I have always been exceptionally good at planning my life. And I don’t mean normal-person planning. I mean planning planning.
I didn’t just have dreams. I had timelines. Strategies. Contingencies. Spreadsheets. Perfectly curated Pinterest boards dedicated to futures I had already decided I was going to live.
And because apparently conventional control wasn’t enough for me, I spiritualized the shit out of it too.
Every morning, I wrote out the life I wanted in present tense as though it were already mine. I did the affirmations. The guided meditations. The visualizations. I learned about neuroplasticity and the power of repeatedly rehearsing a future until your brain begins to experience it as possible. I tried to embody the woman who already had everything I wanted.
I wasn’t just planning my future. I was manifesting it. Visualizing it. Rewiring my brain for it. Aligning my energy with it.
I was going to co-create with the universe—as long as the universe understood that I had already prepared a very detailed fucking agenda.
And beneath all of that effort was something I didn’t understand for a very long time. I wasn’t only trying to create a beautiful life.
I was trying to create a life nothing could happen to.
Because after a life shaped by trauma, chaos, and instability, safety became synonymous with control. If I could control enough variables, I could prevent chaos. If I could make the right decisions, I could prevent regret. If I could anticipate every possible outcome, I could prevent surprise. If I could build enough stability around myself, nothing could come crashing through it. And if nothing ever fell apart again, maybe I would never have to hurt like that again.
The equation was simple. Control meant stability. Stability meant safety. And safety meant I could finally stop waiting for the next thing to go wrong.
It was an elegant system.
There was just one small problem.
Life did not give a fuck about my plan.
There was France.
And France wasn’t some little fantasy I picked up after watching Emily in Paris and deciding berets looked cute. I devoted years of my life to it. I studied the language. I studied the culture. I deliberately oriented what I watched, what I read, what I listened to, and what I exposed myself to toward this country I was convinced would eventually become home.
France wasn’t sitting passively on a Pinterest board. I was preparing for it.
I was building fluency. Building cultural understanding. Building familiarity. Building an entire version of myself capable of stepping into the life I had already decided was waiting for me there.
I didn’t simply want to live in France.
In my head, I already did.
And then there was the family timeline. This one was even more aggressively scheduled.
At one point, the plan was married by 25. First child by 27. Second child by 30.
Very reasonable. Very flexible. Absolutely no underlying psychological issues there.
When 25 came and went without the universe producing a husband on schedule, I begrudgingly revised the strategic plan.
Fine. Married by 30.
The deliverables could move. The project would continue. Because what mattered was that there was still a timeline.
At some predetermined age, I needed to meet The Person. Said person needed to fall in love with me. Said person needed to propose within the allotted courtship window. We would marry. Children would arrive according to schedule. Boy first, then girl. There would be a home. Land. A garden. A pool. Maybe mountains somewhere in the distance.
And for years, I thought that image represented what I wanted. Some of it still does. But I understand now that it also represented something else.
Proof.
Proof that I had successfully constructed the stable life I had spent so much of my own life craving. Proof that the chaos was over. Proof that I had done everything correctly. Proof that I was safe.
I thought if I could get all the pieces into exactly the right places, I could finally exhale.
And I really believed that was where my life was going.
It wasn’t.
If you had asked me years ago what my life would look like on an ordinary Tuesday night in autumn at 32, I could have described it to you in disturbing detail.
There would be a husband. There would be two children, because according to the original project timeline, I was supposed to have produced the first by 27 and the second by 30.
I’d be in our house with land and a garden and a view of something beautiful in the distance. I’d probably be making dinner while reviewing each child’s color coded calendar for the week to confirm who needed to be driven to which meticulously researched extracurricular activity the following morning.
Instead, I am sitting alone in my studio in a skyscraper in the middle of a city, planning a month-long expedition across Southeast Asia after spending parts of the last few months in the Andes and the Balearic Islands, while listening to the dramatized audio of one of my fave romantasy series–again.
This was not on the fucking vision board.
None of it was.
And that’s the strange part. Because if you had shown the younger version of me this life without explaining how I got here, she’s freak the fuck out.
Where is the husband? Where are the kids? What happened to France? Why aren’t you a meteorologist? What the fuck happened to the plan?
And I would want to tell her:
A lot.
A lot fucking happened to the plan.
And somehow, my life did not become smaller when it fell apart.
It became enormous.
Not because this life is inherently better than the one I imagined. I need to be very clear about that. I still believe in love. I still believe in family. I still want that land. There are pieces of that old vision I still want, although hopefully with significantly fewer project-management milestones attached.
The revelation isn’t that I was wrong for wanting those things. It’s that I was wrong about what would happen to me if I didn’t get them exactly when and how I had planned.
I thought deviation meant failure. I thought uncertainty meant danger. I thought an ending meant something had gone wrong.
And maybe most importantly:
I thought safety meant making sure the fire never came.
That’s the problem with control. Eventually, you have to confront the fact that no amount of it can guarantee the outcome.
You can make the plans. You can do the research. You can evaluate every possible scenario. You can go to therapy. You can meditate. You can journal. You can visualize. You can write your future in present tense every morning until your fucking hand cramps. You can do everything you’ve been told will help you consciously create your reality.
And then life can still walk in on a random Tuesday and flip the fucking table.
There are Uranus-style forces that enter our lives without asking permission.
(Yes, that’s an astrology reference.)
The layoff you didn’t see coming. The breakup you never thought would happen. The diagnosis that divides your life into before and after. The pregnancy you weren’t planning. The financial loss that wipes out the security you thought you had. The friendship you thought would last forever ending. The opportunity disappearing after you had already built a future around it. The move you didn’t choose. The door closing after you spent years arranging your entire life around walking through it.
The phone call. The email. The conversation.
The moment after which you realize that the future you were picturing five minutes ago no longer exists.
And suddenly you’re standing there thinking:
This was not the fucking plan.
I’ve had enough of those moments now to recognize something I couldn’t recognize before.
I spent an enormous amount of my life trying to prevent experiences I had already proven I could survive.
That might be the greatest irony of all.
I built increasingly elaborate systems of control to protect myself from pain because, somewhere underneath all of it, I didn’t trust myself to survive pain.
Meanwhile, the evidence was everywhere.
I already had.
Again. And again. And again.
I had survived things I once believed would destroy me. I had watched identities die. I had watched futures disappear. I had watched relationships end. I had watched entire versions of my life become impossible.
And every single time, eventually, there I was.
Not untouched. Not magically healed. Not standing triumphantly in the ashes with perfect hair while my dragon unleashed fire in the background.
Sometimes I was fucking wrecked.
Sometimes I stayed in the ashes far longer than I care to admit. Long enough to stop believing there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Long enough, sometimes, to wonder whether there was even anything left in me at all.
Sometimes I begged for the old life back. Sometimes I would have rebuilt the exact thing that burned if someone had handed me the pieces. Sometimes I had absolutely no idea who I was without it, much less what the fuck I was supposed to do next.
But eventually, beneath all that ash, I would find something. Sometimes barely glowing. Sometimes so small I almost missed it.
But there.
An ember.
Some piece of me the fire hadn’t taken.
And eventually, I understood:
I remained.
Not the plan. Not the life I had imagined. Not always the person I had been before.
But me.
And over time, something began to change. Not my ability to prevent the fire.
My relationship to it.
We love talking about rebirth. Rebirth is sexy. Transformation is sexy. Rising from the ashes is sexy.
Nobody puts the death part on the fucking Pinterest board.
But there is no rebirth without something ending first. There is no rising from the ashes without admitting that something had to burn.
Sometimes it’s a relationship. Sometimes it’s a dream. Sometimes it’s a career. Sometimes it’s a home. Sometimes it’s an identity. Sometimes it’s the timeline you were so attached to that you couldn’t imagine yourself existing outside of it. Sometimes it’s simply the version of you who believed she knew exactly how all of this was supposed to go.
And I don’t think embracing those deaths means pretending they don’t hurt. I don’t think believing everything happens for a reason means everything that happens is good.
Those are not the same thing.
Sometimes the fire is devastating. Sometimes all you can see is what it took. Sometimes the reason isn’t immediately apparent. Sometimes it takes years before you can look backward and understand how one ending altered the entire trajectory of your life. And sometimes, even years later, you still don’t completely understand why something had to happen the way it did.
I believe everything happens for a reason.
I know.
Annoying.
And I don’t mean that in the aggressively inspirational way people sometimes say it when something fucking terrible has happened to you and you’re approximately six minutes into processing it.
I don’t believe everything happens because it is good. I believe everything happens as part of something larger than what I can see from where I’m standing.
There is a difference.
And the older I get, the more evidence I have that some of the moments I was most convinced my life was going horribly off course were the exact moments that changed its trajectory.
Sometimes the reason revealed itself quickly. Sometimes it took years. Sometimes I can trace entire chapters of my life back to a moment I once considered catastrophic and see the chain reaction it created: the place it sent me, the person it made me meet, the part of myself it forced me to confront, the direction I never would have taken if the road I wanted had remained open.
And sometimes I still have no fucking idea.
But I no longer believe my inability to understand the reason means there isn’t one.
Maybe what I spent years calling derailment was sometimes redirection. Maybe the thing that looked like life dismantling my plans was life aligning me with my higher path. Maybe something can simultaneously be a complete deviation from my plan and still be perfectly aligned with a plan I cannot yet see.
And that requires a kind of surrender I spent most of my life desperately avoiding.
Because I think even my spirituality used to contain an unspoken contract.
I will visualize correctly. I will manifest correctly. I will heal correctly. I will align correctly. I will become the right version of myself.
And in return, life will give me this.
This relationship. This home. This country. This family. This timeline. This life.
I called it surrender while quietly handing the universe a list of acceptable outcomes.
Which, in retrospect, is fucking hilarious.
I don’t think that makes manifestation meaningless. I still believe deeply in intention. I believe in the power of our thoughts, our choices, our energy, our attention, and the realities we consciously participate in creating. I still believe we are co-creators of our lives.
I just think I misunderstood the co- part.
Co-creation was never going to mean that I got to dictate every detail.
Maybe the spiritual work was never about becoming so aligned that nothing unwanted would happen to me. Maybe it was about becoming someone capable of remaining in relationship with life even when it did.
Someone capable of saying:
This is not what I wanted. This fucking hurts. I don’t understand why this is happening.
And I still trust that my life is not over just because my plan is.
That feels much closer to faith than anything I was doing when I was desperately trying to manifest a future I had already decided was the only acceptable one.
Because pain and misalignment are not the same thing. Something hurting does not necessarily mean your life has gone off course. Something ending does not mean the plan failed. Something you desperately wanted not happening does not mean you fucked up your life.
A fire is not necessarily evidence that you took a wrong turn.
Sometimes the plan that failed was simply yours.
And sometimes the layoff, the breakup, the rejection, the ending, the loss, the unexpected detour—the thing you would have done almost anything to prevent—is the catalytic force that changes your trajectory.
Not because suffering is inherently noble. Not because devastation should be romanticized. Not because we’re supposed to enjoy watching our lives burn.
But because we cannot always see what the fire is doing while we’re standing inside of it.
Sometimes all we can see is what is dying: the identity, the certainty, the timeline, the future we rehearsed so many times that it started to feel like a memory.
And maybe that is where trust actually begins.
Not when we understand. When we don’t.
I still make plans. Of course I fucking do.
I still have dreams. I still visualize. I still set intentions. I still make spreadsheets. I still have a couple new pinterest boards. I still ask for things with my whole heart. I still know exactly what I want sometimes, and I still move toward it with everything I have.
I just don’t worship the plan anymore.
Because I’ve lived long enough to know that some of the moments I was most convinced my life had gone horribly off course were the very moments that changed its trajectory.
I’ve watched futures I meticulously constructed disappear. I’ve watched things I begged to keep leave anyway. I’ve survived endings I once organized my entire life around preventing.
And somehow, again and again, there was more life on the other side.
Not always immediately. Not always beautifully. Not without grief.
Sometimes I had to sit in the ashes long enough to forget what warmth felt like.
But eventually, there was an ember.
And then another.
And then enough to begin again.
So when life burns through another one of my plans, I am trying to meet the fire differently now. Not by pretending I wanted it. Not by pretending it doesn’t hurt. Not by standing in the middle of devastation and demanding that I immediately understand the reason.
But by remembering that I have mistaken redirection for ruin before.
I have mistaken endings for failure.
I have mistaken the death of the life I planned for the death of possibility itself.
And I have been wrong.
Maybe that’s what faith looks like for me now.
Not believing that nothing will burn. Not believing that if I visualize hard enough, heal enough, plan carefully enough, or align perfectly enough, I can finally create a life immune to fire.
But trusting that when it comes, there is something happening beyond what I can see from inside the flames. Trusting that I don’t have to understand the reason yet for there to be one. And trusting, perhaps most of all, the person standing in the ashes when it’s over.
Because I have spent enough of my life trying to prevent experiences I have already proven I can survive.
I don’t need the future to unfold exactly as I imagined it in order to believe I will be okay inside of it. I don’t need every door to stay open. I don’t need every timeline to hold. I don’t need every version of my life to survive.
Sometimes things have to die.
Sometimes things have to burn.
And sometimes the fire we were certain meant everything was falling apart was part of the path all along.
Maybe everything really is going according to plan.
Just not mine.