feels broken. This rarely works, mostly because you’re handing the change itself to something you don’t control. 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 usually 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 from the outside it looks exactly like standing still. Mostly because it is, for long stretches. The difference is what’s happening underneath: one decision at a time, so gradual you can’t actually see the path forming until you’re already partway down it.
Standing still is uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel like progress, and everything in you wants to grab the next visible direction just to feel like you’re moving again. But trust the stillness long enough, and something shifts. You notice you’re already closer to your own path than you thought, not because you found it somewhere out there, but because you finally stopped long enough to see it was already forming underneath you.
I eventually got off my own version of path two. Not through any dramatic reckoning, just an ordinary Tuesday where I finally looked at the life I was building and realized none of it was mine. I hadn’t chosen the job, hadn’t chosen the version of “fine” I was aiming for, hadn’t chosen most of what I was working so hard to become. Once I saw that clearly, I couldn’t unsee it.
The other three paths feel faster. They rarely are. Path one costs you the time spent waiting, however long that turns out to be. Path two costs you years spent becoming someone you weren’t. Path three costs you however long it takes to clean up whatever the explosion left behind. None of them show you the bill upfront.
The slow way is the opposite. It feels like it’s taking forever precisely because you can feel it happening in real time. The cost is visible from the start instead of arriving later, all at once, disguised as something else.
