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You always loved it
When you're young, the problem is that almost nothing is certain — and yet you still have to make the most important decisions of your life, with limited options, barely knowing yourself. The near-infinite possibilities make it harder, not easier. And the decisions you make in that fog slowly harden into a future with no room left to change. That's where the anxiety of youth comes from.
Kim Young-ha, One Life Only
Anxiety always showed up at the same moment. The moment of choice. The thought that one decision could become an irreversible version of my life didn't just make me anxious. It made me afraid. And no decision carried more weight than the one about work.
What am I actually supposed to do with my life?
That question followed me through my twenties. It still does. Work was never just about making a living — it was something I needed to mean something. I wanted the answer to why am I here to live inside the answer to what do I do. Work made me more anxious than anything else, and at the same time, more alive than anything else. I never fully resolved that contradiction.
I'm in my forties now. The question hasn't gone away. But something has shifted. Enough time has passed, enough decisions have accumulated, that certain things have become clear. Someone once told me the problem with getting older is that too much becomes certain. Strangely, that gave me comfort. I've finally built up a few tools that make the choosing a little less terrifying.
Writing It Down
Whenever the anxiety got loud, I wrote. Pulled the tangled thoughts out, put them into sentences. It helped me make sense of things. More than that, it kept reinforcing one belief: the answer wasn't out there somewhere. It was already inside me. So I started with what I actually wanted from work.
Something I love. Something I'm good at. Something I do without being asked. Something I can stick with no matter what anyone says. Something that reminds me, every morning, why I'm here. Then I went back through my past and wrote down everything I could remember — jobs I loved, jobs I hated, moments of total absorption, things I did for no reason except that I wanted to. The small stuff. The moments that didn't seem to matter at the time.
Something I love. Something I'm good at. Something I do without being asked. Something I can stick with no matter what anyone says. Something that reminds me, every morning, why I'm here. Then I went back through my past and wrote down everything I could remember — jobs I loved, jobs I hated, moments of total absorption, things I did for no reason except that I wanted to. The small stuff. The moments that didn't seem to matter at the time.
Questions Worth Asking
What keeps showing up? What do I keep starting, even when no one's asking me to? What made me quit the things I quit? What made me stay?
Alexander Wang of Scale AI apparently asks something similar in every interview. When were you most absorbed? When did you work with the most initiative? When did you feel least motivated? What do you care about most? Simple questions. But they cut straight to the thing. If you want to know what you're truly drawn to, start by looking back.
The memories don't have to be impressive. The small ones — where you were genuinely happy, genuinely focused, genuinely yourself — are often the most useful.
The memories don't have to be impressive. The small ones — where you were genuinely happy, genuinely focused, genuinely yourself — are often the most useful.
One memory I hadn't thought about in years came back to me.
A break between classes. Sophomore year of high school. The moment the bell rang, my classmates would grab a piece of paper and line up at my desk. They wanted a short poem using the syllables of their name, with a little drawing to match. I did it without thinking — a few seconds per person, and it just came out. Somehow it landed. Even the quiet classmate who'd never really talked to me showed up. I remember feeling surprised. And quietly pleased. Writing that memory down, something shifted. 'You really loved that, didn't you. You were actually pretty good at it.'
A Teenager With a Tic Disorder
High school was three years of anxiety, depression, and a self-esteem that had mostly collapsed. The stress eventually showed up in my body. I was too young to understand what was happening, too closed off to even ask why. I just endured it. Kept my head down. Waited for it to be over. But when I looked back, that version of me remembered those few minutes at break. The only time during those three years when I wasn't braced against something. When I was just making something, giving something — and feeling, for a moment, like I was actually there.
It Was Always in There
Looking back isn't nostalgia. It's excavation. The choices that felt like failures start to look like evidence. The anxiety, the repeated behaviors, the things you were inexplicably drawn to — they connect. They form a line. And that line points somewhere. I'm following that line now. Work still makes me anxious sometimes. But it also gives me something it never used to — a quiet kind of peace. From the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep, it keeps reminding me why I'm here. The shadow that followed me for so long feels a little further away. It was always in there. In you, too.