The Moment She Realized She’d Built Her Life Around a Lie
"When my husband told me he wanted a divorce, it was a shock," she said.
"I believed marriage meant safety. Home. Forever. He was my person. I was just beginning my spiritual awakening, asking big questions and getting very few answers, and then it all fell apart. Everything I thought was secure just wasn't."
I'm on the phone with a friend reliving a heartbreak that's old enough to drink.
Recently unemployed and staring down the strange territory between age discrimination and knowing she's still got plenty left to offer, she's finding herself haunted by a familiar question: What happened? Why did her life turn out the way it did, and is it too late to change course?
Chasing Stability
Transitions have a funny way of resurrecting old wounds. After the divorce, she bought a condo and lived there for ten years.
"It never felt like home," she said. That got my attention, and not because the condo sounded like a shitty place to live. Quite the contrary, she made it sound pretty, inviting, and completely hers.
What caught my attention was this: For years, she'd told herself that what she wanted most was stability, yet when stability arrived in the form of four walls she could call her own, her ability to see it was buried beneath a lifetime of blind spots.
“I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since,” she said. “Safety, stability, belonging. It’s been a theme. Every time I started to feel grounded, whether in a relationship, a job, or a friendship, something shifted. It got taken away, or I had to move on.”
You know those moments when you can hear someone discovering the truth while they're saying it out loud? This was one of those moments, so I asked if I could mirror back what I was hearing.
“Yes.”
“What I hear you saying is this: you’re not safe. You’re not stable. You’re not free to be you.”
Silence followed by a loooooong exhale.
“Shit,” she said sadly. “Shit, that’s it.”
Her Doubt Goblin had been whispering the same three lies for decades: I am not safe. I am not stable. I am not free. And oh lordy, the cost of those lies was staggering.
For twenty years, she'd been chasing stability instead of building it, looking for it in the mirage of a failed marriage, a condo that never felt like a sanctuary, jobs that underpaid, and relationships with others that let her down.
Now, standing on the precipice of retirement, she was divorced, unemployed, living with her mother, and wondering what had happened to the life she'd imagined.
The Cost of Keeping Everyone Else Steady
We were about to expose the inglorious cost of obligations, the kind forced upon you while you silently scream, “WTF?”
“My mom has always needed me to live the life she wants, and somewhere along the way, I started believing that keeping her world steady was my job. She’s been my Achilles heel my whole life. I’ve spent years making sure everyone else is okay, but I’m so tired of feeling responsible for that.”
“Some days, I wonder how I keep going. But I know this much: I don’t want to just survive anymore. I want to be me. Calm. Creative. Free.”
There it was: the biggest Doubt Goblin of them all, fear and frustration that had robbed her of decades of joy.
The truth was that she had spent years trying to earn a feeling that could never be delivered by a spouse, a paycheck, a house, or a title.
No wonder she was exhausted.
The Moving Finish Line
"What does that look like for you?" I asked.
The answer came so quickly it was obvious she'd been carrying it for years.
"Home. Having my own space. The strange thing is, I had that, but I kept focusing on what I didn't like. I never let myself settle into what I said I wanted."
How many of us can relate to praying for what we want, only to discover we don't know how to receive it when it arrives? That's the greatest trick of all. We spend years believing the answer is somewhere out there: a better job, a better relationship, a better circumstance. Meanwhile, the life we're longing for keeps knocking, and we're too busy looking over the horizon to answer the door.
Damn those moving finish lines, right?
Fear has a funny way of disguising itself so we play small. It tells us we're being responsible. Realistic. Cautious. Prepared. But sometimes what we're really doing is spending decades rearranging our lives to avoid feeling uncomfortable.
The cost of playing it safe is rarely safety. More often, it's the life we never fully allow ourselves to live. The conversations we avoid. The years wasted wrestling with the same fears, frustrations, and uncertainties that haunt us again and again.
Awareness and transformation are not the same thing, but being able to observe the pattern is an important first step.
Then we spend some time arguing with it.
In time, if we pull ourselves up by our bra straps, we begin making different choices.
Tiny Shifts
What changed that day was more significant than getting a new job or finding her own home, because what my friend did that day was remove the blindfolds from her Pattern Paralysis™.
Because once you've seen the Doubt Goblin, it becomes much harder to mistake its voice for your own or let it dictate what you're going to choose next.
Over time, she began experimenting with different approaches that lined up better with who she truly is and wants to be.
Tiny shifts, but tiny shifts have a funny way of changing direction.
And direction, given enough time, changes destinations.
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