The Shoes That Looked Perfect

Have you ever found a pair of shoes that fit just right? Not “good enough.” Not “they’ll stretch eventually, give it a few weeks.” Actually right, the kind you forget you’re wearing because nothing about them is asking for your attention.

I remember the opposite feeling more clearly. A pair I loved the look of. Everyone complimented them. On paper, they were exactly right. And they pinched, the whole time, in a way I got so used to that I stopped noticing it as pain and started experiencing it as just how shoes felt.

This isn’t really a post about shoes.

For a long time, I thought if I just figured out the right way to live, the right role, the right relationships, the right choices, I would finally feel content. Satisfied. Like I’d landed somewhere solid. I did everything I was supposed to do.

And some of it, I loved. That’s the part that made it so confusing. It wasn’t that my life was bad. There were pieces I genuinely wanted to keep. But even the parts I loved didn’t quite fit, like a great pair of shoes a size too small: they looked perfect, they just didn’t fit. I built a life that made sense to everyone except me.

Eventually I learned that doing everything right and being me were two different things.

Here’s something I want you to sit with, because it took me a long time to see it clearly myself: the picture in your head of what a good life is supposed to look like, the job, the relationships, the body, the pace, the definition of “success,” you didn’t invent that picture. Someone taught it to you, a long time ago, before you were old enough to ask whether it fit. Most of us never go back and check.

I’m not going to pretend that checking is simple. Most of what’s shaping how you see your own life right now is so deeply built in, you don’t even experience it as a belief, it just feels like “how things are.” So it has to happen slowly. One thought at a time. One honest look at a time.

And I want to be clear about something else, because I think it matters more than almost anything I could say here: I will never tell you to just think positive about something that’s genuinely hard. If your life is hard right now, that’s real. It doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, and it doesn’t mean the answer is gratitude journaling your way past it. This isn’t about skipping the hard part. It’s about getting curious enough to notice what’s actually true, underneath what you’ve always assumed was true.

I’ve been building something out of all of this. A course, starting with the question most people can’t answer honestly the first time they hear it: what would a 10 out of 10 life actually look like, not the version you’ve been shown, not anyone else’s, but yours?

We don’t start there. We build up to it, a little at a time, until you can actually picture it without borrowing someone else’s definition to do it.

The first module is ready. I’m opening a small number of early access spots before I build out the rest, because I’d rather test this with real people than guess. If you want in, keep an eye on your inbox, I’ll have details soon.

For now, just sit with the question. Not the whole answer. Just the question.

What have you been wearing that looked perfect and never quite fit?