There is something particularly cruel about being your own harshest critic. You can spend years working on yourself, changing, growing, unlearning, rebuilding, and becoming someone you once could only dream of being, and still find yourself standing in front of the mirror wondering what you’ve actually accomplished.
You look at your life and think, I’m not where I thought I’d be. You look at the people around you and wonder whether you’re falling behind.
You look at everything you haven’t done, everything you haven’t achieved, everything you haven’t become, and somehow manage to overlook the one person who has been there through every single second of it.
Yourself.
I think we have a tendency to measure our lives by what we can point to. The job, the relationship, the house, the degree, the photographs, the milestones.
We want evidence. We want something tangible that we can hold up and say: Look. I did that. I made it.
And when we don’t have those things, or when our lives don’t look the way we imagined they would by a certain age, we start to question whether we’ve done enough.
But what happens when the most important work you’ve ever done is the kind nobody can see?
What happens when the years that changed your life the most are the same years you have the least to show for them, at least by the world’s standards?
What happens when you’ve spent years becoming someone new, only to look around and feel like you’re still figuring everything out?
When we say we don’t know what we’re doing, I have to wonder whether we genuinely don’t know, or whether we’ve simply become so accustomed to looking for what is missing that we have forgotten to acknowledge what is already there.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last several years, it’s that the two are not the same.
For me, the years that didn’t look like progress…
If I had to pinpoint when the real work began, I’d say around 2020, before COVID even hit and we were all “doomed” in quarantine.
I’ll talk about my spiritual awakening in another post because, trust me, that deserves its own space. But for the purpose of this conversation, what matters is what happened after I began looking inward. Not just looking at who I was, but questioning why I was that way in the first place.
Why did I react the way I did?
Why did certain things hurt me so deeply?
Why did I keep repeating certain patterns, even when I knew they weren’t good for me?
Why was I so affected by things I couldn’t explain?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: What if some of the things I struggled with weren’t just things that happened to me, but things I also needed to take responsibility for within myself?
That last question will humble you in ways you cannot adequately prepare for.
It’s easy to identify the people who hurt you. It’s easy to remember the circumstances that changed you, the disappointments that hardened you, and the experiences that made you question yourself.
It’s much harder to examine the ways you responded to those things, the beliefs you formed because of them, and the behaviors you carried into situations that had nothing to do with the original wound.
At some point, I had to stop looking exclusively at what had happened to me and start looking at what I had become because of it.
And that meant meeting parts of myself I didn’t particularly like.
Not the cute, relatable imperfections we casually admit to having. Not the little quirks that make for funny stories over dinner. I mean the parts of yourself that make you sit in silence because you don’t know what to do with what you’ve just realized.
The parts that make you question your own judgment.
The parts that force you to recognize how much of your identity has been built around protecting yourself.
The parts you wish you could explain away, but can’t. Because you know that understanding something doesn’t automatically absolve you of responsibility for it.
I was trying to understand myself, but the process wasn’t always gentle. Most of the time, it felt like I was tearing myself apart just to figure out what I was made of.
And when you begin pulling at those threads, you don’t always know what you’re going to find.
Some things make sense. Some things hurt. Some things answer questions you’ve had for years, while others leave you with ten more.
There were moments when I genuinely didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t know what I was capable of, what I was supposed to do next, or whether I had the strength to confront everything I was uncovering.
I knew I wanted to heal. I just didn’t know what healing was going to ask of me.
I certainly didn’t know that some of the hardest years of my life would eventually become the reason I could say, with more certainty than ever before, that I am happy in my own skin.
Not all healing is pretty…
We talk about healing as though it’s this beautiful, linear journey.
You recognize the problem. You do the work. You learn the lesson. You emerge wiser, lighter, and ready for the next chapter.
And sometimes, maybe, it happens that way.
But most of the time healing looks like realizing you’ve been wrong about yourself.
Sometimes it looks like admitting that the person you thought you were isn’t entirely the person you’ve been showing up as.
Sometimes it means grieving a version of yourself you spent years trying to become, because you’ve finally realized that version was built around what you thought would make you acceptable to everyone else.
Sometimes it means sitting with uncomfortable truths without immediately trying to turn them into something inspirational.
And sometimes, the only way forward is through a period of your life that you would never willingly revisit.
There is an image from the Hindu Mythology that has stayed with me when I think about this: the churning of the cosmic ocean, Samudra Manthan.
As the devas and asuras churned the ocean in search of Amrita, the nectar of immortality, something else emerged first. Halahala, the terrible poison capable of destroying creation.
Before the nectar came the poison.
And Shiva took that poison upon himself, holding it in his throat to prevent it from spreading through the universe. This is part of the story behind his name Neelkanth, the blue-throated one.
I find myself thinking about that sequence of events when I look back at my own journey.
Not because my experiences are equivalent to a sacred cosmic event, but because the symbolism resonates with me.
What happens when you begin churning everything you’ve buried inside yourself?
What happens when you disturb the things you’ve spent years trying not to feel, the beliefs you’ve never questioned, the pain you’ve never properly understood, and the versions of yourself you’ve kept intact because you didn’t know who you’d be without them?
Not everything that rises to the surface is beautiful.
Sometimes, you uncover anger you didn’t know how to express. Sometimes, you discover fear hiding underneath control. Sometimes, you recognize that a defense mechanism you once needed has become something that hurts you, too.
And sometimes, you find yourself face-to-face with the very things you’ve been trying to escape.
The process can feel less like becoming a better person and more like watching everything you thought you knew about yourself come undone.
But what if that unraveling isn’t proof that you’re failing?
What if some of what feels like falling apart is actually the beginning of understanding?
I’m not saying every painful experience is secretly a blessing, or that we should romanticize suffering. Pain is painful. There are things I wish I hadn’t had to experience, and I don’t need to pretend otherwise to appreciate the person I’ve become.
But I have learned that confronting something ugly within yourself doesn’t make you ugly. Recognizing a pattern doesn’t mean you’re doomed to repeat it. And discovering that you have work to do doesn’t erase all the work you’ve already done.
Sometimes, you have to be willing to look at yourself honestly before you can begin to understand yourself compassionately.
That distinction changed a lot for me.
Because there is a difference between holding yourself accountable and punishing yourself for being human.
One gives you somewhere to go. The other keeps you stuck in the same place, convinced that if you criticize yourself enough, you’ll eventually become someone worthy of your own acceptance.
I know what it’s like to confuse the two.
Here’s the thing about the work I was doing: I couldn’t exactly post it. So there was no major recognition and there was no applause for any of it.
I couldn’t upload a story saying: Hey, I confronted a part of myself today that I’ve spent years avoiding.
I couldn’t make a TikTok about the moment something finally clicked after months of questioning everything I thought I understood.
I couldn’t take a photograph of myself sitting with an uncomfortable truth and caption it: Another milestone in my healing journey.
My healing was spiritual at a time when most people I knew weren’t necessarily familiar with spirituality in the way I was beginning to experience it.
Energy, spirit, astrology, tarot, energy and aura readings, crystals, chakras, etc.
The questions I was asking, the things I was exploring, the way I was trying to make sense of my life … so much of it was happening in a language I was still learning myself.
It was new territory for me, and it was new territory for the people who cared about me, too. There were people I could count on, a select handful who remained important to me throughout that time. But even they were trying to understand what was happening. How could they fully understand a process I was still struggling to explain?
I could barely articulate what I was going through to myself. And so much of it was dark.
Not necessarily in a way that would make sense to someone looking at my life from the outside, but in the sense that I was navigating things internally that I had never had to navigate before.
I was questioning, unlearning, confronting, and trying to make sense of myself in ways that didn’t always have a clear beginning or end.
There were no milestones to announce. No finish line to cross.
No guarantee that the work I was doing would lead me anywhere.
There were days when the victory was simply making it through the day. There were moments when getting out of bed, opening my eyes, or finding enough peace to make it through another morning would have meant more to me than any achievement someone else could see.
And yet, those weren’t the kinds of victories we tend to celebrate.
We know how to congratulate someone for getting a promotion. We know how to celebrate a new relationship, a new home, a successful project, a physical transformation.
But what do we say to someone who has spent years trying to understand themselves?
How do we acknowledge the person who has quietly fought to change a pattern that no one else even knew existed?
How do we celebrate someone who has learned to sit with their emotions instead of being consumed by them? Someone who has started recognizing their own boundaries, questioning their assumptions, or learning to respond differently to situations that once overwhelmed them?
There isn’t always a photograph for that.
There isn’t always a caption.
Sometimes, there isn’t even a person who knows enough about your journey to recognize how significant the moment really is.
And when nobody else is acknowledging your progress, it’s surprisingly easy to convince yourself that there hasn’t been any.
We become so accustomed to measuring our lives through other people’s reactions that we forget some of our most meaningful accomplishments might never receive one.
No likes. No comments. No congratulations.
Just you, quietly doing the work. And then doing it again tomorrow.
The person I was becoming didn’t look like the person I used to be.
There is another part of this that I think about often…
For a long time, there were certain ways I knew how to present myself to the world. I had experiences, ambitions, and identities that were visible. I had been involved in modeling and acting. I knew what it meant to show up, to put myself out there, to be seen in a particular way.
Those things were part of my life, and they mattered to me.
But life doesn’t always unfold in a straight line, and sometimes you go through periods when the things that once defined you no longer occupy the same space.
I don’t model the way I used to. I’m not acting the way I once imagined I would. I don’t necessarily present myself to the world the way I did before. I look different. My priorities have changed. There are versions of my life that I once thought I would be living by now, and I am not living them in the way I expected.
If I measure my life exclusively against those expectations, I can find plenty of reasons to feel like I’ve lost my way.
I can look at the things I haven’t done and convince myself that I should have done more.
I can look at the person I used to be and wonder where she went.
I can compare my present circumstances to a version of the future I imagined years ago and decide that I must somehow be behind.
But that would mean ignoring the person who exists today. And the truth is, I am the happiest I’ve ever been. I am more at peace with myself than I have ever been. I feel more healed than I have ever felt.
That doesn’t mean I have everything figured out. It doesn’t mean I never struggle, never question myself, or never have days when I feel completely lost.
It means that beneath all those uncertainties, there is a level of peace I worked incredibly hard to find. And I refuse to overlook that simply because my life doesn’t look the way I once thought it would.
I think we underestimate how much courage it takes to allow yourself to change when the world is still expecting you to be who you were.
Sometimes, the version of you that other people remember is not the version of you that you need to return to.
Sometimes, the life you thought you wanted was built around a person you were still learning how to be.
And sometimes, you can miss an old version of yourself without actually wanting to become that person again.
I can appreciate who I was without measuring who I am today against her. I can acknowledge the things I’ve stepped away from without deciding that I’ve failed. And I can want more for my future without dismissing everything it took to get me to this point.
Those things can coexist.
I can be proud of the person I am and still be figuring out what comes next. I can be grateful for my peace and still want a different career, a home of my own, new experiences, and opportunities I haven’t yet had.
I can be happy with my life without pretending that my life is finished becoming what I want it to be.
Why do we make it so difficult to give ourselves that much grace? What if you’re not as lost as you think?
I keep coming back to the phrase: I don’t know what I’m doing.
I say it. I hear other people say it.
We say it when we don’t have a plan. When we’re uncertain about our careers. When our relationships don’t look the way we expected. When our friends seem to be moving forward and we’re still trying to work out our next step.
We say it when we feel behind. We say it when we look around and can’t find enough evidence to convince ourselves that we’re doing well.
But I wonder how often we say it because we genuinely have no idea what we’re doing, and how often we say it because we haven’t given ourselves permission to recognize the things we already know.
Think about everything you’ve learned about yourself in the last five years. Think about the things you used to tolerate that you no longer do.
Think about the boundaries you didn’t know how to set, the conversations you can now have, the patterns you can finally recognize before they repeat themselves.
Think about the things that once had the power to completely derail you that you can now approach with a little more perspective.
Think about the grief you’ve survived, the uncertainty you’ve navigated, the decisions you’ve made without knowing whether they were right, and the moments when you had to find a way forward because standing still was no longer an option.
Think about the times you chose differently, even when choosing differently was uncomfortable.
Think about the person you had to become just to make it through certain chapters of your life.
Who were you then? And who are you now?
I’m not asking you to pretend that everything is perfect. I’m not asking you to ignore the things you still need to work on or to convince yourself that you’re further along than you are.
I’m asking you to consider the possibility that your unfinished business is not the only thing worth looking at.
You can have a lot left to do and still have done a lot already.
You can be uncertain about your future and still be proud of your past.
You can be in the middle of becoming someone new without dismissing the person who got you here.
And you can feel lost without being entirely without direction.
Sometimes, we mistake uncertainty for a lack of progress because we expect growth to come with a certain level of confidence. We imagine that once we’ve done enough work, we’ll finally feel like we know exactly what we’re doing. But I don’t think that’s always how it works.
Sometimes, the more you learn about yourself, the more you realize how much there is to understand. Your perspective changes. Your priorities change. The questions you ask yourself become more complicated because you’re finally willing to look beyond the easy answers.
You may feel like you know less than you did before, when in reality, you’re simply aware of so much more.
There is a difference between being lost because you refuse to look inward and feeling uncertain because you’ve finally started doing so.
And I think we need to give ourselves a little more credit for knowing the difference. Give yourself credit for the work that changed you.
Because that recognition will only come from you. And I don’t think we talk enough about the loneliness of personal growth enough.
Not every journey is something you can share with your friends over dinner. Not every realization is something your family will understand. Not every difficult season comes with a clear explanation that makes sense to the people around you.
Sometimes, you’re changing in ways that other people cannot see yet.
Sometimes, the people who knew you before your transformation are still learning how to understand you afterward.
Sometimes, you are the only person who knows just how much effort it took not to return to an old version of yourself.
And sometimes, you don’t even recognize the progress until you look back and realize that something which once felt impossible has quietly become part of your life.
That matters. It matters even if nobody congratulated you. It matters even if you didn’t document it. It matters even if the people around you never knew what you were going through. And it matters even if you are still struggling with other things today.
I wish I could go back and tell the version of myself who was trying so desperately to understand everything that she didn’t need to have all the answers to justify the effort she was making.
I wish I could tell her that the work she was doing counted, even when she couldn’t explain it. That she didn’t need to emerge from every difficult experience with a perfectly packaged lesson.
That she could acknowledge the parts of herself she wasn’t proud of without deciding that those parts were the entirety of who she was. That she could take responsibility for her healing without treating herself like an enemy.
And that she didn’t have to wait until her life looked impressive again to be proud of herself.
Because the truth is, I am here today with a kind of peace I didn’t always have. And that peace didn’t arrive out of nowhere.
It came from years of questioning, confronting, unlearning, and trying again. From doing the work when it was uncomfortable. From sitting with things I didn’t understand. From being willing to look at myself honestly, even when I didn’t particularly like what I saw.
It came from a process that was sometimes ugly, sometimes isolating, and often impossible to explain.
It came from work that nobody applauded. But it was work nonetheless.
And I think it’s time I gave myself credit for that.
Not because I’ve reached some final destination. Not because I’ve mastered life or become the best possible version of myself.
But because I know what it took to get here.
I was there. I know.
The work doesn’t have to be beautiful to be meaningful.
Maybe this is a reminder for anyone who has spent the last few years feeling like they should have more to show for themselves. Maybe you haven’t reached the career milestone you imagined. Maybe you’re still living in circumstances you thought you’d have outgrown by now.
Maybe you look at your social media and see people announcing engagements, buying homes, traveling, getting promotions, and seemingly moving through life with a level of certainty you cannot find within yourself.
And maybe, in comparison, you feel like you’ve done nothing.
But I want you to think about what your life has required of you.
Not what it looks like from the outside. Not what someone else your age has accomplished. Not what you thought you would have achieved by now.
What has it actually required of you to become the person you are today?
Maybe you’ve been learning how to trust yourself again. Maybe you’ve been grieving someone you love while trying to keep the rest of your life moving. Maybe you’ve been confronting parts of yourself you spent years avoiding. Maybe you’ve been learning to live without the approval you once depended on.
Maybe you’ve been surviving a chapter that nobody around you fully understands. Maybe you’ve been trying to find a reason to get out of bed, or trying to find peace in a life that feels nothing like the one you imagined. Maybe the work has been so internal that even you have struggled to recognize it as progress.
I hope you know that you don’t need to make your pain sound profound for it to count.
You don’t need to turn every difficult experience into a lesson for someone else. You don’t need to post about your growth, prove your resilience, or make your healing look beautiful enough for other people to understand it. You don’t need to wait until you’ve achieved something impressive to acknowledge the work you’ve already done.
Some of the most important things you will ever accomplish will happen in rooms where nobody is watching. Some of the biggest changes in your life will begin with decisions so small that nobody else will notice them. Some of your proudest moments may be moments you never tell another person about.
And some of the hardest work you’ll ever do will leave you with nothing to show for it except a different relationship with yourself.
That is not nothing. That is not a wasted year. That is not a sign that you have fallen behind.
It is the foundation upon which everything else will eventually stand.
And sometimes, it is the accomplishment itself.
I’m still figuring things out. I still have things I want to do, places I want to go, and a life I am actively trying to build. There are still days when I wonder what I’m doing, but I am learning that I don’t have to answer that question by dismissing everything I’ve already done.
I can acknowledge the uncertainty without denying the progress. I can want more without deciding that what I have now isn’t enough to be proud of.
And I can look at the person I’ve become, the years it took to get here, and the work nobody saw, and finally say something I don’t think I have said enough.
I’m proud of you.
Not for what I’ve achieved in a way other people can measure. Not for how I look, or what I do for a living..
But for the work I did when there was no audience. For the things I had to confront when I had no idea what I was going to find. For the times I kept going without knowing whether the effort would ever lead to anything.
For the parts of myself I was brave enough to examine, the things I was willing to change, and the person I allowed myelf to become.
You don’t have to be finished to be proud. You don’t have to have everything figured out to recognize how far you’ve come. And you don’t have to be celebrated by the world to acknowledge that what you’ve done matters.
Because sometimes, the work that changes your life the most is the work nobody ever sees.
Sometimes, it is messy. Sometimes, it is dark as hell. Sometimes, it takes years before you can even begin to explain what you went through. Sometimes, it is more important than anything you could have posted, performed, or presented to the world.
So the next time you catch yourself saying, I don’t even know what I’m doing, take a moment before you believe yourself.
Look back.
Look at the person you were when all of this began. Look at what you have faced, what you have learned, what you have survived, and what you have changed.
Look at the things you no longer carry. Look at the things you no longer accept. Look at the peace you have fought to find.
You may not be where you want to be yet. But please don’t confuse that with having done nothing to get here.
You have been doing the work. Even when nobody saw it. Even when nobody understood it. Even when you didn’t know how to give yourself credit for it.
And maybe it’s time you did.
Because not every transformation comes with a standing ovation.
Sometimes, the only person who knows how hard you fought to become who you are is you.
Let that be enough to start giving yourself credit.
– nk
