Things I’d Tell My Younger Self (But She’d Ignore)
Image by Alessandro Danchini from Pixabay
On feeling out of place, moving slowly, and learning that misalignment is not failure.
If I could talk to my younger self, I do not think I would try to correct her. I would not tell her how to fix her life or how to become more disciplined or ambitious. Mostly because she would not listen. She would hear me out, nod, maybe even agree, and then continue doing things exactly the way she always had.
She was not a hard worker in the traditional sense. She missed deadlines more often than she met them. She was always chasing something but never quite reaching it. She moved slowly, sometimes carelessly, and often felt guilty about it. From the outside, it probably looked like she was laid back. From the inside, she was constantly stressed, always feeling like she was falling behind without knowing how to catch up.
She worked jobs that never quite felt like they fit. The first job that paid the bills but drained her. Then, becoming an admissions counsellor, a job that sounded respectable but didn’t feel like “IT”. Then a sales role at a SAAS organisation, which culminated in a venture for everything in an E-commerce start up: content writing, social media, influencer coordination, vendor and customer management. She wore many hats, none of them feeling like her own. She showed up, she tried, but she always felt slightly out of place, like she was pretending to belong somewhere she did not fully fit in.
Surprise! Surprise! She is not alone.
And this is exactly what I would tell her. I would tell her that feeling out of place is not the same as being incapable. Not fitting into a system does not automatically make you an underachiever. But she would not believe me. The reason being- She was convinced that effort looked a certain way, and she did not look like that. A sense of comparison always lingered in her thoughts, constantly making her feel undervalued.
I would tell her that not knowing where you are headed does not mean you are wasting time. That wandering is still movement. That chasing without reaching is still learning something about yourself. But she would be too busy feeling behind to hear that. She thought clarity was something other people had, not something she was allowed to wait for. (I know, A BIG misconception!)
She wrote sometimes. Poetry, mostly. Quiet pieces that never left her diary, phone, or social media. She never thought of it as something serious. It was just something she did when she felt too full or too empty. She did not believe it counted. Real work, she thought, looked louder. More structured. More consistent.
Writing felt too personal to be useful.
I would tell her that the things that come naturally often feel unimportant at first. That what you do quietly still matters. That just because something is not validated immediately does not mean it has no place. But she would dismiss that too. She was convinced she needed to try harder at being someone else instead of paying attention to what already felt familiar.
The truth is, she needed to live it exactly the way she did. She needed to feel uncomfortable in those roles. She needed to feel like she was always slightly misaligned. Because that discomfort was not a failure. It was information. She just did not have the language for it yet.
Despite everything, she was paying attention. Even when she felt lost, she was observing. Noticing what drained her and what stayed with her. Noticing which parts of herself felt forced and which felt honest. She did not call it growth back then. It just felt like confusion. But it was doing its work quietly.
Image by She is gone from Pixabay
If I am honest, I would not change much. Not the missed deadlines, not the jobs that did not fit, not the constant feeling of being behind. Because those experiences taught her what structure felt like when it was wrong. They taught her the difference between effort and alignment. They taught her that stress does not always come from doing too little. Sometimes it comes from doing the wrong things for too long.
So if I could tell my younger self anything, it would probably be this. You are not lazy. You are not broken. You are not behind. You are just trying to find your place in a world full of constant hustle and bustle.
She would probably ignore me. She would still worry. Still compare. Still feel like she was not doing enough. And that is okay. Because becoming yourself is rarely neat. Sometimes it looks like drifting. Sometimes it looks like underachieving. Sometimes it looks like writing quietly on the side while trying to survive everything else.
And somehow, slowly, it all adds up. And suddenly, it is all worth it.
- Karanpreet Kaur Bhatia
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