Before you understood yourself well enough to know what you wanted, you were shown what success looked like. A specific kind of house. A specific kind of job. A specific kind of relationship. A specific amount of money that meant you had made it. The images were given to you before you had the ability to evaluate them. You have been chasing those images ever since.
Not because they suit you. Because they were installed early, and early installation goes deep. The target feels like yours because you have been moving toward it for so long. But it was placed there by someone else, in a different time, for reasons that had nothing to do with who you actually are.
This is why people arrive at what they worked for and feel nothing. Or feel wrong. They achieved the destination that was handed to them and discovered it did not fit. The ambition was borrowed. The achievement is real. The satisfaction is absent. You cannot fill a shape that was not made for you. You can reach it. You can stand inside it. It will not feel like home.
The harder work is not reaching the destination. The harder work is questioning whether the destination was ever yours to begin with. Most people never do this. The chase is so total, so consuming, that stopping to ask whether the direction is right feels like failure. So they keep moving. They call it drive. They call it ambition. Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it is just a very determined form of not asking the question.
