Somewhere In Between

We spend a lot of time trying to make sense of ourselves. I know I have, trying to draw a straight line through a page of messy thoughts.

Most of my writing circles back to the same theme: the intricate balance I try to find in life. That balance lives in the space — often the tension — between two opposing truths: ambition and peace; freedom and duty; confidence and humility; authenticity and privacy; others and self.

I used to think I had to choose. I lived in black and white, because it felt safer than gray. But life has a quiet way of humbling you when you lean too far in one direction. Too much drive burnt me out. Too much peace made me dull. Too much freedom left me lost. Too much responsibility left me stuck. Giving too much drained me. Protecting myself left me alone.

Eventually I came to see: this isn’t a flaw in life. This is life. We’re caught between what Freud called “the superego and the id”, I call it the god and the beast within us:

The soul reaches for love, purpose, transcendence. The body craves pleasure, power, success. The mind is where they meet — the middle ground, and the battlefield. It gets noisy, so go do something else.

I used to think the goal was to figure myself out. Now I think it’s to live myself out, fully. Not by picking a side, but by walking the line, between the part of us that reaches for heaven and the part that’s trying to stay grounded.

The process of accepting that — to believe, to confuse, to fall, to get back up, and to keep walking — I believe is what people call “growing up.”