Getting Out of Your Own Way

At any given moment. on any date, you and I sit on the brink of the rest of our lives. What happens next could change everything. It will change everything. That’s pressure, for sure, but it’s also freedom. Recently I’ve come to see pressure and freedom as the same thing. The pressure to live freely. How do we even begin to figure out this problem?

If I wanted to give my career the best odds, I should have stayed in Ireland. It’s where all the opportunities are, it’s where I’m best known. It’s where I’m most likely to succeed. But I left. There was pressure to stay. In terms of work and everything people tend to find important, it made more sense to stay. So making a decision against this was difficult. There was so much pressure. This is what I mean by the pressure to live freely.

Because, since leaving Ireland, I’ve never felt lighter. I’ve never been able to breathe as easily, to actually relax. I feel better, more at ease. The choice I made had nothing to do with my career. In fact, it probably hurt my career to a point. But I’m happier, I feel better, and so any work I do in this mind-frame will surely be better for it. Rather than focusing on what I ought to do, I asked myself what I wanted to do. And maybe I ought to have stayed in Ireland, and maybe my career would have flourished, but would I have been happy?

This is the process of getting out of my own way. It’s fucking hard. It’s not an easy to thing to go against the grain with the hope of feeling better.

But sometimes it works. Sometimes the risk pays off, and you do feel better.

I alos, but very rarely, write a Substack