So, yeah, the thing about being stuck is that it doesn’t actually feel like anything at first. There’s no grand violins or lightning bolt revelations or even a solid, well-lit moment where you go, “Ah, yes, I am now truly and deeply trapped in the same cycle of choices that have kept me here for years.” It’s more like a particular flavor of quiet, a feeling of again-ness, like when you hear a song you once loved but now recognize only as a thing you’ve already heard too many times. You stand in your kitchen, the place you have always stood, with the same crumpled receipt in your pocket from two days ago that might as well be two months ago, the same groceries in the fridge arranged in the same logical order, and there it is: The sense that none of this is, in any real way, new.
And of course the brain, the over-educated primate brain, is desperate to impose some meaning on it. What does this say about me? it asks, somewhat dramatically, as if it were a person in a novel and not just an organ that evolved to spot tigers and hoard calories. The first instinct is to pull external validation like a lever, to imagine the invisible jury weighing in on my failure to escape the great again-ness. The first instinct is always the question: “Why does this always happen?”
And then—maybe because I’ve thought about this so many times, maybe because I’m just bored enough—I wonder, for the first time, if the question itself is part of the problem. Like maybe the assumption of again-ness is just a trick of perception, a way the mind makes familiar discomfort feel inevitable. And if I change the question—not to something aggressively positive or self-helpy, not “What am I grateful for?” but something precise, something small and undeniable—What is different?—then suddenly, I have to notice things I wasn’t looking at before.
Like, okay, the fridge is mostly the same, but this time I bought oat milk instead of half-and-half because I’m experimenting with the idea of not feeling like a dying mammal after my coffee. And the crumpled receipt in my pocket? It’s not from the same place I used to go. It’s from the weird little bodega I found because I walked a different way home last night, which I never would’ve done a year ago because I would’ve assumed new streets led to the same places.
So maybe I’m not stuck. Maybe I just forgot to update the definition of what progress looks like. Maybe the problem was never repetition, just the way I was measuring change.
Maybe, instead of narrating my life like a rerun, I get to decide it’s an experiment.
