The Compass
A self-help guide written for me and for anyone who recognizes themselves in it.
I am an INTJ. I think in patterns, systems and possibilities. I notice what sits underneath what is being said, connect things that appear unrelated, and tend to think several steps ahead. It has made me good at solving problems, building things, anticipating what might go wrong — and exceptionally good at overthinking. This piece is my record of learning how to use that mind without letting it run my life: Family. Friendship. Work. Love. Self. This journey doesn’t end on arrival. The Compass closes on “come back to yourself, again and again” — not a resolved life, but an ongoing one. Like the living system beside it, nothing here is meant to be finished. Some things will become clearer. Some beliefs will change. Some things I thought I knew will turn out to be wrong. I will keep becoming. The point isn’t to finally figure myself out. It is to know how to find myself again.
I haven’t named most of the people in these pages. Each one arrived with an opportunity for me to grow. I don’t call it a lesson — learning, to me, carries the sound of punishment, and it hands sadness and grief more weight than they’re owed. An opportunity is different: it waits on me to opt in or opt out. So, I thank them — not necessarily for their presence in my life, nor for who they were to me, but for the place they occupied in the larger design. They came as they came, each carrying their own life, their own choices, their own becoming. Somewhere within that meeting was an opportunity for me. Perhaps there was one for them too. That is not mine to decide. I only know what was given to me through our crossing.
FAMILY
The thing she had, the one I inherited, and the effort it took to record some of it.
1. What She Carried
First of all, let me give a gentle welcome to whatever has led you to read these pages. Family stories seldom start with one particular moment; instead, they come to us slowly, just as a familiar smell follows you into a room. Each family passes on more than just photographs and recipes. Ours passed on fear, resilience, responsibility, and silence, and for a long time I believed that inheritance was fixed, something woven into my personality just as eye colour is.
When I was a child, my mother was absolutely certain of herself. She worked without complaint, was continuously worried, and bore a heavy burden that I could not, at the time, understand. I picked up the quality of resilience just by being around her, along with a deep sense of devotion. Few children realize the cost such a life exacts from the person living it, and I never did, not for a long time.
What I saw, instead, was a systematic approach. The adults nearby would consider all the possible ways in which things could go wrong before tackling any problem. Worry was the family’s way of showing their love. People demonstrated that they cared by being well prepared. I got used to thinking several moves ahead long before I realized why.
Later on, at my job, I found that same instinct, which allowed me to predict potential failures before they occurred. Although it came with me when I got home, it gradually changed into something different; I began trying to improve the people I cared about in the same way I optimize a process by identifying inefficiencies, proposing a solution, and waiting for the improvements to take effect.
I realize now that people are not processes. I came to that understanding gradually, just as you do with most important things — not through one conversation but through many little ones, by watching after one explanation had failed to make any difference, until the pattern itself became the lesson. People change only when they decide to; not because someone loves them enough to push them, not because someone at last discovers the sentence that brings it all together, not because someone bears up enough for them.
The most difficult aspect of growing up was realizing that I could love my mother entirely and, at the same time, choose not to adopt her particular way of showing love. Although it never actually felt like rejection from my point of view, I can see why it might have appeared that way to her; it was more like a process of differentiation — indeed, almost like a gratitude that had moved beyond imitation.
I maintained my discipline, stayed faithful, showed compassion, and was willing to work hard at something important. I gave up the idea that love should come with a solution.
If I were able to write to her at this moment, my letter would be something similar to the following: Thank you for all that you bore before I had grown old enough to realize how heavy it was. The reason why I walk any differently from you is not that your journey was of less value. It is because the things you carried are precisely the ones that led me to leave some behind. All the beauty that is in me comes from you, and all that is new in me is merely the flower that grew from those roots.
2. The Ocean Separating Us
There are various ways to leave home. Some choose to do so by taking a plane; I did too, though I crossed a second border — something having nothing to do with geography — both before and after my departure.
The journey was exciting, yet it was also marked by a certain kind of guilt which distance appears to create out of nothing; the more removed you are, the more intense love becomes and the greater the sense of responsibility, as though the ocean itself were magnifying both of these feelings. The phone calls between us became bridges connecting two versions of ourselves — one still at home in the world I had left behind, the other gradually taking shape in an awkward way, out of a life I had not yet come to know.
To build something out of nothing, I had to develop a kind of concentration that I had never before practised. I never managed to carry my mother’s concerns and, at the same time, lay the foundations of my own life; each hour I spent trying to deal with a life that wasn’t mine was an hour I had taken away from the one I was really living. For a long time, I regarded distance itself as a sign of disloyalty, as if love needed a certain closeness. It actually took longer than I’d like to admit to realize that healthy distance can be a form of respect — respect for the path someone else is on and respect for my own.
Beneath all that was something else, more ancient and harder to describe: a belief which I had taken in long before I was able to question it, the idea that if I thought hard enough and made adequate preparations, I could outthink uncertainty itself. This belief never came with a name; it merely wore the guise of responsibility, of care, of the fact that all I was trying to do was help. It developed in a home where unpredictability had previously been costly, where remaining alert had seemed safer than relaxing, and where a child picks up that sort of atmosphere long before she realizes there had ever been any other way of breathing.
It creates remarkable achievements, that sort of vigilance, discipline, and reliability, resulting in a life which appears from the outside to be completely under control. Yet it leaves little room for surprise, relaxation, or trust and keeps the body tense well after the real danger has ended.
The sentence which finally had the effect wasn’t dramatic. A person remarked, “When it’s time to know, we’ll know.” It didn’t eliminate the uncertainty. It removed my belief that the uncertainty had to be settled right away, tonight, by me. For the first time, waiting seemed less like a sign of weakness and more like a sort of intelligence I had not previously given myself credit for.
At that moment, if I find myself heading towards the quickest solution — by checking my inbox, going over a conversation, or planning five steps in advance — I stop. In some cases, this means going for a walk with Oreo rather than pressing for a resolution that isn’t yet ready. On other occasions, it’s enough just to remember that the world will show me what I need to know when the right time actually arrives. While the practice of waiting is generally uncomfortable, I am learning to accept that unfinished moments should remain precisely unfinished, without treating them as emergencies. That bit of patience makes all the difference.
I am still getting used to the new vocabulary; rather than asking myself what would happen if everything went wrong, I am now focusing on deciding in advance what I shall do if it does, rather than holding on and breathing. My mother does not need another mother; she needs a daughter — someone who can listen without disappearing into her, who can love her without taking on responsibility for all the things that happen in her life, and who can respect her origins without having to live forever within them.
That didn’t make leaving any simpler; in the end it made it mine.
3. The Pattern That I Finally Gave a Name To
For many years my mornings were opened by my mother’s voice. It was a little routine, one that had been smoothed out through repeated practice — two people in different countries keeping in touch via a screen, talking about both nothing and everything until it was time to end the call. I enjoyed it, even on those days when there was nothing specific to say, and so we stayed on the line anyway.
I began to realise that, although I had apparently never really noticed it before, every time my brother’s name would appear on her phone in the middle of a sentence, at that moment I would become the ceiling — meaning the camera that was left propped up on the bed as she went off, still wearing her headphones, her voice growing more and more distant with each step she took towards the kitchen. I never needed to be the first one; all I wanted was for the relationship to be honest, and for a while it hadn’t been.
When I finally spoke, I was careful in what I said. I didn’t express anger; instead, I put forward a real question — if this is the choice you’ve made, then why should I continue to turn up in the same way? I was told that I was jealous. I wasn’t. Jealousy would have asked why he got more. My question was completely different, and being misunderstood in no way made it any less true.
Beneath the morning calls lay a deeper habit which I had never really examined. Since I’m good at identifying faults and correcting them, if I’m given a complicated process, I’ll be able to locate the point at which it fails; and if I have a person I care about who appears to be stuck, some old instinct of mine begins to draft an explanation that will eventually make them understand as well.
In my mother’s case, this instinct has no practical application. I am able to see clearly how her fear has restricted the course of her life. I can picture, in great detail, a version of her who rests more and occupies herself less. For a long time I have wanted to bring that woman about — as though she were a project which I had still to complete, rather than a complete individual with her own timetable and her own idea of what sort of a life was worth living.
She is not my unfinished project. It was embarrassing for me to come to that realization, and it took an even longer time to stop viewing it as a loss and start seeing it as a form of freedom. I am able to tell her what I see, suggest an alternative way of dealing with things, and love her completely. But then I have to stop — not because I no longer care, but because she is a person, not a problem to which my name can be attached as a solution.
I have no intention of punishing her for any of this, nor do I want her to feel abandoned or to stop loving me as I have always done. The reason is that I don’t want to go on pretending to be close when that closeness no longer seems genuine. That’s why the calls became shorter, and the silences were allowed to remain silences rather than having me fill them in out of habit. I used to need to be the first one to speak, but now all I need is to be honest.
4. Distance, Not Abandonment
In the past, I believed that distance was the result when love had failed; I am now gradually discovering — although with more resistance than I had anticipated — that distance can, in some cases, be precisely what enables love to continue to survive, there being a real distinction between leaving someone and merely pulling back from a pattern which no longer works.
The difficulty doesn’t lie in coming to the conclusion that I need the space; it’s that I know she might be hurt by it — imagining her somewhere thinking about the daughter who used to call every morning, who would listen for hours and make an effort to fix all the things she could. A part of me would like to shield her from that kind of pain. Yet I’m realizing that trying to protect another adult from every possible consequence of my own boundaries is simply another way of bearing a burden that never belonged to me in the first place. I can’t base my freedom on the condition that she should never feel let down by it.
The fact is that my love for her hasn’t stopped just because of the distance; I can love her even though I’m across an ocean. I can ask her how she is, laugh with her, worry about her, visit her and celebrate her. The one thing I no longer desire is to consider constant access as the only valid proof that the love is genuine.
The relationship might need to adopt a different pace at this point: it could involve shorter conversations, more silence, less advice, and more of the kind of ordinary chat that doesn’t demand that either of us put on a show. On some days we’ll talk and on others we won’t. A relationship doesn’t cease to be genuine just because it establishes a boundary — on some occasions, a boundary is precisely what enables two people to get to know each other without resentment in the room.
Guilt will almost certainly arise regardless. I am learning not to interpret every subtle feeling of guilt as proof that I have acted wrongly. Sometimes guilt merely signifies the discomfort of doing something unfamiliar after years of being consistently and reliably available; it feels strange when a new pattern begins to feel normal. This discomfort is not the same as being unkind. When guilt surfaces, I try to respond gently: it is acceptable to need things to be different, and it is understandable to feel uneasy during this transition. I remind myself that I have not done anything wrong simply because it feels new. Throughout this experience, I realized that love does not require constant involvement — Oreo was the first to show me that. I can care for him fully while also letting him explore; I can protect him without limiting his life out of fear for what might happen. This insight, though unintended, quietly became a guide for other situations as well.
In my mother’s case, I can admit I see why she feels that way, even if I don’t agree with her. I can say “I love you” without assuming it’s my duty to try to change her. I can listen to her without feeling that each of her complaints is something I’m required to deal with. I realize that she might prefer the earlier version of me — the daughter who had always been available, always explaining and always making an effort to help her become all that I thought she might become. I can’t keep being that daughter just because she is comfortable with it. Love wasn’t meant to require me to give up the woman I have actually become.
Adult love is no smaller than the older kind. It might simply be less crowded — there being enough room for two people to be separate, to disagree, to sit in silence, to make choices that don’t completely make sense to each other, and yet to remain, without a doubt, in each other’s lives.
5. Letting Her Be
There is a certain kind of exhaustion caused by loving someone about whom you have a clearer understanding than they do of themselves. You can see the fear lying beneath the habit and almost imagine the life they could have led. Since you care for them, you feel inclined to give them the map.
I carried out this action with my mum for years; I’m now putting the map down.
She may be exactly who she is. It’s all right for her to worry and to keep herself busy in a manner which, to anyone observing from the outside, appears to be avoidance. She is free to make choices I wouldn’t make myself, yet remains attached to circumstances I would long ago have abandoned. She can disagree with me, misinterpret me, or even refuse the freedom which I am certain is right there for her to take. In that case, it does not follow that I have failed her.
I once thought that if I loved someone enough, I could help them achieve whatever potential I saw in them. That belief was genuinely tender, but it also contained, beneath that tenderness, a sort of arrogance which I didn’t realize was there until a great deal of time had passed — after all, who really has the right to be the one to decide what her potential ought to be? It’s possible that the kind of life I’d choose for her isn’t actually the one she’d like. She may place a value on things that I don’t. She might be afraid in ways that I can’t fully observe from where I am. Or it’s simply possible that she’s making her own choices for her own reasons and that those reasons don’t need my approval in order to be valid.
The following is all that I can offer her: my love, honesty, and my company, only when I am actually able to give it rather than when guilt causes me to do so. I will listen when it seems that my listening is creating a connection rather than merely fulfilling an obligation. I will let her know when something offends me, let her know what I need, and then allow her to decide how to act on that information — just as she has the right to decide what to do with it, just as my own life is mine.
The things I can’t give her are a different childhood, a cure for past heartbreaks, fearlessness, and the version of herself that at times I believe I can detect lying just beneath the one she has decided to be. I cannot live her life for her, and I have given up trying to do so.
Guilt will arise at times, but that doesn’t mean I should revert to the previous state. There will be moments when she feels hurt, and that doesn’t necessarily mean I have caused her harm. She might say that I’ve changed, and she would be correct; I have. In fact, that’s precisely the whole point.
I won’t leave her. I won’t try to save her. I won’t take control of her, nor will I punish her for the way she has always been. I’ll be with her where she is while remaining where I am. If she decides to move in that direction, there will be space for her to do so. If she doesn’t, I’ll still love her because I won’t push her towards a life that is no longer mine to live.
We used to show our love for each other very clearly and for a long period of time. Now I would like to try to love her quietly. I want her to be who she is, and I want myself to be, too. And if, one day, we happen to meet at some point in between, let that be because both of us got there freely — because that, I believe, would be a purer kind of love, one with no project attached to it whatsoever.
FRIENDSHIP
The fact that there was no crowd never seemed to amount to an absence, and the things it took to cease apologizing for my own pace.
1. The Pace
There was a few-year period when I tried to be social the way I thought other people did — by turning up, staying late, and saying yes even though I didn’t really mean it. Each time I got home, I was completely worn out, not just tired in the ordinary way. I never really knew what I was looking for in all of that, or exactly what had gone wrong in a room where nothing at all dramatic had taken place. In the end I gave up. I decided almost casually that perhaps it wasn’t something for me — yet I still felt lonely, and that only made me more confused than the exhaustion had done. If I didn’t want it, then why should its absence cause me pain?
That is as close as I have got to giving it a name: we meet, we sense a sort of alignment, and then, almost straight away, I continue walking while the person I have met remains on their second step. I am not attempting to get away from anyone, but I cannot slow my own pace to match a friendship that is not progressing at the speed at which I actually live my life. Eventually, the gap grows so wide that I become bored, misaligned, or simply disappear, without either of us being able to say exactly what has happened. Still, the way you move through connections might be entirely different from mine. Some people do develop deep friendships slowly and with great patience, and that is perfectly acceptable. However your connections take shape, the pace that feels natural to you is already acceptable.
In the past I believed that was proof that I was to blame — that I was too intense, too quick, too overwhelming. Now I no longer think that. What I believe is that I have to change, have to match up, and need intimacy when it’s actually happening, and that need of mine doesn’t slow down just to be courteous to anyone else’s schedule. It’s not cruel; it’s only my way of doing things, and I’ve spent a long time apologizing for it.
2. The things that I actually need, not those that I had always thought I wanted
It appears that most people have a fairly broad idea of what friendship is — one that includes keeping in touch, making joint arrangements, attending each other’s birthdays, and carrying out the little things involved in staying in each other’s lives. Yet for me, all of that by itself does not make someone a friend. There has to be something underlying all of this before I can call someone a friend: do I actually know this person? Does this person know me as well? Is there something genuine being exchanged between us, or are we merely both in the same room on a regular basis?
I have one or two individuals who are truly my friends, and then a great many other people whom I like, respect, get on well with and enjoy talking to — yet I never feel the need to turn any of that into a friendship. I don’t believe that having fewer friends means I’m living a more limited life; on the contrary, I think I’m living an honest one. As a result, I probably don’t have the sort of empty social schedule that other people talk about. If somebody else saw an empty weekend and thought that something was missing, I would mostly just think: well, that’s all right. At this moment I don’t really need more people. My unit of connection has always been depth of resonance, not quantity, and resonance doesn’t increase simply because more people are present.
There’s an odd consequence to this. Someone can call me their friend after years of knowing me, and some quiet part of me is still asking, privately, are we? I like you. But what does that word actually mean, here, between us? It isn’t coldness. I’m not using the same definition everyone else has agreed on without me.
I don’t particularly enjoy carrying out the various maintenance rituals either — such as checking in since a certain amount of time has gone by, meeting up because it’s been a long time, keeping a group chat going out of a sense of social duty, or displaying closeness even though I don’t actually feel it at the time. When there is genuine interest, I am fully there; but when there isn’t, forcing a friendship structure on the situation feels like wearing a coat cut for someone else’s shoulders.
What I’d like to keep in myself is the open-mindedness beneath all this, so that it doesn’t turn into a closed door. It’s not that I don’t need friends, so as a result no one ever gets in, but rather that I don’t need a crowd; yet if someone truly matches with me I’ll know when it happens. I no longer think that I have to go out and look for my kind as I used to do; instead, if someone really belongs in my life, I’ll pick it up — just as I’ve come to trust that I don’t have to have the whole plan before I take the next step.
For a long time I had believed that I wanted a kind of friendship similar to that of everybody else — one that was complete, full of people, and easy. The thing I have come to rely on instead is what I truly need, and that turns out to be something much smaller and much more honest. I am happy now in having made that choice — choosing what I need at this moment rather than always having felt that I was supposed to want it out of habit.
3. What I Am Not Ready to Exchange
I have recently come to realize another aspect of myself, one that is just as important as speed: I am not low-maintenance at all. There are standards of my own that I only recently realized were, in fact, standards — up until then I had thought them to be the basic level. For example, I keep my promises, I am always on time, I don’t call late at night unless there’s a good reason, and I never turn up somewhere without being invited, treating my door as a boundary, not a suggestion.
What other people appear to see in these situations is the kind of thing that makes up the texture of friendship — the late-night phone call because they were thinking of you, the unexpected visit since that’s what closeness means, the plan that’s only roughly kept because life takes its course. I don’t see it that way. To me, it doesn’t seem to be a sign of intimacy; it seems to be a slight wearing away of something I genuinely care about, carried on until it’s no longer slight — another misalignment in a life which already has a few.
I need accountability, not explanations disguised as apologies. I need the truth, even when it is uncomfortable — preferably delivered with a measure of kindness, but without any elaborate performance or subsequent drama. I used to believe that I should adapt myself, smooth things over, and make it easier for others to be friends with me. I no longer feel this way. I am not willing to change who I am simply to keep someone, just as I did not want to alter myself to fit my mother’s idea of closeness or a relationship’s notion of love. There may come a time when I meet someone for whom I am willing to relax these boundaries — not abandon them, just ease them a little, as genuine commitment sometimes requires. For now, however, I am not at that point.
Today I am chasing myself. Myself before a friend.
WORK
Why effort was never the problem, and what a life is worth building underneath it.
1. The Pleasure of Solving Things
I have never been afraid of work. Give me something complicated, and I want to understand it; give me a broken process, and I want to find exactly where it failed; give me a messy system, and I start looking, almost without deciding to, for the pattern underneath it. There’s a particular satisfaction in taking something tangled and making it clear — a problem becoming a process, a process becoming a system, a system becoming something people can actually use. That kind of work gives my mind somewhere to go. It was never simply productivity. It was curiosity, expressed through action.
The trouble starts when effort quietly becomes proof of worth instead of an expression of it. Then I start measuring myself by how much I can absorb — one more report, one more problem, one more person who needs something from me — until the work stops being satisfying and becomes, without my noticing the shift, another way of carrying.
What I actually want is simpler than that, and also harder: I want to work hard, build things that matter, solve problems genuinely worth solving — and then I want the result to arrive. I want effort to meet reality, to have somewhere to land, which is a different thing entirely from wanting an effortless life. I am slowly learning that being capable does not mean being available for everything. I can solve a problem without adopting it permanently. I can improve a process without becoming responsible for every problem that comes after it.
For a long time I thought purpose had to announce itself — a calling, a grand mission, something large enough to justify an entire life. I think it’s quieter than that now. Purpose is mostly the feeling that the way I spend my days lines up with the person I actually want to be. I notice things. I connect what other people experience as separate. I ask why, and then I want to know whether the thing can be made better — not because I decided to be this way, but because it’s simply how my mind moves, and it followed me through work and relationships and the way I understand myself long before I ever named it.
Work gives that part of me somewhere useful to go, but purpose was never meant to be identical to employment. A job can change. A title can disappear. A company can reorganize itself into something unrecognizable. The underlying direction can survive all of it, if I let it: understand things, improve what’s improvable, make life a little more workable for the people near me — including, occasionally, myself.
Maybe purpose was never a destination in the first place. Maybe it’s only a direction I can check myself against, the way a compass gets checked rather than arrived at: does this move me toward more honesty? More freedom? More curiosity, more aliveness, more respect for myself and for whoever is standing next to me? If the answer is yes, I can keep walking without needing to know exactly where the road runs out.
2. The Life I Am Building
There’s a kind of success that looks great in photographs — a decent job, a nice home, a full schedule, achievements, and all the people who are proud of you and see you from a comfortable distance. All those things have been important to me and still are, but the way I assess them has changed. Now I want the life behind the photograph to feel good as well, not just appear good from the outside.
My life consists not merely in the things that I achieve, but in the morning when I sit in quiet until something is asked of me, in the walk I take with Oreo, in listening to music as my mind takes on the form it actually has that day, in eating a meal without having to perform pleasure from it, in going on a trip because I truly wanted to see the place rather than because it would look well documented, and in a conversation which leaves me feeling more like myself rather than less. Nothing in it leads to any measurable result, yet all of it contributes to making a life.
I appreciate hard work; I enjoy getting better at various things, acquiring knowledge, and solving problems. However, I no longer see any value in treating effort as a performance — there’s no need for me to be exhausted throughout the day for it to count, and it’s not necessary for every hour to yield something with a name. The most useful thing I can sometimes do is to let my mind drift until it finds its way back to me.
I need room in my life — room to alter my plans without seeing the change as a failure. I want room to travel, to sit with a question that I can’t currently answer, to have relationships that don’t require all of me at once — room for work that is meaningful and also room for nothing in particular. A spacious life is not one that is empty; it is a life which has enough room for what truly matters, rather than setting aside every inch of it for things that merely appear to do so.
What I am actually constructing is a kind of life in which competence and gentleness can exist together, one in which ambition does not need anxiety to drive it; in which independence does not slip over into isolation and love does not have to be proven by possession; in which responsibility has definite boundaries rather than going on indefinitely, and curiosity is allowed to remain curiosity rather than becoming yet another demand for certainty.
It doesn’t have to be extraordinary every day in the future; I just want ordinary mornings that I actually enjoy. I want a home that feels like it’s really mine rather than one that’s merely arranged like a scene. I want to do work I respect. I want to have enough money to live comfortably without constantly having to calculate my expenses. I want people to be able to be quiet around me and for that quietness not to mean that something is wrong. I want a dog that is still excited when I come home, each and every time, simply because I’ve done so. Journeys that turn into stories rather than just lists of places visited. And plenty of space within myself so that, as things are happening, I can realize at the time that I am, in fact, living them.
There’s no prize for arriving exhausted. I can make the life beautiful in ways only I ever have to notice — the coffee, the music, the walks, the work I’m quietly proud of, the people who make me laugh, the silence I once found so difficult to sit inside. One day I may look around and realize that the life I was trying so hard to reach was already being built, in exactly these small moments, the whole time.
LOVE
What a dog taught me about ownership, and what it actually cost to learn it.
1. The Lesson Oreo Taught Me
For the majority of my life, I have judged love by how hard I tried. The more I worried, the more I thought that I cared. The more burden I carried, the more sure I became that I was loving in the right way. Then came an unusual teacher who slowly broke down that entire idea — a dog, to be precise, who never once asked me to become a different person and who never loved me because I had managed to solve one of his problems. He accepted me just as I was.
It wasn’t a grand lesson. It arrived through ordinary things: a walk, a smell he found impossibly interesting, a lake, a burst of pure unearned joy at the sight of me, a sleepy weight against my side at the end of the day. And underneath all of it, a realization that surprised me the first time it surfaced and has never entirely stopped surprising me since: loving him never once made me want to own him.
One evening when I was holding him close, the thought that occurred to me wasn’t ‘he is mine’. It was ‘I am lucky that the universe brought us together’. The two sentences are not the same, even if they appear similar from the outside. The first implies possession while the second suggests gratitude. If love could exist completely without ownership, then it could also exist without control. Perhaps it was never intended to involve possession from the beginning. All along, it was more in the nature of stewardship.
I would like him to experience the world — to run about, to snuffle at all those ridiculous things, and to swim if that’s what he wants to do. Of course I consider the dangers. Coyotes are around, as are roads, and the weather can change suddenly. But I don’t want fear to be the only aspect of his world, and protection was always meant to make life safer, not to make it any smaller than it had to be.
There is very little negotiation in it, this particular love. I don’t need him to become a certain kind of dog to validate what we have. I don’t need him to understand my arguments, choose me over anyone else, or prove anything at all. I care for him and enjoy the strange privilege of being part of his life while it lasts.
Human love is more complicated because we bring language, history, expectation, and the particular ache of wanting to be chosen into it. Some of that complexity is beautiful; we can imagine a future together, make promises, and disappoint each other in ways only intimacy makes possible. Still, I want some of Oreo’s spaciousness carried into it. I want someone who can love me without trying to manage me, someone who can say ‘go, explore.’ I continue to hope that I will be chosen, not because I am needed, but because that person sees me and still wants to keep me. I tell myself to hold people in the same way that you would hold a bird — not tightly enough to trap it, not loosely enough so that it disappears unnoticed, but gently enough that it always knows, without having to test it, that it is free.
2. Love Without Ownership
In the past I believed that the opposite of love was indifference, but now I believe that it can also be possession — meaning a desire to hold someone so tightly that their freedom begins to seem frightening, since this is not really love but rather fear dressed up as love, fear of losing them, fear of being replaced, and fear that one will, in some way, turn out to be insufficient. I have now realized the difference, mainly because I have experienced both states firsthand.
Obsession is obvious because it keeps coming up with questions which have no real conclusion — such as whether or not they still love me, why they didn’t call, what the silence meant, if there are any others involved, and what if they do leave — and the mind continues to look for answers since it thinks that the next one will finally bring a sense of security. It never does; there’s always another question waiting behind the last one.
Real love is much quieter than that; it can long for someone without turning that longing into a crisis, it can desire closeness without requiring constant evidence of it, and it can say ‘I want you here’ without that statement becoming ‘you must stay’. To me, this distinction is more important than it used to be.
Regarding Oreo, there is very little expectation — I don’t need him to become a certain type of dog for the relationship to be valid. With humans, on the other hand, love involves language, history, and choice, and that complexity is beautiful; it is also precisely where expectation comes in.
I don’t want anyone to finish me, or to take on the responsibility of regulating all the emotions I have, or to keep giving me reassurances, or to form a relationship with me based on our common fear of losing one another. I want someone who chooses me of their own free will, and I also want to stay free enough so as to deliberately choose them again and again.
I have spent a lot of my life getting to know other people. At this stage, I am looking for someone who is curious about me — not someone who thinks that they already know me or who has been taken in by a notion of who I am, but rather someone who is willing to ask questions and willing to remain with me even if the answers end up being complicated. I want someone who can know me without having to manage me.
I want love to expand rather than restrict life — enough space for two people to have separate thoughts, separate friendships, separate silences, without either of us interpreting independence as a rejection. Closeness without captivity, commitment without ownership, passion without chaos, and safety without stagnation.
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To be needed was never the same as being loved, even if it seemed exactly that way from within. Just because something was intense didn’t mean it was deep, no matter how convincing it seemed at two in the morning. True love, when it comes, won’t ask me to shrink in order to feel secure. When I finally meet it, I will know by the way my body feels — it won’t be struggling for air; it will simply be breathing.
3. What Remains
Once, I believed that heartbreak involved losing someone else. I now realize that it can just as readily consist of losing a version of yourself — the person you were when you were with them, the future you had already begun to imagine, the little habits that had been developed around the idea of that person’s continued presence, and the certainty that tomorrow would turn out a certain way. It can happen that a relationship ends emotionally years before it is officially concluded, and the body doesn’t adhere to the calendar. I was surprised at how sad I felt when an old relationship at last reached its legal end, long after I had been certain beyond any doubt that it was already over. I remember asking myself why I was grieving at this point. I had already said it was over. It seems that some endings are recognized by the mind long before they are actually experienced.
In the past, I craved an explanation for all things — for why something had happened, what it meant, and what alternative actions I could have taken. Although meaning can be helpful, it can also become another means of clinging. It isn’t necessary for every feeling to have a narrative attached to it. There are times when sadness is simply sadness; it comes, passes through, and then goes away, without any need on my part to interpret it.
The experience of heartbreak has shown me that it is possible to lose someone without losing myself. It has taught me that love can be completely genuine even when the relationship is flawed. It has made me realize that something can be important in a deep way and yet have to come to an end. I don’t think that, because some kinds of love have caused me pain, I should become cynical — nor do I want to label every strong emotion as obsession or conclude that human love as a whole is false just because a few specific instances have let me down. I would like to stay discerning without closing myself off, and I still hope to be capable of wonder.
I used to say that I would break my heart a thousand times in order to find the one person for whom it would finally stay whole by itself, and I still believe in the spirit of that statement even at this time. Rather than build a whole life out of fear of heartbreak, I would prefer to run the risk of having my heart broken. My aim had never been to ensure that my heart wouldn’t break once more; it was simply to know that I wouldn’t abandon myself when it did.
It’s possible therefore that the question was altered later on. Having spent so much of my life wondering whether someone would choose me, I now want to ask myself a different question: should I choose this? The fact that this change in question seems minor is misleading; it’s not. When I ask if someone chooses me, I give them the central position in the story; when I ask if I choose them, I regain my own sense of self.
There is a certain comfort in being needed — it may seem to prove that you are important. Yet dependence can create a relationship which appears intimate but in fact reduces both people, and I am not willing to act as anyone’s emotional support. Instead, I would like to be a partner. When genuine, the decision isn’t something made once and then put aside; it shows itself in the way a person acts when there is no audience — through consistency, curiosity, respect, the readiness to make amends, and the freedom to disagree without suffering consequences.
When I made my choice all this time, I was never acting in a way that put me above everybody else; it was simply a matter of remembering that I, too, am one of the people for whom my needs matter. If a relationship makes me keep vanishing to keep going, then remaining ceases to be an act of love and becomes a form of self-erasure, just one with more polite manners. I would like to be able to say that I have chosen you — not out of fear, not because I am lacking something — but from the calm certainty that my life already belongs to me and that I am willing to share it.
4. Held Loosely
I keep coming back to one word since it expresses the kind of love that I prefer to possession: stewardship. When something precious is given to you, you should look after it well — not because it is yours, but because it has been placed in your care for the time during which you have it.
Oreo comes naturally. He’s not something I own; rather, our lives have crossed paths. I look after him, keep him safe, take him to various places and watch him grow, but I don’t have the right to expect that all of his world should revolve around my concern for him. True care involves allowing room for his own nature as well as shrinking his life down to the size of my worry.
I would like to apply the same idea to my relationships with people. The fact that someone loves me doesn’t mean that I have gained them. A friendship should not be treated as something I own. A family relationship is not a contract which gives me the right to control the other person’s decisions. Even in the best case, commitment is a promise made by two free individuals. As soon as I begin to think that someone belongs to me, I am no longer able to see them clearly.
Stewardship does not mean indifference; it means taking responsibility without claiming possession. I can be there when needed, keep my promises, protect what is important, speak the truth, and, at the same time, remember that the other person has an inner life that was never mine to manage. This principle also applies to me: my body should not be seen as a machine to be punished to achieve some idea of perfection; my career should not be something I have to defend for all time; and my future should not be a possession I have to force into being. All of this is simply a life that I am living temporarily, and that temporary status is not the same as careless. Nevertheless, I still want to look after it well.
There is a certain kind of freedom in the fact that you could leave yet decide to remain. For many years, I believed that commitment meant clinging on no matter the cost — because leaving seemed like a failure and because I felt someone needed me. Of course, I had already put in the time, since I could still see the good aspects beneath the difficult ones. In some cases, that decision to stay was indeed love; in other cases, if I am honest, it was simply a fear of what might happen next.
The question I now have is this: if there were no sense of guilt, no past history, and no fear of letting anyone down, would I still make this choice? The question isn’t always a comfortable one; it’s a genuine one. I don’t wish to remain in a place simply because I feel trapped by all I have already given; I want to stay because what is actually here now is worth choosing again today.
The kind of relationship I’m looking for doesn’t mean that either of us has to vanish. We can disagree, maintain our separate interests, have tough days, and change — and yet still choose each other. We do this not because neither of us can leave, but because both of us can, and that’s why we’re staying today. For too long I’ve mistaken endurance for love. Although endurance has its worth, love wasn’t meant to be judged by how much pain a person can take without complaining. I want to be someone who stays when staying is the right thing to do and who leaves when it becomes necessary, and I want to be able to tell the difference between the two — not impulsively, not out of fear, but simply aware of which situation is true.
5. The Love That I Have Chosen
I now know more about what love is than I did when I first set out to find it — not since I’ve gathered all the answers — but because I have gradually and at times costly learned what love actually isn’t. It isn’t possession, nor is it rescue; it is not a continuous, low-level anxiety that is taken for devotion; it is not about being indispensable; it is not about losing oneself so that someone else may then feel secure, and it is not, despite what I used to think, the absence of pain.
What I prefer is a kind of love which allows both individuals to breathe — one in which affection does not turn into surveillance, commitment does not harden into ownership, disagreement is not punished, and independence is not taken to mean rejection, so that two people can have completely separate inner lives and at the same time build a single shared life around them.
I would like to show curiosity, to listen without at once trying to fix things, to be honest before resentment has time to build up in the quiet corners, and to protect what is important without having to control it, as well as to choose someone without making them take full responsibility for my entire sense of worth.
All I really want is something that is easy to express but difficult to attain: to be known. Not controlled. Not idealized. Not simply required. Rather, to be known — by someone who is interested in the parts of me that are not at first sight, by someone who is able to sit by my uncertainty rather than jumping at the chance to get rid of it, by someone who can acknowledge that they do not understand this now and yet stays on.
My criteria are no longer chemistry, intensity, how long I long for someone when they’re not around, or how much they need me to function; instead, I now focus on how I feel within the relationship. Do I become more myself in it? Can I express myself freely? Can I relax? Can I disagree? And can I be ordinary in the person’s presence, unremarkable, and yet still feel completely at home?
I won’t close myself off because some kinds of love have hurt. I’ll become more discerning instead. I won’t stop loving because obsession once wore love’s clothes convincingly — I’ve learned the difference now between intensity and intimacy, and I don’t intend to unlearn it. I won’t demand that any human love feel exactly like the uncomplicated love I have for Oreo. Still, I’ll keep the lesson he gave me anyway: that it’s possible to be deeply attached to someone without needing to possess them.
I don’t need to know who that person is yet, or when a love like that will arrive, or spend so much energy searching that the searching itself becomes another form of control. What I can do is live. Build the life. Love the people already here. Take Oreo outside. Travel. Work. Make things. Laugh more than seems strictly productive. Let myself be surprised by an ordinary Tuesday. And if someone comes along who can walk beside all of that without ever asking me to become smaller — I’ll notice. I’ll love them with open hands, not because I’m certain they’ll stay, but because I’m grateful, in the moment, that they’re here. That, as far as I can tell, is the love I’m actually choosing.
SELF
The direction underneath everything else — and the closing part of this book.
1. Home
Home is one of those words that quietly changes meaning as a person grows. When I was young, I thought it was a place. Then I thought it was people. Later, I believed it was certainty, and crossing an ocean slowly took all three ideas apart at once. Countries changed. Addresses changed. Relationships changed. Jobs changed. Plans changed. And still something remained underneath all of it — the part of me that kept asking honest questions, the part that refused to give fear the final word, the part that believed a life was meant to be lived rather than controlled. That is where home actually began, as far as I can tell: not in a location, but in whatever survives every location changing around it.
Home, I’ve learned, isn’t where everything is familiar. It’s where I recognize myself. I don’t need certainty before I move. I can miss people without abandoning who I’ve become since I last saw them. I can love deeply without carrying another person’s entire life on my back, and my own peace deserves exactly as much protection as my kindness does.
At one time, I thought that if you understood someone thoroughly, that was the same as helping them change. I listened, I analyzed, I offered suggestions, and I took on the responsibility. Later on, I realized that understanding a person and taking responsibility for their change are two completely different things, and that I had quietly assumed the second role without being asked. At first this realization seemed like a loss, but now it feels like freedom.
If life ever becomes noisy once more — — for it certainly will — — I might end up attempting to work out what will happen tomorrow before the day in question has even come around, taking on people who never really asked me to, and constantly questioning if anyone in fact understands me. In such a situation, I would like to recall that I have already travelled across countries, established a new life for myself, and learned to accept uncertainty without prematurely ending it. I have come to realize that love means being a steward rather than possessing. Whenever I need to, I can return to myself.
I’m home; I have, in fact, been so all along without really realizing it.
2. What Was Mine to See and Not to Carry
I didn’t learn how to analyze data until long before I had learned to analyze people. Back then, I picked up on the pause before an answer, the smile that never quite reached someone’s eyes, and the way a person could say they were fine while their shoulders silently disagreed. I came to see observation as almost second nature long before I knew what to do with it. For many years I thought that if I could understand someone thoroughly, I would be able to help set them free. It turned out it took a lot longer than I’d like to admit to realize that having a clear view of someone does not mean that you can save them.
There is a certain temptation buried in a good understanding of people. You begin to think about the conversations they should have, the decisions they might take, and the futures they could create if only you helped them to build them. Occasionally, you care so deeply that the potential of another person starts to feel like your own unpaid homework. Yet the potential of another person was never mine to carry; it belongs to them just as mine belongs to me. For a long time, I measured my worth by how much I could carry. If someone was hurting, I listened.
If someone was confused, I explained. If someone felt stuck, I went looking for a path they could walk. I called this love, and sometimes it was. Sometimes it was fear wearing love’s clothes, disguised as usefulness so it would not have to admit what it actually was. I carried conversations home with me. I replayed arguments that were never mine to replay. I imagined better futures for people who had not chosen those futures themselves, and the backpack I was quietly filling became so familiar I forgot it was not actually part of me.
Understanding another person’s potential does not obligate me to deliver it. I can encourage. I can listen. I can love, fully. I cannot live someone else’s life on their behalf, no matter how clearly I can see its shape. Putting the weight down didn’t make me less caring — it made my caring sustainable. I started asking a smaller, more honest question whenever I felt the old backpack settling onto my shoulders again: is this mine to carry? More often than I expected, the answer was no. I was given eyes to witness the world, not shoulders built to carry all of it. I can observe. I can love. I can offer. Then I can let life unfold without gripping it quite so hard.
3. Freedom
For a long time I believed that freedom consisted in having all the answers — enough money, enough certainty, enough planning, and enough control. It wasn’t until later that I realized control and freedom are in no way the same; at times they are even opposites. The tighter I clung to my life, the smaller it became, while the more I learned to relax my hold on it, the more surprised I became.
Control is tempting because it offers a sense of safety. It suggests that if I think hard enough, plan carefully enough, and anticipate all possible situations with sufficient care, then I can completely avoid disappointment. In reality, life has never accepted those conditions. Flights are cancelled, people depart, health changes without asking for permission, and dreams turn into other dreams. Control cannot prevent any of this from happening; it can do no more than tire the person still trying to manage it.
I used to think that trust appeared in a sudden and dramatic way, but in fact it came about in a quiet manner, building up over time — each time I managed to survive something that I was sure would have broken me, each time I adjusted myself to something I had not anticipated, and each time life gave me something that I could never have arranged for myself. Trust developed not because life became predictable, but because I gradually realized I could cope with whatever actually turned up.
Freedom means waking up without having all the questions answered before breakfast; it means letting tomorrow make its own introduction rather than questioning it today. It means loving somebody without silently attempting to change them so that they become easier to love. It means knowing my worth was never determined by how much I could carry. It also means going forward even if the map has completely vanished.
Each time I find myself tightening my grip, I stop and consider what I am actually trying to protect. It may be wisdom, or it might simply be fear disguised as wisdom. I am making an effort to opt for openness more frequently than I do for certainty — preferring the version of myself who trusts her ability to respond to the one who insists on her ability to predict. To the best of my understanding, that is what freedom really consists of.
Remember. Certain pages are not intended to be read just once, and this is one of those pages.
Lack of knowledge is no crisis. Fear may be considered, but it will never have the deciding say. Peace is more powerful than control. Being at a distance does not mean that love is absent. Just because I understand someone does not mean that I am responsible for altering them. My kindness is most lasting when it includes myself. Curiosity generally carries me further than any certainty has ever done. I have survived each season that previously made me think it was the end. Some answers only come about after I begin to walk. My value does not go up with the amount I carry. Show love with open hands. Place more trust in my ability to respond than in my ability to predict.
Why not take a break at this point? Go over the ideas once more, or let one of them appeal to you. Is there one sentence or idea in this passage which currently seems especially true for you? If there is, I would like you to keep it with you as you enter the next moment. Let it resonate, or use it to guide your decision, or merely go with it quietly as you proceed.
When it seems as though everything is coming to an end, read this slowly and take one sincere breath. I needn’t solve next year’s problems today. All I have to do is deal with this specific moment adequately. The future has never once required me to predict it; it has only always required me to be there.
I never have a version of myself in which I cease to become, and yet I do keep becoming.
4. Beginning Again
The difference between starting anew and starting over is that starting over implies that all that came before just vanished. Beginning again is different in that I take the old life with me — the skills, the mistakes, the grief, the courage, the people I loved on the way, the countries I crossed to reach this point, and the things I finally came to understand, even if it was only years later that I realized I could not quickly get rid of them. I am not beginning from nothing; I am beginning from all that I have already become.
The move had an effect that went beyond simply changing my address; it took away the familiar framework which I had not even realized was keeping me going. People whom I had known for years found themselves suddenly far away, across an ocean, and the routines that had previously characterized a normal life became more like memories. I had to learn how to create a feeling of belonging with nothing to start with. That was scary, but in a manner that I never anticipated, it was also freeing — no one could give me an identity and then demand that I hold on to it forever.
I established a career. I first gained an understanding of systems, then moved on to learning about leadership, and eventually learned how to deal with problems without waiting for someone to tell me precisely what to do. However, what was more interesting was what was taking place beneath all of this: I realized that competence needn’t turn into control. It was possible for me to be capable without carrying everything on my shoulders, and I could work hard without letting struggle become my entire identity.
I was once in love as well. When relationships came to an end, so did the older versions of myself. At times I actually questioned whether I had lost too much. Now I look at it differently: each ending gave back to me the aspect that craved freedom, the part that sought the truth, and the part that wanted to love without disappearing in the act of loving.
In the end, none of it called for dramatic courage, only the ordinary kind, carried out repeatedly until it no longer seemed impressive. True courage consisted in sending in the application, going on the trip, and bringing to an end what had already ended — thus starting what was genuinely new. It meant saying yes before it was certain, and saying no when my body had already found the answer long before my mind had. I once believed that courage meant the absence of fear. That’s not the case. It is knowing precisely what could go wrong and still deciding, with full awareness, that it is worth facing the possibility anyway — not because everything will certainly happen, but because I trust myself to react if it doesn’t.
A life based on straight lines is one type of life; mine has been constructed through a series of revisions, and I no longer regard that as a failure. It could even be described as authorship.
5. Solitude
At one time, feeling alone seemed like a kind of warning — when the phone remained silent, I would fill the quiet with all sorts of explanations; if somebody withdrew from the relationship, I always had to know the precise reason; and when a relationship came to an end, the emptiness it left behind seemed huge, almost like a structural element. These days, solitude has a different meaning for me; I can now enter solitude without immediately thinking that someone has left me.
I have found, rather unexpectedly for myself, that I do in fact enjoy quiet. There is a kind of relief in not having to respond to anyone — no need to give an explanation, no need to put on a performance, no need to translate emotions. One can just be there, unobserved. The experience of living alone has taught me things I never could have picked up on when I was always adjusting to someone else’s pace: I now know my own preferences. I know when I want company and when I really don’t. I can spend a whole afternoon doing almost nothing and not regard it as wasted. I can take Oreo for a walk and let the day suffice, without it having to be productive as well.
The fear lying beneath the loneliness is not, in fact, loneliness but rather the idea that perhaps nobody will ever really understand me. This fear is so strong because I don’t want to become so good at letting people be themselves that no one ever gets close enough to actually know me; I want freedom, and I also want intimacy. I no longer think that these two things are opponents.
All I really want is for there to be people who can come into my quiet without having to fill it up — someone who doesn’t need constant access in order to show that we are close, someone who is able to sit by me. At the same time, our thoughts must remain completely separate — someone who realizes that my independence was never a way of rejecting them. And when I do want to talk, someone who is actually there, not just showing up from somewhere else.
Perhaps solitude is not the opposite of relationship. It could in fact be a form of preparation for an even better one. If I am certain that I can be alone, I need not choose people out of fear; instead, I can choose them because I want to. I can get rid of what is wrong. I can remain in situations that are right. And I can love without having to make quiet deals to ensure my own survival.
6. Becoming Myself
For many years, I believed that self-discovery involved finding the person I had always secretly been beneath all the other aspects of myself. I now know that it’s more complicated than that. Certain parts of me have always been there; others were developed as a means of survival, some as a way to achieve success, and others were simply formed because they worked at the time, with no one ever telling me there was a deadline. To become myself is to learn how to tell the difference.
I picked up the skill of reading situations and developed the ability to predict what might happen. I learned how to analyze situations, to put in real effort, and to be of use in whatever way the particular moment demanded. These capabilities turned into real strengths. Yet a strength can survive long after the circumstances which first gave it its value have disappeared — just as something that once offered protection may eventually become unnecessary for you, just as a coat ceases to be of any use when the weather changes and you continue to wear it out of habit.
Some of me react swiftly while other parts merely observe. The observer picks up on the pattern, and the thinker then gives an explanation. It is only the portion of me that actually goes through life that has to decide what to do about it, and I don’t want observation to completely replace experience. I don’t want to spend my whole life understanding things rather than living them.
It is I who feel curiosity, me who feel freedom, and me who enjoys deep and absorbing work. With regard to dogs and animals, I understand them in a way that I have never been able to explain completely. Travel is what makes me feel curious more than anything else. Writing enables me to see myself more clearly than almost anything else. Quiet gives me the opportunity to exist without an audience. Love, when it is spacious, not gripping, feels precisely right.
I don’t want any more to be the one who fixes everybody; I don’t want any more to confuse anxiety with intuition or to regard every unknown situation as an emergency which demands my involvement, or to show off my strength when what I actually need is a chance to rest. I also don’t want relationships in which I have to vanish a bit in order to remain connected.
To become myself also involves letting myself stay truly unfinished. It is not necessary for me to define every aspect of who I am at this moment. I am capable of changing; I can contradict a belief that I firmly held a year ago. I might find out something completely new about myself next week. I don’t know who I’ll be in five years, and I say that with no fear of not knowing.
7. Life Is Mine
I keep coming back to that sentence in a quiet manner, just as one might go back to a room that turns out to be more frequently needed than they had anticipated: “my life is mine”. It seems so obvious that you’d be tempted to overlook it, yet it was some years before I truly understood it.
I have no need to arrange my life according to my mother’s fears, and I can fully understand the origin of her choices without merely repeating them just because they are familiar. She has her own life, and I have mine. This distinction does not remove the bond between us; on the contrary, it is precisely what makes the connection honest rather than just dutiful.
The people I have loved have had a significant effect on me — some have remained, some have gone their way, and others have influenced me in ways I only fully realized when looking back on the past. Yet none of them is entitled to take credit for what happens in the future. I can respect the relationship we had without allowing it to determine what happens now. In the same way, my career is one that I create rather than something that defines me. I can be ambitious without becoming my job. I can work hard without needing the work itself to show that I am worthwhile. And if the person I am becoming turns out to need something different from the person I used to be, I can completely change course.
My life belongs to me in smaller ways too, the ways that rarely make it into a single defining sentence. I decide what kind of morning I want, where I travel, what I read. Who I call, and when I need quiet instead. What I’ve discovered is that freedom isn’t just about being able to do whatever I like; it also means recognizing that my choices are truly my own — if I select a particular course of action and it doesn’t turn out well, I can take full responsibility for the outcome without using that as evidence that I made a bad choice initially. If circumstances change, I have the option to make a new choice. That may, in fact, be one of the greatest freedoms I have ever taken upon myself. That might be one of the largest freedoms I’ve ever actually claimed for myself.
I try to take my life back, quietly, whenever I notice myself handing it away without meaning to. Not dramatically. Just quietly. Choose the morning. Choose the work. Choose the people, the silence, the adventures, the boundaries, the love. My life was never a family inheritance, or a relationship contract, or a career plan, or a tidy collection of past decisions I’m obligated to keep honouring. It’s alive. And it’s mine.
8. The Compass
A compass doesn’t tell you where the road will eventually go. It only tells you which direction you’re currently facing, and it turns out that’s enough. I don’t need a map for every year of my life still to come. I need to know what I want to move toward on the days the road gets confusing, which it still does regularly.
There are days when everything seems to happen at once — a plan changes, someone disappoints me, a relationship gets complicated, money feels tight, work becomes too much, the future turns briefly impossible to predict. My first instinct, even now, is often to try to solve it all immediately. I don’t have to. I can return to the compass instead: honesty, freedom, curiosity, love, courage, responsibility with actual boundaries, a life that feels unmistakably like mine. Not rules for perfection. Only directions. If I’ve lost my way, I can ask whether my next choice moves me closer to them or further away.
I used to need lengthy and complicated explanations for certain truths, but now some of them can be expressed in one sentence: I can love somebody without trying to fix them, I can be uncertain and still be safe, I can be alone and not be abandoned, I can work hard without having to carry all the weight myself, and I can change my mind without having to treat my past as a mistake.
I understand that love isn’t about rescuing someone, since I’ve tried to rescue people and have seen those attempts fail as expected. Another person’s freedom begins precisely where my attempt to manage them ends. Love may be able to offer a hand, but it can never walk someone else’s path for them. I know that uncertainty isn’t an emergency; it can simply stay unclear, and I can wait until there is actually something genuine to respond to. I know that I am capable because I have already created things, moved to other countries, changed jobs, survived the end of relationships, and learned systems that I didn’t understand a year before. I don’t need to believe that everything will work out; I only need to remember that I can cope with whatever does happen.
They are not commandments but rather instructions, and I am permitted to simplify them as I proceed: tell the truth, remain free, prefer the real to the imagined, take only what is truly yours, let other people have what is theirs — work in places where effort counts — love without clinging, and whenever I lose my way — since I will do so more than once — then start all over again.
9. When All Things Are Difficult
There will be days on which I forget all that I have learned; one thing or another will go wrong, then another. A plan will be altered, and someone will let me down. Money will seem tight, and work will feel heavy. My mind will begin to link every little difficulty together and draw the conclusion that everything is going wrong, and on such days I want to remember that a difficult day is never a judgment on the rest of my life.
Before I start to interpret anything, I make it a point of finding out what is actually true — what has happened, what hasn’t happened yet, what I am merely imagining, what I can deal with today and what can be put off. I don’t feel it’s necessary to deal with possibilities that have not become facts. If a plan has been cancelled, it remains cancelled, and if a conversation has been disappointing, it stays disappointing. This doesn’t logically mean that I am making bad decisions or that life is working against me, or that anything I ever touch will eventually break down. Sometimes several uncomfortable things happen on the same day, haphazardly, with no connection between one and the other.
It’s not necessary for me to work out what happens tonight. I’m not sure whether it’s permissible to treat this as the final answer, and there is genuine relief in not feeling the need to draw a conclusion when reality hasn’t yet given one. I’ve coped in the past — moved to another country, rebuilt my relationship with myself, altered my daily routine, solved problems which at first seemed impossible, gone through endings and started over more than once. I need no prediction of what will happen in order to have confidence in my ability to deal with the outcome.
If the mind becomes too noisy, I can choose to make the world seem smaller rather than bigger. Just breathe, go for a walk called Oreo, have a drink of water, eat something, get some sleep and sit in silence with my eyes shut. I don’t have to rely on thinking to get out of any situation I end up in — sometimes the body needs a simpler form of communication than the mind provides. And I make it a point not to stop living while I’m waiting for things to work out. Keep the appointment, take the walk, do the work that is still important, prepare the meal, listen to the music and laugh, if there’s anything funny, even on this day. Let there be one really good hour in an otherwise tough day.
It isn’t the case that one difficult experience encompasses my whole life. I need not work out what will happen tomorrow; all I have to do is deal with today. Facts should come before stories. If something is unknown, then that is all that can be said about it — no more sinister interpretation is possible. I am capable of adapting. It is permissible to rest. The difficulty of a season does not cancel out all the beauty that has already occurred or all the beauty that still lies ahead.
10. What I Desire to Protect
It is important to me to become; yet there is another thing of equal importance which is situated right next to it: knowing what I am determined not to lose as I continue to become.
I would like to stay curious — continuing to ask why even after I have gained experience and even when I believe I already know. I want the world to surprise me because it is curiosity that keeps certainty from turning into a cage. I would like to remain soft; I have discovered that softness does not mean weakness — it is possible to set a boundary and still care, to say no and still love, and to leave without becoming cruel in the process. I don’t want it to be disappointment that ultimately hardens me.
I don’t want it shown to me that human love as a whole is fake, on the grounds of having had difficult relationships. What I’m looking for is discernment, not cynicism — the ability to see obsession without simply dismissing intensity altogether, and to notice control without coming to fear commitment in general. I would like to stay independent, and that doesn’t mean being isolated: I am able to look after myself, to make my own decisions, to travel, to work, and to be alone when that is what is necessary — and since I can do that on my own, I have the choice to enter into a partnership rather than needing it to support me. I also want to keep myself playful. Life doesn’t have to be all about analysis. There must be room for dogs running around aimlessly, for music, for silly conversations, for plans that change without turning into a crisis. Being alive is an activity in itself, and I don’t want to lose that idea as I try to appear impressive.
It’s not necessary for all that I have learned to remain with me forever, since some lessons have long since done their purpose. Certain habits once helped me, but now they only make my life narrower than it should be. I would like to be able to tell the difference between wisdom and leftover armour. I should keep the curiosity and get rid of the compulsion that goes with it. I should keep the effort but leave behind the overextension it can lead to. I should keep the discernment and discard the suspicion which at times assumes its appearance. I should keep the love and abandon the desire to possess. I should keep my independence and leave behind the isolation it can quietly turn into if I am not careful. I must get rid of the need to fix each person I love. I must let go of the need to predict every outcome before it happens. I must also give up the idea that disappointment always means I made the wrong choice.
There were certain things that were nothing more than bridges. I went over them, and once I had reached the other side, I was entitled to leave the bridge behind and to keep only the woman who had actually learned something from the experience.
11. The Final Compass
I don’t know where I’ll be when I eventually read this again. Life may look almost exactly the way I once imagined it. Maybe it will look like nothing I pictured at all. Either way, I hope that uncertainty was never actually the enemy. I only ever wanted to know what would happen before it happened, which is a very different thing from needing to.
I hope that I still know what makes me feel alive; that I continue to notice things, to question assumptions, and to enjoy solving a difficult problem just for the sake of doing so. I hope that I have not become so efficient in the way I live that I forget how to truly live within all that efficiency. I hope that I have met people who can love me without feeling the need to possess me, and that I have genuinely learned the difference between obsession and intimacy. I hope that I have allowed myself to be chosen without making it the sole condition of my happiness, and that I have also learned to choose someone freely, on my own terms, more than once. I hope that I remember what Oreo taught me: that love can feel like gratitude rather than possession, that protection should enable a real life to flourish, and that sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone you love is to let them sniff the ridiculous thing they have found on the ground.
If life is hard again — and it will be, at some point — I hope I remember that I’ve been here before. I know how to begin again. If life is beautiful, I hope I don’t immediately ask how to preserve it. I hope I just let it be good. Take the trip. Eat the meal. Watch the sunset without narrating it. Call someone I love. Let happiness exist without interrogating it for weaknesses.
If I were to summarize all that I have learned in a single point, it would not be a strict rule but rather a guiding principle: consistently return to yourself whenever love becomes confusing, family situations feel overwhelming, work demands become excessive, the future appears uncertain, or your mind begins inventing countless possible outcomes. In each of these moments, keep returning to yourself.
Love is not ownership, not rescue, not the amount of pain I’m willing to tolerate, not constant access. It can be deep and still leave room — the way I love Oreo: with care, attention, gratitude, protection, without ever believing that what I love actually belongs to me. I am analytical. I notice patterns. I like effort, solving, and meaningful work. I need freedom. I can be intense, and I can overthink, and I can turn controlling when uncertainty starts to feel like a threat instead of just a fact. But I am also, always, still learning. I can notice the pattern without becoming the pattern.
At times I shall forget all this, and that is entirely normal; I may end up stuck in an old pattern, overthink the situation, become impatient, desire to fix someone who never asked to be fixed, and seek certainty even though only patience can actually achieve the result. In such a case, I should not punish myself for having forgotten. All I need to do is become aware of it and then go back to where I was.
I never intend to have an easy life, since I have no particular desire for such a thing; I enjoy putting in effort, I enjoy growing, and I enjoy the definite sensation of becoming more capable as time goes on. Instead, I will make a different promise: I will keep returning to myself. I will not leave myself behind in order to stay close to someone else. I will not give up my curiosity just because certainty at times seems safer. I will not stop loving because love has on occasion truly hurt me. I will not sacrifice freedom out of fear of becoming attached, nor will I give up living because the future cannot be known in advance.
If I can’t decide what to do, I ask myself whether it is honest, whether it is free, whether I can bear it, whether it is real or I’m just imagining it, and whether it brings me closer to the woman I really want to be. After that, I choose the next step — not the entire route, only the next step.
If you’ve got this far, it’s worth remembering why all this was done. It wasn’t to create a perfect version of yourself, nor was it about finding answers for every possible future, or about becoming immune to pain. The only real purpose was to serve as a reminder that you already have a sense of direction within yourself, that you can lose it and then find it again, and that you can change and start over — such as loving, leaving, staying, working hard, resting, being alone, belonging, holding something precious without owning it, and allowing someone to go even if you haven’t decided that the love meant nothing. You can let your mother be; you can also let yourself be.
No matter where you are, have faith that your journey will unfold according to its own timetable. It is not necessary for you to know all the answers to carry on. Let your life be a surprise to you. You are indeed progressing in the right way, even on those days when you question that. Give yourself the chance to believe in the honesty of your own experience.
When all this becomes noisy, or complicated, or for a short time frightening, go back to the one simple truth that lies beneath all the rest — that your life is your own and live it.
