For most of my life, I’ve hated this question. It always made me feel like there was something wrong with me. I never knew how to answer it. Yet so many people around me did.

 

When I was at Boston University, for example, everyone seemed so sure of who they were, who they would become, what their lives would look like, what they were damn sure going to achieve, and precisely how they were going to do it. And they seemed to have known years. How?

 

I envied them.

 

What I would have done for even a discarded scrap of their confidence. I faked it for a time, but my carefully hidden “odd duck” identity never quite went away, along with my fear of being “caught.” By whom? Not a clue. At 41 years old, I know how ridiculous that sounds.

 

But 19-year-old Liz was petrified and, well, trying her best. Also, back then, Liz and her big butt were barely surviving the thoroughly demoralizing low-rise jeans era of the early 2000s — so cut her some slack, OK?

 

 

 

In my 20s, I escaped this line of questioning, but it came roaring back to life in my late 30s. Once again, I had no answers and no plan, even though I desperately sought growth. Of course, I’d parrot the usual party lines:

 

 

But it all felt like bullshit.

 

Whenever someone asked me to visualize my “dream life” of the future, I couldn’t do it. Whenever someone suggested I write a letter from my future self to me now, I couldn’t think of a damn thing to write other than, “If your glasses are missing, they’re either on your head or in the freezer. You’re welcome.”

 

Whenever someone instructed me to picture a day in the future when I’m living “my ideal life,” and then write down all the details I could “see,” I could never see anything. OK, on rare occasions, I would see myself sitting on the beach at sunset in the fall, at Surfside in Nantucket. But that's always been a place I go to mentally when stressed. It's one of my favorite places on earth.

 

 

Again, my peers could seemingly nail these assignments. Even those with only wisps of abstractions considered those threads tangible and real enough to be worth chasing after.

 

I started to panic. Would I ever feel like I belonged anywhere, walking a path that felt wholly like it belonged to me?

 

Then, sometime during the past three years, a switch flipped in my brain. I don’t know how, why, or when. All I can tell you is I woke up on New Year’s Day this year (at 5:55 a.m., oddly enough), with the realization that I no longer wanted the “clarity” I had been feverishly chasing for most of my life. And I had felt this way for a long time before acknowledging it.

 

Why would I limit myself in such a way?

 

Life became way more interesting the moment I started doing all the things I said I would never do. Also, I'm laughably wrong whenever I try to predict the future. And I’m always glad I’m wrong. Truly, those moments when something or someone completely takes me by surprise feel like pure sunshine.

 

 

 

 

 

I'm simply no longer interested in defining my future in excruciating, exacting detail just because someone else says I have to as part of a growth exercise. "Living," as now defined by me, is a daily choice to embrace curiosity.

 

 

I have no idea where "home" will be. I have no idea who will be with me. I have no idea what or who will surprise me in the most beautiful ways in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. I have no idea what items I’ll strike off next on my “things Liz will never do” list.

 

I also have no idea which places, people, or things I’ve said “no” to for right now that will become a passionate, full-body “YES!" in future. But I can’t wait to find out.

 

For those of you reading this who feel an unnameable, inescapable, restless friction around the edges of your life, this is your wakeup call. Because the more you wait, the more pain you're going to feel. That dull ache you feel will only grow the more you try to ignore it. Now is the time to become a curious explorer. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Be open to discovering all the ways you’ll prove yourself wrong over and over and over again — and then marvel at how unfathomably grateful you are that you weren’t right in virtually every single case. That’s what living a life beyond your default is all about.