What if it was easy?
Reflections on 2025: revisiting all the stories we tell ourselves
2025 was a year of endings for me. Relationships, projects, jobs, the apartment I’d settled into, the life I’d built for myself, the idea of who I thought I had to be. Everything I had been building towards for the past three, four years came toppling down magnificently, leaving me reeling in the aftershock.
I spent the last few months of the year desperately scrambling to put all the pieces back together—to macgyver some sense of safety to finally breathe again. But again and again, I found myself lost in shame and self-doubt, thrown into the same patterns I’d struggled with for years, the same patterns that had previously trapped me in months of despondency (locking myself in my room with my cat subsisting on instant noodles and cozy RPGs on my Switch).
Why can’t I just hold a normal job? What do I actually want to do? If I have all this free time, why can’t I bring myself to follow my ambitions?
I spent countless hours psychoanalysing myself, using LLMs as mirrors to try to understand what was wrong with me. MBTI, Enneagram types, childhood trauma, shadow work, IFS, Jungian psychology, Zen, Taoism, Sufism, Advaita—no psychological or spiritual framework was out of bounds. Everything was wrong with me. And yet nothing was wrong with me. And yet—if I could just understand—if I could just identify what I needed to fix, I could overcome it.
In a frenzy, I applied to over a hundred software engineering jobs I tried to convince myself I wanted, submitted an overly verbose and confusingly meta technophilosophical paper to NeurIPS Creative AI track, and applied to the Bloomsbury Academic Fellowship with a deeply personal pitch of my matrilineal connection to the Secret War in Laos in a halfhearted-yet-well-meaning attempt to prove to myself the validity of writing as a serious, intellectual career option. (Rejected on all accounts, by the way.)
Compounded by housing contract complications which I’d rather not delve into here, my sense of safety, both financial and physical, felt constantly under threat. Between supporting my new partner through startup incubators and juggling the conflicting requests of new housemates, I felt simultaneously stretched to my limit and completely untethered, spiralling out of orbit.
By the final six weeks of the year I had reached breaking point. Emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted, at some point I found myself collapsed on an armchair, relating my struggles to a particularly receptive stranger at the AI safety office on a Saturday afternoon. He listened with quiet composure, and then, after a moment, asked me a question that would continue to echo in my mind:
“What if it was easy?”
On New Year’s Eve, I took a moment to reflect on everything I’d learned this year. There was a sense that everything was still unfolding, and while I’m still swimming through the thick of it, the darkest of the fog has started to lift. The first realization rang like a clear bell through the mist.
1. You’ll never find your answers: knowing won’t save you
I recognised had been arrested by the same patterns of self-doubt and self-abandonment for much of my life, in particular in the context of career and romantic relationships. I could see the patterns transparently, I could name all the wounds and all their sub-categories and self-reflexive coping mechanisms. I’d built an ever-sophisticated, ever-growing internal monstrosity of a model of my psyche over the years. I kept trying to understand more, to become aware of more. To see what I might be missing.
And yet nothing changed.
The breakthrough came in like a sledgehammer: awareness without action is sophisticated avoidance. My incredibly intricate analytical capacity was a defense mechanism: if I could understand and articulate my wounds perfectly, I wouldn’t have to feel them.
But healing could never happen in the mind. No more insight could save me—no matter how beautiful, how accurate, how succinct or clear—only doing, imperfect doing. No safety net of knowledge. Only imperfect action taken in faith.
Because purpose isn’t found. It emerges. Through experimentation, through committing to listening to yourself and following through. Purpose reveals itself through trying things—through taking the risks, feeling the failure, and recalibrating your compass. Alignment always happens now.
2. When you revolve your life around others, you abandon yourself
Making myself small, helpful, and radically transparent to others felt comfortable. It felt like second nature to me to attune to the needs of others as a way of bonding. I’d anticipate the needs of others, especially my partner, almost automatically. And often, my own wants might be disguised in a request to the other person: do you want some ice cream? (Translation: I would like some ice cream.)
It felt right—if I’m non-threatening, if I’m in service to others, I surely must be doing good in the world, right? Surely, this must be aligned? Increasingly, I began to get more in touch with suppressed frustration at feeling taken advantage of, underappreciated, and undervalued. I realised my desire to help others, to make them happy, often came not from an overflowing of goodwill, but a need to feel connected to them and prevent being abandoned. On top of this, self-deprecating reflexes, especially in a professional context in the guise of vulnerability had become a self-fulfilling prophecy: If I criticise myself first, then others won’t. Ironically, I ended up modeling for others how to treat me by abandoning myself preemptively.
In endless hours of self-therapy, journaling, and reflecting, though I supported myself with kind words and loving sentiments, I often did not follow through in my actions. I neglected voicing my boundaries or stating my needs clearly. When it came to actually doing things, I prioritised everyone else. The truth dawned on me: “If there’s something in my life externally that I feel like I’m not receiving from other people, what are the ways in which I’m not giving it to myself?”
3. The body knows before the mind
My partner convinced me to get a WHOOP (I swear this isn’t an ad) as he was concerned about my health, in particular my sleep and stress levels. It came with this ability to measure HRV—heart rate variability, a metric directly correlated with nervous system regulation. Although a healthy HRV as a measurement is not absolute (your “ideal” HRV is influenced by many factors, and is specific to the individual), generally the lower your HRV score, the more dysregulated your system tends to be.
Going in, I thought I’d have a regular, if not slightly more regulated nervous system as I meditate, practise yoga, and generally am mindful about my stress levels and get adequate sleep. So when the numbers actually revealed themselves—an average HRV of around 30, (some days dropping down to the low 20s) well below over 95% other women in my demographic, it was a bit of a shock. It became clear to me how disconnected I was from my body: even if my mind felt regulated, there was a disconnect between mind regulation (being aware of racing thoughts, negative patterns, etc) and somatic experiencing (feeling into tension in the body, tightness, or pain).
I began to become aware of my tendency to intellectualise my emotions instead of feeling them. I’d always identified as being “emotional”— and my constant self reflection made me realise that though I’m emotionally sensitive, I intellectualise emotions as a defense mechanism to shield myself from the pain of feeling them. I’d unknowingly created a pattern of dissociation from my body in an effort to “fix” myself. No amount of thinking my way out of stress or anxiety would ever work if my body—if my nervous system was primed for fight or flight. I was stuck in one mode, unable to flow between activation and rest for so long that it had become my normal. Getting in touch with my body, especially through somatic exercises, is one of my priorities for the new year.
4. Everything is a story
One evening, my housemate told me the story of the autobiography of a comedian she once read. In it, the comedian suffered from a psychotic break and ended up being institutionalised, heavily drugged—so much so that he lost his sense of self, who he was before the ordeal. When he was eventually released, he began to pick up the pieces of his life and try to “be himself” again. He recalled that before the incident he absolutely hated bananas, so he decided trying bananas again would be a great place to start. When he tried one, to his surprise, he discovered he didn’t hate them at all—he actually quite liked them! Were his likes and dislikes not really his own to begin with? How much of what we believe about ourselves—our preferences, our tendencies, our behaviours, are simply the result of patterns of belief?
Every time I identified a pattern about myself in my mind, I felt the sense of being contracted into a story—a sense of identification with being “this sort of person.” A victim, a people pleaser. The good girl. The creative, free-spirited one. How much of any of this was “true”? When I looked back at my life, really looked, openly, I could find evidence both for and against almost every adjective I could use to describe myself, positive or negative. Was there any fixed sense of self?
Wherever I placed my attention—whatever I believed I was, I became. The only constant was change. It was simultaneously terrifying and liberating.
5. What if it was easy?
And this, perhaps, is the most liberating story of all: letting go.
The story of burning through savings. Of stress around financially supporting myself through a career path that felt so misaligned. Of housing contract pressure and disruptions in living space and managing the expectations and requests of multiple competing parties. Of the triggers and vulnerability of a new and intense relationship. Of trying to meet everyone’s needs before even giving myself permission to think about my own.
The exhaustion, the hypervigilance, the planning, trying to control outcomes—a single breath in—
What am I actually trying to control? Am I afraid of the outcome, or am I actually afraid of how I think I will feel with said outcome?
What am I actually clinging onto?
—and breathing out.
The more we cling, the more we brace for impact. We become increasingly rigid, holding our peace hostage for some imagined outcome that is supposed to relieve us of our suffering. The more we ache to secure the illusion of safety by trying to predict all possible outcomes before acting, the more we paralyse ourselves in fear. The more we reinforce the narrative that perfect understanding grants us release—that having a moment to finally exhale—is earned through effort and vigilance.
And yet—
What if it was easy?
What would that look like?
If I didn’t have to explain. If I didn’t have to orchestrate five million different things. If I didn’t have to manage, scan for danger, or lose myself in mental acrobatics in order to give myself permission to take the first step. If I simply voiced, clearly, from a place of authenticity, what I actually feel—what I actually want—what actually is—and acted from this space. Letting go of all grasping, all aversion, and allowing myself to act. Centred in myself.
Clarity not as a goal, but as the origin of all action.
It’s January 1st and nothing has actually changed. It’s still uninhabitably cold here in London. I still haven’t heard back from a possible contract job. I’m still waiting on the agency for new tenants to take over the lease. I’m still navigating crossed boundaries, awkward conversations, and heartfelt moments of connection. I’m still wandering, still fucking up, still anxious, still making my way through each day oscillating between endless gratitude at the wonder and love and beauty of existing at all and the mundane drudgery of the ridiculous obstacle courses of this human experience.
Yesterday I woke up and felt the inexplicable urge to run. For context, I wouldn’t call myself a runner—but perhaps that’s another story to rewrite. I put on two pairs of leggings, a jumper, and two jackets (yes, I know) to brave the frost. There is something so strangely magical about running across the Heath in midwinter, cold and frigid and full of potential. I could feel the weight of my body shifting, sometimes light and sometimes heavy, awkwardly adjusting to the damp leaves—sometimes slipping, sometimes propelling me to my next step. The sunlight muted, soft against my cheek. The clouds of mist, dissipating with every outbreath.
Each step, one at a time. I don’t know where I’m going.
But I’m going forward.