Why Do I Feel Like I Am Living Someone Else's Life?

If that question has been sitting with you, even just popping up every so often incrementally, it is worth paying attention to.

The feeling of living someone else's life is not random and it is not ingratitude. It is what happens when the distance between who you actually are and who you have been presenting yourself as to the world grows large enough to become impossible to ignore. This did not just happen overnight — you arrived here gradually, through years of small adaptations and quiet compromises, through becoming whoever you needed to be in order to be accepted, approved of and loved by the people and the world around you.

The life that resulted from all of that adapting might look perfectly reasonable from the outside. The career makes sense, the relationships are intact, the routine is functional — but something at the base of it all does not feel like yours at all. This is because it was not built around you but rather sold to you and built around what the world wanted for you. We are all gently pushed into stereotypes that define us based on our career, hobbies, age, background — and it completely rips us from our genuine self.

We laugh at the idea of a builder on a construction site spending his breaks knitting and ordering a cocktail after work — but that social construct is precisely what keeps everyone acting as they think they should. Like they must fit the script that has been written for their life and in doing so they are pushed into this feeling of living someone else's life entirely.

That is the life you are living and the feeling you are describing is the real you, still there underneath everything, letting you know it has not gone anywhere.

The question is not how did I get here. The question is what would it look like to start building something that actually feels like mine.

That is exactly the work I do. And it starts with a free twenty minute conversation.