When life feels like a knot you cannot untangle
This post is for all of us. For me, for you, and for the many people who are quietly navigating the twists of life and wondering why it feels so hard to just… breathe.
I want to open up a little here. Not to overshare, not to make this uncomfortable, but because I genuinely believe that the more honestly we talk about these things, the less alone we all feel. So here we go.
So, what even is life?
I looked it up once, half as a joke. The dictionary doesn’t really have a satisfying answer. And honestly, that makes sense, because life doesn’t work the same way for any two people.
For me, life feels like an infinite cycle of stumbling. Of falling and getting back up, each time a little more bruised but somehow a little more resilient too. I wouldn’t exactly call my life difficult. But emotionally and psychologically, it hasn’t been a smooth, beautifully crafted story either.
I grew up in an average middle-class family. There was enough support to survive, but not always enough to truly live. I’ve experienced pain, caused hurt I didn’t intend to, and missed chances to prevent some of it. The journey has been messy. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I developed the habit of overthinking everything.
The overthinker’s burden
I am an overthinker. Deeply, exhaustingly, sometimes hilariously so.
If you’re an overthinker too, you’ll know that joy has a way of slipping through your fingers. You take a small, happy moment, and your brain quietly starts listing everything that could go wrong with it. You turn tiny events into full-blown tragedies inside your head, and then feel guilty about the fact that you just did that.
I’ve thought a lot about why I’m like this. A therapist once said there could be many reasons, and I think they were right. Some of it might be events from years ago that still linger quietly in the background. Some of it might be that being told “you never think before you act” as a child turned me into someone who now overthinks everything, as if I’m trying to make up for something I was never actually guilty of. And some of it might simply be that my overthinking has come true enough times that my brain decided it was a useful survival tool.
Maybe your reasons are different. Maybe you see yourself in some of this. Either way, I want you to know: there’s nothing wrong with you. Your brain is trying to protect you. It’s just working a little too hard.
The thing I’ve had to keep reminding myself is that the people around me aren’t always going to understand this. Not because they don’t care, but because they’re fighting their own battles. What I’ve learned to ask for isn’t someone who can fix my thoughts. I just want someone who’ll sit with me while I untangle them. That’s it. Is that too much to ask? I don’t think so.
The “perfect daughter” performance
At 15, I made a decision. Consciously or not, I decided to become the perfect elder daughter.
I studied hard. I said yes to everything my parents asked. I got a job. I worked hard. I looked after my younger sibling. I made sure my relatives approved of me. I kept everyone comfortable.
And somewhere in all of that, I completely forgot to be myself.
I forgot that I had a life of my own to figure out. That the personality I’d been building since childhood was mine to keep, not to package up neatly for everyone else’s comfort. I became so focused on being good for everyone else that I lost track of what I actually wanted for myself.
Here’s what I want to tell anyone who recognizes this pattern: your parents are human. They make mistakes. They carry their own wounds, their own pressures, their own blind spots. Putting them on a pedestal and then feeling silently crushed when they turn out to be flawed people is a recipe for years of quiet resentment that goes nowhere good. Love them. Be patient with them. But stop trying to be the perfect version of yourself for their sake. That version isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t really you.
The career question I keep asking myself
I care a lot about my career. Maybe too much, some days.
But I’ve been thinking about why. I think it’s because building my career is one of the first things that’s ever felt entirely mine. Not mine because someone handed it to me. Not mine because it was expected of me. Mine because I chose it, worked for it, and keep choosing it every day.
My definition of success might look completely different from yours, and that’s fine. What matters is that I’m willing to work hard for something I believe in. The dream might sound ambitious. It might even sound a little silly from the outside. But I’ve never thought there was anything wrong with wanting to build the life you imagined as a kid.
The question that loops in my head, though, is: at what cost?
Do I push forward and leave certain things and certain people behind? Or do I stay put, again, the way I always have, and put everyone else’s comfort ahead of my own? It’s a question I don’t yet have a clear answer to. Maybe you’re sitting with a version of the same question, too.
The knot
So here’s what I mean when I talk about the knot.
Life, for a lot of us, isn’t a straight line. It’s a tangle. Threads of family and identity and ambition and fear and love and loss, all wound around each other so tightly that you can’t always tell where one ends and another begins.
The knot isn’t a bad thing, exactly. It’s just complex. And the work of living, really living, is the slow, patient work of finding which thread to pull first.
My knot has always had one stubborn thread running through it: I don’t give up. Even when I probably should. Even when giving up would be easier and quieter. Something in me keeps going. That stubbornness has gotten me into trouble more than once. But it’s also the reason I’m still here, still writing, still figuring it out.
Whatever your knot looks like, I genuinely believe you have a thread like that, too. Something that holds even when everything else feels loose. You might not be able to name it yet, and that’s okay.
You are not behind
I’m still in the middle of my story. Still making mistakes, still overthinking, still occasionally forgetting to be myself in the middle of trying to be good for everyone else.
But I’m getting there. And so are you.
Don’t compare your knot to someone else’s. Don’t measure your progress against theirs. Your struggles are yours. Your timeline is yours. And the fact that you’re still trying, still reading things like this, still looking for a way to understand yourself a little better? That counts for something.
Take care of yourself, especially when it feels like no one else will. And take care of the people around you, too, before life gets too busy, and you look up and realize you missed your chance.
You are growing. Even when it doesn’t feel like it. Especially then.
If any part of this resonated with you, I’d love to hear it in the comments. What does your knot look like? What’s the thread that keeps you going?
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