Recently, I’ve been thinking about how to live well. It feels like there’s always time during the day. And then it’s dark already. What I thought were endless paths in front of me were slowly being decided with every step I take. Even the points I hesitate at are chosen for me. With how I’ve been progressing in life, I might never get to do all I wanted to do: start a company, get good at DJing, make movies, try every restaurant in New York, hit every national park, build a self sustaining ecosystem, design a university campus, backpack the world, learn to fly a plane. It feels like my interests are scattered. Why can’t I be tightly wrapped up like other people? A medical student that likes EDM music. All they do is those two things and they are happy with those simple pleasures! Sometimes I think this but sometimes I think about how unbearable it was to pretend to fit into an easily understandable archetype. People love a simple story.

Beyond the story I tell others. It’s one thing to narrativize your life, but it’s another to get lost in your own mirrors. After graduating, I told myself I was going to work on myself. It had felt like my entire life I was striving for excellence. By any means possible, nail that test or get that internship or hit goal after goal. I skipped big trips if they came at awkward times, didn’t come home for Thanksgiving, didn’t try new things unless they had a purpose. I’m thankful that most of this was internal motivation, but I can’t say that the motivation wasn’t from a deep chip on my shoulder or a deep desire to win. Does that make it better than money or prestiege? I want to say that anyone who tries this hard has something twisted. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need to go to extremes. Extreme thinking turns into extreme results. Still, I felt like I had a weight I had ignored. My own health, actually spending time with my family, and most of all I had constantly deprioritized having leisure for progress. I think it was worth it for the kind of person I was at the time.

Now, I’m cycling back to quieting the voice that tells me I need to fix certain issues with myself. I really did work on myself… I think I’ve disabled my aggression and I’m getting closer to walking the talk. Everything has changed and yet I feel more myself than ever before. It’s a little bit like obsessive cleaning though. You start scrubbing a mess away and then you become consumed by perfection and now you’ve scrubbed the material off. So I am trying to get to know myself. We’re all students of the lessons life teaches us.