Be a Paradox
Life is not an either/or equation you need to solve. It’s an all-encompassing experience to open up to, over and over again.
Get up with the sun, but willingly surrender to the wilderness of the moonlight.
Lift heavy weights, but explore the body freely enough to run, jump, dance, and try pilates.
Be intense, but know how to sit still.
Eat an unprocessed, high-protein diet, but enjoy the ceremony of an untracked meal in good company.
Do things with purpose and intention, and also for pleasure.
Pour yourself into people, and be whole when no one is there but the quiet comfort of yourself.
Think seriously and feel deeply, but practice the lightness of play.
Lead a life of direction and meaning, but embrace the empty centre.
Be disciplined, but not rigid, and know when the plan is in fact, the problem.
Speak your mind clearly, while understanding the power and completeness of silence.
Be ambitious, but let yourself arrive in unknown places and rest.
Know your worth, but stay humble enough to be astonished by all you have yet to learn.
Build something that endures, but don’t confuse the work for your worth.
Love people fiercely, let them be human, and keep your heart open anyway.
Have strong convictions, but hold them loosely enough to let new ideas reshape them.
Take care of your body as the only home you will ever live in, but never mistake the house for the whole of the one who lives inside.
Chase meaning, but remember it exists in the seeking, not in what is found.
Grieve what’s lost. Celebrate what remains. Do both at once if you have to.
Seek growth while also being here, content with who you already are.
Be a paradox, because a life that contains only one thing is a life living in a fragment of its full potential.
Most people spend their lives trying to become someone a room can hold. Someone clearly defined and clearly legible. Someone whose edges don’t spill past the border of whatever world they have worked hard to enter.
You study what the room values, you raise yourself to meet it, you earn your seat. And then you sit down and feel it; the deflation of not quite feeling right, the disappointment of not fitting, the disillusionment of this being a place you might finally belong.
But beneath it, there is something stranger and more surprising. A spaciousness. The quiet realization that you are not tethered as tightly as you had hoped, nor as you might come to fear, and maybe you never needed to be.
This space is not a gap to be closed in strained effort to finally fulfill a seamless and comfortable position there but a mark of freedom there is more to you than what is here. This space is a reminder of the honest and beautiful other things inside of you that are not expressed at other people’s tables.
The unspoken contract of every room you will ever enter is this: to belong here, you must only belong here. Commitment means reduction. Depth means specialisation. You earn your place by becoming singular, predictable, legible enough for people to know what to do with you.
And so you exaggerate the parts of yourself that fit and set aside the parts that don’t, subtly, over time, until you have curated yourself into something the room can accept. The problem is that you are not curated. You are not singular. And no matter how hard you work to make yourself fit, some part of you will always know it.
What nobody tells you is that this is not a flaw nor a weakness in your character; you are not the problem. It is information about the size of your life. It is an invitation to let it be big.
Your life is not a line. It is a spiral. And a spiral requires movement and momentum to continue, lest it collapse back to its core. You are not meant to expand in every direction at once. You are meant to go deep in one area, then shift, then go deep somewhere else, carrying everything you learned forward with you.
The parts of you not currently in focus are not forgotten or dismissed.They are waiting, still active, still present, for the spiral to come around again upon their turn. The mistake is not that you have many parts. The mistake is believing you have to tend to all of them at the same time or risk losing them forever.
You don’t. You need only know which ones require your full attention right now, and what the minimum is that keeps the others alive until it is their turn. But to fully activate the parts of you to the highest expression in their moment of focus, you need to unbind yourself from the belief that it’s desired, required, or even possible to be perfect in all areas at all times. And as well, you must learn that attention over here does not mean regression over there.
There is a minimum effective dose for every part of a well-lived life, and when you learn to apply it consistently, something unexpected happens: you go further in your area of focus than you ever did when you were trying to hold everything at once, because you are no longer afraid that everything else is falling apart while you are looking away.
What it costs you to learn this, you will pay in real losses. You will drop things, you will be derailed, you will regress and you will fail. You will have chapters where you spread yourself across everything and try so hard, harder than you ever have, and still, you will arrive nowhere. And though this will cost you dearly, you will learn more deeply through lived experience than for all your idealized planning alone, not what is supposed to be important to you, not what looks nice on the transcript of your life, but what actually matters in feeling. Through a great deal of honest communication with yourself, you will eventually discern which things were glass and which were rubber, and which were never yours to carry at all.
This same practice extends to everything you believe, everything you read, everything that presents itself to you as the whole truth.
When something feels intensely convincing, your first question should be what the other side looks like, because you have learned by now that excitement is a sales tactic as much as it is a signal. You do not accept things wholesale because they move you. You try them on. You live with them. You keep what holds up in the actual experience of life and leave the rest without needing to condemn it.
This is how you end up reading Nietzsche while deepening your relationship with God, and feeling no contradiction in that whatsoever. They do not need to agree. You do not need the things you love to form a neat and coherent coalition. The truth, for most people who have done the work of finding it, lives in the unsexy middle; the part that does not spread like wildfire, because it is not trying to convince anyone of anything. It is simply what remains after the excitement settles and the real questions begin. The embers that linger to light the flame inside the one who stays to watch it rekindle into something real.
Your interests are not contradictions to be resolved. They are the actual shape of who you are.
The harder you try to belong somewhere completely, the further you get from the only place you have ever been able to find real peace; within yourself.
You have spent enough time performing for belonging, editing yourself into whatever version you believed would finally be enough to earn a seat at the table, a place in the family, a role in the community. What you understand now, and what cost you years to understand, is that none of those things were ever actually conditional. The love was never something you needed to earn. The worth was always already there. The performance was something you learned, not something you actually were or needed to be.
Belonging to yourself looks like this: knowing you are misunderstood, misperceived, that you draw negative reactions from some people as easily as you draw positive ones, and being at peace with yourself in both cases.
When you belong to yourself you can see criticism and praise as information as much as inconsequential collateral rather than verdict. It’s about trusting your own ability to examine ideas and opinions and knowing where to think twice, and where to release what’s not meant for you. You’re not unmoved or unaffected but you are sure in your singular authority whether or not to make it your own.
When you belong to yourself you regularly seek to challenge what you have always believed and turn it over for truth as you exist today, to update it, expand it, rewrite it if necessary so it more deeply reflects who you actually are now, not who you have always been or who you might expect yourself to become.
It is neither living as the person you were nor performing as the person you hope to be. It is opening up to who you are right now, and accepting that with love.
You will not belong everywhere. You were never meant to. And what a relief, as everywhere is a very difficult place to be. You contain too much depth just to skim the surface, you are too layered, too much a product of genuine curiosity and real living to be contained by any single room, label, or version of yourself that others can easily file away and understand.
And the sooner you stop trying to make yourself fit, the sooner you get to experience what it actually feels like to be whole. Free to explore what depths, what height, what breadth, what fullness life might offer you once you release yourself from the expectation that you must be and remain as any one thing in any such way for too long.
Remind yourself as often as you need to, daily if you must, that you are not a fixed point. You are a spiral in motion, and every cycle of focus, every turn toward something new, every season of expansion in one direction and patient tending in another, is not a contradiction or regression of who you are, but the evolution of it. You are not becoming someone ‘different’. You are becoming more fully yourself, again and again, in ways you could not have predicted and do not need to control.
So be a paradox. It is the most honest thing you can do.
꩜ Spiraling upward, outward, onward with you, SJT
Written for those who don’t belong and don’t want to.
Hello human reading this - I am a NEW writer and I want to get better at writing. If you actually read this and made it to the end ANY FEEDBACK - no matter how blunt or hard- is genuinely and truly appreciated. THANK YOU. 🙏🏻