I don’t know how many of my opinions are actually mine. Strange thing to admit at 41.
I’ve got opinions about work, marriage, money, motherhood. Ask me anything, I’ll answer before you finish the question. But lately I’ve been wondering where some of those answers came from.
Before I finish my coffee, someone’s told me how much I should have saved, what my kids should be eating, how often married people should have sex, which country I need to see before it gets “too touristy.” Then I close Instagram and go about my day without thinking much about what all of that left behind.
I don’t think we’re as good at separating the noise from our own thoughts as we think we are.
Humans have always had people telling them how to live. The difference now is volume. I hear more opinions before 9 a.m. than my grandmother heard in a week, and they contradict each other constantly. Work harder. Slow down. Give your kids everything. Stop overscheduling your kids. At some point the noise stops sounding like noise. It starts sounding like your own voice.
That’s the part I can’t shake.
Nobody has to tell me I should be doing more with my life. I can handle that myself. I’ll look at a perfectly good Tuesday, a career I built, a home, somebody asking where their charger is even though I’ve never once been named Keeper of the Chargers, and think: should I be further along by now?
Further along where? According to whom?
I rarely ask. I just feel behind.
We’re good at spotting an ad for moisturizer. We’re bad at spotting when we’re being sold a life. A woman films her 5:17 a.m. coffee in a kitchen with suspiciously empty counters. You watch for twenty seconds and think nothing of it. But twenty seconds, a hundred times over, and your own tired morning starts feeling like proof you’re doing it wrong. Nobody told you that directly. That’s what makes it work.
Eventually the algorithm doesn’t even have to do the comparing for you.
I evaluate my body while getting dressed. My career in traffic. My marriage because somebody else’s husband bought flowers on a random Wednesday and mine came home with the wrong paper towels. Nothing gets to just belong to me. There’s always another life parked next to it for comparison.
So I’ve been asking myself something harder than it sounds. What did I want before I knew what everyone else wanted?
I keep expecting a profound answer. Mostly I just notice how fast I reach for someone else’s. I’ll think about writing and want to check somebody’s numbers. I’ll wonder what’s next and reach for my phone like the answer’s sitting between a cortisol reel and a stranger’s trip to Portugal.
Maybe that’s the habit. Not the scrolling. The asking everyone else first.
My voice didn’t disappear. I think I’ve just interrupted it so many times I forgot what it sounds like when I let it finish.