you have to just do things.
APR 12, 2026
Sitting under the shade of a gazebo, my best friend from university (college for my American friends) asks me if I remember how we used to talk about uncertainty. About how we didn’t know what we wanted to do after we finished… My mind blank, I don’t remember, but I believe her. There are seasons in life that return us to this place over and over again. We have to decide who we are now and how to change direction.
I weep when I first see her, the tears welling behind my eyelids threatening to submerge me in a combination of joy and grief. We haven’t seen each other in 12 years and only loosely kept in touch, our lives taking on very different trajectories. Quickly, though, we fall into a familiar rhythm, and I find myself grateful for the easy intimacy that comes from sharing some of the most formative years of our lives.
Last night, on my return home while watching the sun set in bright yellow hues across the sky, I think to myself about what we had said.
It takes a great deal of strength and self-trust to say to yourself, “I have not been living life in a way that is my truth and aligned to who I really am. Who I really am is [ ].” The dreaded response may come back, “How do you know?” And, of course, you cannot absolutely know until you’ve changed direction and tried it, lived it. There is just this dream, this feeling, this urge, this desire.
I want to defy the idea that you have to know what it is that you want, who you are and what your gifts are at any given moment.
You can reinvent yourself over and over again. You can change direction and choose a new version of yourself, a new pathway, a new way of existing and engaging in the world as many times as you need or want. Perhaps every form of your soul’s expression is just one piece of the journey. And when one part completes itself a new one can begin.
Not knowing and making moves anyway is the only real way to change direction. You have to just do things.
But first comes the sense that something is wrong. That you’ve somehow fallen down a path that is not actually yours and you don’t even remember having chosen it or how you got here. The desire to change direction comes from the feeling that you and your soul have outgrown the container your life has become.
It’s a restlessness that I am very familiar with. A sense that you’ve been living slightly outside yourself for too long. A sense that the life you’re living doesn’t quite belong to you. According to Jungian psychology, these moments, where life doesn’t quite fit, are pointing quietly and insistently toward the life that would.
So the first thing to do isn’t to find direction. It is to acknowledge the discomfort, the in-the-wrong-skin feeling that is humming in the background. And then, once you’ve acknowledged it: don’t wait.
When something has genuinely caught light in you is the moment to act. It inspires you to act differently. There’s an enthusiasm to it, an aliveness. Being able to take advantage of that feeling when it arrives — to respond to it rather than file it away for later — is one of the most satisfying things you can do for yourself.
You will never be fully ready. There will never be a perfect time. The version of you who has it all figured out before she begins doesn’t exist, and waiting for her means the thing never gets made, never gets started, never gets tried. It’s not about the right time. It’s about doing things before you’re ready just to have them exist.
Again and again, when something has worked in my life, it came down to this: I just did it. Imperfectly. Without certainty. I just prioritised getting the thing done over getting it right.
Small steps have a way of setting off chains of events you couldn’t have predicted or planned. One tiny thing done today can be the beginning of something that looks, from further down the road, like it was inevitable.
If you’re in this place right now — feeling the hum, sensing the edges of a change in direction — I’d love for you to come and do things alongside me.
2 things:
Cowork is a six-week program for people who are building something and need the structure, the company, and the gentle pressure of actually showing up to do it.
Penpal is a brand new free letter-writing community, a place to think out loud, to track your own becoming in writing, to have honest conversations with yourself and others who are doing the same.
I created both of these because I know the power of a) not doing things alone and b) not waiting until you’re ready to begin.