Everyday I am plagued by an altogether consuming feeling that–no matter how hard I try–I can not seem to get away from. This feeling grabs hold of my chest and tightens its grip, unsettling every nerve in my body. It is there in the morning when I start my day and it is there in my bed when I end it. It smirks silently in my face as I scroll through my phone. It surrounds me on every social media outlet. It is there towering over every conversation I have with my friends. This lets me know that I am not the only one caught in its strangling hold. 

The feeling that follows me everywhere I go is the feeling of not doing enough. It is the underlying frustration of not believing I am where I need to be. Followed by the self-condemnation (perpetuated by almost every success story in the world) based on the “idea” that if I only pushed myself harder I could be on track. 

It is the panic of being behind in a race I never knew I entered. 

I often catch the voice in my head saying, “you should be doing this” or “you are late” or “you should have already done this by now.” In my head there is a ticking time bomb fueled by all the expectations I see around me;  a huge house stuffed with expensive memorabilia from all over the world sponsored by a platform of thousands of followers by the age of 25 with a net worth of millions with seemingly no effort at all. Everyday we are bombarded with rich beautiful people telling us what to want and how to do get it. I am the first to buy every self-help book on the shelf or subscribe to any podcast promising the “secret of success” only if I am being honest, all I get at the end of it is overwhelmed. I feel like I am playing catch up. And half the time it just feels hopeless, like if you aren’t trending by now then you have already expired before you have even begun. And the whole time I am just punishing myself for the things I didn’t do “like the people who I admire said I should.”

I know I’m not the only one because I hear my friends confess similar versions such as:

• “I am not sure if I should go to college right now, but I feel really bad about it.”
• “Should I call him?”
• “I  want to study this major but I should probably just do this one because it makes more money.”
• “I’m stressed because I should really start looking for internships this summer.”
• “I guess I should just give this guy a chance.”
• “I should probably wait for a better time.”

All are variations of a theme. We as a society are all aware (at least subconsciously) of the expectations held on us in order to be deemed successful. Unfortunately, the only thing to come out of them is the shame people feel for not being on the same track as everyone else.

We have fallen into the trap of believing that the same career, the same mortgage, the same white picket fence, the same millions of followers on Intragram is the only recipe for happiness available. That the only way to do life is having it all together by the time you are 25… we have subscribed to the illusion of a one-size-fits-all success story. And when our lives do not look like what we see on our For You pages, we succumb to the mind numbing turmoil of self doubt, inadequacy, and yes, shame. It is either that or endure the mind consuming confusion of not knowing at all what you want to do. 

On one hand there is the danger of following the mainstream…

but on the other there is the fear of being lost with no direction to move to.

Its a double edged sword. There are so many different ways of being now that it is hard to navigate what path to follow. It becomes hard to identify what is the best for us so we follow what we see. Conveniently we follow the only path to success sold to us. However, success is not a one size fits all and there is no one “right” path. 

I’ll tell you this:

If you feel bad for straying away from the given path (or you say ‘should’ way too often), then that is a key sign that you are following other people’s expectations of you.

How do we live a life that is truly and authentically ours? The kind of life that is actually fulfilling?? Not the one pleasing to the aesthetic but the one pleasing to our souls?? How do you identify what feels most natural to you, not just what is most popular? Sometimes the questions are more important than the answers. It is only by questioning ourselves that we can build our own mold rather than the cookie cutter one of the batch. 

When the whole world tells you how to think, how to act, how to be… HOW on earth do we determine what truly works best for us?

And to that I say, conviction. 

What is conviction?

To me, conviction is knowing something in your gut. 

Conviction has less to do with how much evidence supports your point of view, but rather how much faith you have in your belief. Nowadays, nobody really believes anything. Just what people tell them. The more I talk to God, the more I understand that my “gut feeling” is more powerful than I ever thought.

Everybody can be convicted, but not everybody has INTUITION. Because not everybody learns to follow their gut. Because we let people think for us. We let other people tell us how to be, rather than looking deep inside ourselves for who we KNOW ourselves to be. 

One of the prime reasons I doubted myself for so long is because I was convinced other people had a better idea about what I needed than myself. Looking back, I could have saved myself so much heartache had I just learned to listen. I can tell you with confidence that my gut knew that boy was wrong for me in high school. Or that the internship in college was completely wrong for me. Or that something felt really wrong (even when I wanted it to be right).

But I never listened because I was too busy fulfilling other peoples expectations of me. Doing the things I thought I had to do to be deemed a “success.” Why do we do that? Realistically, nobody can ever know the depths of you…

It’s because we are scared of making mistakes. While this is completely human, there is something to be said about fearing failure and yet doing it anyway because at least our mistakes would be our own. At least we would be assured that our life is our own and we built it rather than having it built for us.

That’s the catch though… intuition can NOT grow without failure. It is by making mistakes that we learn what we want, what we like, what we don’t. It is often by finding ourselves in less than ideal situations that our gut even has the chance of figuring it out for itself, but so often we don’t even give it the chance. We all have this muscle of right and wrong, no matter how much we try to persuade ourselves into thinking we have no idea. 

What does it mean to have conviction in times like these?

Conviction is knowing something in your gut. And the more you pay attention to that part of yourself, the more developed it gets. And that is something that can only be deemed as INTUITION.

Without intuition, we will never know who we are, what we want, what is best for us. 

We can’t be convicted when we are on auto pilot. Can’t be convicted when we are not awake. Sadly, our culture is not great for cultivating conviction. The enemy to conviction? Comparison. And our culture thrives on that shit. When we lean into the lanes of others we will inevitably crash, either with our bitterness or with the real soul inside that you can’t escape from. We must not–cannot– lose the capacity to think for ourselves. 

Life becomes much easier when we understand the right path is not found but made. So make it. And the first step is likely the the one your gut has been guiding you for some time if you only had the courage to listen to it. You would be surprised the incredible places you can go if you just trusted yourself.