When Your Life Looks Right But Feels Wrong |

I was stuck on the Bay Bridge and sobbing.

My body had been trying to tell me something for years. That night, it stopped asking.

Traffic wasn't moving. My phone was dead. My son was at daycare waiting for me. Again.

And somewhere back in a conference room in the city I had just spent three days smiling in, there was a version of me still playing along.

The conference had gone well.

I said the right things. I laughed at the right moments. I was good at this. The salary said so. The stock options said so.

I was living the dream.

Except I wasn't.

I wanted to make dinner. I wanted to give my son a bath. I wanted to read him a book, put him to bed, and be there when he woke up in the morning.

That's what I wanted.

Not the stock options. Not the title. Not the dream someone else had designed and handed to me, and that I had accepted without ever once asking.

Do you want this?

On that bridge, something broke open.

Not broken down. Broke open.

The tears weren't a weakness. They were information.

My body was telling me what my mind had been too afraid to hear.

This isn't my life.

I knew it. I had always known it.

I just hadn't let myself know that I knew.

That's the thing about my knowing.

It doesn't shout. It doesn't argue. It doesn't make a PowerPoint presentation with data to support its case.

It just waits.

It waited for me on the Bay Bridge on a Tuesday evening with a dead phone and nowhere to go.

And when everything else went quiet — the conference, the career, the performed version of success — it was still there.

Steady. Patient. True.

This isn't my life. I know what my life feels like. Go live it.

It took me five years. New companies. New jobs. Getting closer each time to something I couldn't yet name.

And then I found it. I've been doing it for 25 years.

Maybe you're on your own bridge right now. Stuck. Nowhere to go. Something in you finally loud enough to hear.

That's not a breakdown. That's your knowing.

If you're ready to listen — I'd love to sit with you.

What is the quiet underneath all the noise trying to tell you — that you haven't let yourself hear yet?

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