You Can Be Good at a Life You Don’t Actually Like

photo by Kelly Sikkema on unsplash

It was a Tuesday, and I remember that only because I remember thinking, it’s just a Tuesday, and I have nothing left to do. Every email was answered. The invoice I’d been putting off was sent. The laundry was folded and put away, not shoved in a basket, actually put away, in drawers, the way you do when you have your life together. I had even wiped down the kitchen counters for no reason, because they weren’t dirty, I just wanted something to touch. My calendar for the next day was already color-coded. I sat down at my desk around eight in the evening with a cup of tea I didn’t really want, and I looked at all of it, the clean apartment, the empty inbox, the plan for tomorrow sitting there like a gift I’d wrapped for myself, and I felt nothing. Not sadness exactly. Something quieter and stranger than that. I felt like I was looking at someone else’s very well-organized life.

I want to be clear that nothing was wrong that day. Nothing had happened. That’s actually the part I keep coming back to, because if something had gone wrong, I could have explained the feeling. I could have said, well, of course I feel off, look what happened. But nothing had happened. I had simply done everything I was supposed to do, and done it well, and the doing of it had left me sitting in a clean kitchen at eight in the evening not wanting to be anywhere, including there.

For a long time before that night, I had been the person people described as “so on top of things.” I liked hearing that, if I’m honest. I liked it more than I probably should have. A friend once told me she didn’t know how I managed everything, the freelance clients, the apartment, the way I always seemed to have my week mapped out while she was still figuring out what to eat for dinner. I remember smiling and saying something like, oh, I just make lists, it’s not a big deal, but inside I felt this small warm glow, like I’d been handed a gold star. I have always been good at being handed gold stars. Good grades, good performance reviews, the client who said I was the most reliable designer she’d worked with. I collected these moments the way some people collect stamps, quietly, privately proud, building a case for myself that said, see, you’re doing this right.

What I didn’t examine, not for years, was whether “doing this right” and “doing something I wanted” were the same sentence. I had just assumed they were. I think most people assume they are, until one ordinary Tuesday makes them stop and look directly at the gap between the two.

Here’s a detail I keep returning to. A few months before that night at my desk, I bought a very expensive planner. Leather cover, the kind with tabs for goals and habits and a section in the back for “reflections.” I filled it out every single week. I tracked my income, my client outreach, my sleep, even my water intake for a while, which is a little embarrassing to admit now. And I was good at it. I mean genuinely good, disciplined in a way that impressed even me. I would sit on Sunday nights and plan my whole week with something close to pleasure, the pleasure of a system working the way it’s supposed to. It didn’t occur to me, not once during those months, to ask whether the week I was planning was one I actually wanted to live. I was too absorbed in planning it well. There’s a particular kind of satisfaction in being competent, and it can be so loud that it drowns out a much quieter question sitting underneath it, which is simply, but do you like this.

I think the moment at my desk was the first time the quiet question got louder than the satisfaction. And once I heard it, I couldn’t unhear it, though it took a while before I understood what it was actually asking.

For the next few weeks I kept doing exactly what I’d always done, because that’s what you do, you keep going, but I started noticing things I hadn’t let myself notice before. I noticed that I dreaded Mondays not because Mondays are hard, everyone says that, but because I dreaded the specific shape of my particular Mondays, the client calls where I performed enthusiasm I didn’t feel, the way I’d agree to timelines that made my chest tighten the moment I hung up, the way I’d said yes to a project that didn’t interest me at all because saying yes was the responsible thing to do and I had built an entire identity around being the responsible one. I noticed that when people complimented my discipline, some part of me wanted to say, you don’t understand, discipline is the easy part, I’ve just gotten very efficient at not asking myself what I actually want. But I never said that. I said thank you, and I meant it, in the small way you can mean something while also knowing it isn’t the full picture.

There was a specific afternoon, maybe two weeks after the Tuesday I keep mentioning, when I was walking to get coffee, and I passed a woman sitting outside a café with a sketchbook, just drawing the street, not for anyone, not for a client, not because it was on a list. And I remember feeling something sharp and unexpected, not envy exactly, more like recognition of a distance. I used to draw like that. Years ago, before I built this version of myself that runs on schedules and deliverables, I used to sit somewhere and draw just because my hand wanted to move. I hadn’t done that in so long that I’d stopped counting it as a loss. It had just quietly disappeared from the list of things I did, the way things do when they don’t produce anything measurable.

I don’t want to make this sound more dramatic than it was. I didn’t quit my work or blow up my life or have some cinematic breakdown. What actually happened is smaller and, I think, more honest than that. I started paying attention to the difference between two feelings that I had always treated as the same feeling. One is the feeling of handling your life well. The other is the feeling of liking the life you’re handling. For years I had only ever asked myself the first question, am I handling this well, and the answer was almost always yes, so I never thought to ask the second one. It turns out you can answer yes to the first question for a very long time while the second one sits there completely unanswered, gathering dust, until something as ordinary as an empty evening makes you finally look at it.

I started keeping a different kind of note, not in the leather planner, just on my phone, short lines I’d write when something felt off in a way I wanted to remember. Things like, client call again, said yes before I even thought about it. Or, cleaned the whole apartment instead of starting the project I actually care about. Small, unglamorous observations. I wasn’t trying to fix anything yet. I was just trying to see the pattern clearly, the way you might finally turn on a light in a room you’ve been walking through in the dark for years, not because you’re scared of what’s in there, but because you’re tired of bumping into the same furniture.

What I found, once I could see it, was not some hidden dream I’d been suppressing. It wasn’t that dramatic. It was more that I had built a life so competently that competence had become the whole point, and somewhere along the way I’d stopped checking whether the thing I was so competent at was actually mine. I had gotten good at a version of freelancing that prioritized being easy to work with over doing work I found interesting. I had gotten good at being the friend who always shows up, always remembers birthdays, always has her life together, without asking whether showing up in that particular way was something I chose or something I’d just become known for and then kept performing because stopping felt like letting people down.

I think about that woman with the sketchbook more than I’d expect to. Not because she represents some better life I should have chosen instead, I don’t actually know anything about her life, she might have her own version of this same problem. What she represents, in my memory of that afternoon, is a kind of attention. She was doing something with no audience and no deadline and no metric attached to it, purely because some part of her wanted to. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done anything like that, and the not remembering was the whole point.

I still have the leather planner. I use it less now, and differently. I still make lists, I’m still, by most definitions, a responsible person. People still tell me I have my life together, and I still don’t correct them, because in a lot of ways I do. But every so often, usually on an ordinary evening, nothing wrong, everything done, I ask myself the second question now, not just the first one. Some nights the answer is yes. Some nights it isn’t, and I sit with that instead of immediately reaching for another task to smooth it over.

A few weeks ago I bought a small sketchbook, nothing serious, just something to have around. It’s mostly blank. I open it sometimes and draw badly for ten minutes and then close it and go back to whatever I was doing. It hasn’t changed my life. I don’t think it’s supposed to. It just sits on my desk now, next to the planner, a small reminder that being good at something and wanting it are two different sentences, and it’s worth knowing, every once in a while, which one you’re actually living in.