A Few Friendly Reminders For Anyone Who’s Feeling Stuck

This is a break from your life, a deviation from your story, a silly side road that you went down just far enough to realize that it was time you turned back.

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This place in which you’re stuck is not your life.

This is a break from your life, a deviation from your story, a silly side road that you went down just far enough to realize that it was time you turned back. Your life does not have to unfold here in the stuck-place, no matter how many people tell you otherwise. You are here for a visit, for a glimpse, for a brief education of the life that you do not have to choose. Your story does not end here – nowhere close.

You do not have to finish what you’ve started. You are allowed to change your mind in huge ways. You are allowed to alter plans you’ve had forever. You are allowed to drive so far down a road that you’re not sure how you’ll ever get off it and then simply do a U-turn and go back. The only thing worse than travelling one thousand miles in the incorrect direction is travelling one thousand and one miles. There is still time to turn the car around. There is still the chance to choose another road.

I know that other paths seem daunting. When you spend so much time doing the things that you are naturally bad at, it becomes so easy to forget that you are good at something. Even if that thing is not what you are doing right now. Even if that thing is not tests or assignments or holding your attention for a really long time. Even if that thing is not relationships or loving people consistently and accepting love in return. Even if you are not a good son or daughter or mother or father or sibling or friend or employee, you are good at something and that something is out there, waiting for you down a path you have not yet discovered.

You see, what you’re doing right now does not determine your worth. Your worth is not your age, your rage, your job or your GPA. Your worth is not your relationship status or your sexual orientation or the way you walk or talk. Your worth is not how extroverted you are or are not. It is not reflected by how many parties you go to, how many friends you have, where you have been in the past or even where you are going.

Your worth is buried in whatever makes you come alive and whatever keeps you up at night. Your worth is measured by what makes you cry out in laughter and what makes you break down in tears. By the things that you’d fly across the world for in an instant and by what you cannot let go of for the life of you. Your worth is whatever you are good at and happy with and feel ignited through doing and don’t you ever let anyone tell you something different.

You are not worthless or useless or lost because you are not your most alive right now.

You are in the process of becoming.

And you’re about to show the world how wrong they’ve been about you all along. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

thumbnail image – Vadim Timoshkin