The Pivot Is the Point

Growing up, I thought life was about the finish line. The next step, the next milestone, the next polished version of myself I was supposed to grow into. I treated progress like a checklist and timelines like commandments. If I wasn’t moving forward, I assumed I was losing.

So when my plans shifted and the life I imagined stretched into something unfamiliar, I panicked. I worried I was falling behind. I wondered if people would think I had lost my sense of direction. But my parents surprised me. They weren’t keeping score. They cared about purpose, not performance. They welcomed the pivot as if it were simply the next chapter, not a crisis.

Somewhere in that moment, something clicked. Science calls it hedonic adaptation, the idea that the thrill of achieving things fades faster than we expect. I call it the reminder that arriving is highly overrated. Because after every arrival, there is another beginning waiting to rewrite the script.

Letting go of the need to arrive made my life feel bigger. I became a jack of all trades, someone who learns, experiments, follows curiosity, and builds a life with layers instead of labels.

What I found was a quieter kind of confidence, the kind that appears when you stop trying to outrun your own timeline.

A full life is never a straight line. It grows through edits and revisions, through unexpected interests, through detours that later make perfect sense. It forms through the soft surprise of realizing that the things you never planned for might be the things that fit you best.

There is a tenderness in choosing your own pace. A richness in being more than one thing. A beauty in letting yourself evolve without rushing to meet the expectations around you.

The pivot did not take me off course. It showed me how wide my path could be.

xoxo,

Sake