I spent a lot of time noticing what made me unhappy.
And when I say noticing, I mean I was very good at it.
I could tell you what was bothering me, why it was bothering me, how long it had been bothering me and, depending on how much coffee I’d had, probably give you a fairly convincing theory about where the whole thing started.
Very insightful.
Also... not particularly useful.
Because for a long time, I confused noticing something with actually doing something about it.
I knew when something in my life wasn’t working.
I knew when I wasn’t taking care of myself the way I wanted to.
I knew which things I complained about over and over.
I knew which situations drained me.
I knew when I would look around my own house and think, I don’t even like this.
I knew when I wanted something different.
And yet somehow, I kept expecting the knowing part to eventually produce a different life. It did not.
Apparently, life does not award points for self-awareness.
I Had Plenty of Information
That was one of the biggest things I eventually realized.
I wasn’t missing information.
Most of the time, I already knew.
I didn’t need six more months to think about the thing I had already been thinking about for three years.
I didn’t need another notebook.
I definitely didn’t need another beautifully highlighted book telling me something I already understood.
At some point, I had to admit that the problem wasn’t that I didn’t know what needed to change.
The problem was that changing it was going to require me to actually do something.
And doing something is much less comfortable than thinking about doing something.
Thinking is safe.
Thinking lets you stay exactly where you are while feeling moderately productive about it.
Action is annoying like that.
It asks for a decision.
So I Started Changing Things
Not everything at once.
There was no dramatic Monday morning when I woke up, threw open the curtains and announced that my new life had begun.
Honestly, that would have been exhausting.
It was much more ordinary than that.
I started looking at the things I kept saying bothered me and asking myself what I could actually do about them.
Sometimes it was something small.
Sometimes it was something I had been putting off forever.
Sometimes it cost money.
Sometimes it meant changing a habit.
Sometimes it meant admitting that something I had once wanted simply wasn’t working for me anymore.
I had spent years looking in the mirror and being bothered by my eyelids. Eventually, I stopped having the same conversation with myself every morning and had the surgery.
There were things in my home I had complained about for years. I changed them.
I wanted to feel stronger and better in my body. That one didn’t happen because I understood the importance of exercise. Believe me, I had understood that little nugget for quite some time.
I had to actually exercise.
Repeatedly.
Very inconvenient sometimes.
I had a business that had once made sense for me and eventually didn’t anymore. I could have spent another year analyzing why I had lost interest in it.
Instead, I closed it.
Little by little, I stopped asking myself only what was bothering me.
I started asking a much more useful question:
What am I going to do about it?
That Question Changed a Lot
Because once I started acting on the things I already knew, something interesting happened.
My life began to feel different.
Not overnight.
Not perfectly.
But different.
I had fewer things hanging over me.
Fewer conversations with myself that started with, I really need to...
Less frustration from watching myself complain about the same thing while doing absolutely nothing to change it.
And probably the biggest difference was that I started trusting myself more.
If something bothered me, I knew I wasn’t automatically going to tolerate it forever.
I might not know the answer immediately.
I might need time.
I might decide not to change it at all.
But I stopped assuming that awareness was where the process ended.
Awareness became the beginning.
Maybe You Already Know
I still believe noticing matters.
You have to be honest enough to admit when something isn’t working before you can change it.
But I also think we can spend a very long time living in that space.
Noticing.
Thinking.
Analyzing.
Talking.
Planning.
Waiting until we understand it perfectly.
Meanwhile, the thing we already know continues sitting right there in the middle of our life.
Sometimes we don’t need another realization.
Sometimes we already have enough information.
And maybe the next question isn’t:
Why am I unhappy with this?
Maybe it’s simply:
What am I going to do about it?
And maybe that’s the better question to sit with this week:
Where in your life have you been very aware of what isn’t working... but still haven’t done anything about it?
Not to judge yourself.
Just to notice the difference between knowing and changing.
Because sometimes the next step isn’t another realization.
It’s finally doing something with the one you already had.
Always with so much love,
GABY