Before we turn life into a story

My first report in graduate school was about phenomenology. Like most students encountering a new philosophical tradition, I initially approached it as an academic requirement. I read the assigned materials, tried to understand the unfamiliar concepts, and organized what I had learned into something I could explain to the class. At the time, my main concern was whether I understood the subject well enough to present it clearly. I did not expect the topic to remain with me after the report was over.

Phenomenology, in its simplest sense, is concerned with lived experience. It asks us to examine how we encounter the world before we impose our assumptions, explanations, and judgments upon it. Rather than immediately asking why something happened or what it means, phenomenology encourages us to begin with the experience itself. What did we see? What did we feel? How did the moment appear to us as we were living through it?

The more I thought about this, the more I realized how difficult it is to observe life without immediately interpreting it. We are constantly assigning meaning to our experiences. We decide whether a day was productive, whether a conversation went well, whether a decision was correct, or whether a difficult period made us stronger. We compare the present with the past and try to determine where it might lead us. Sometimes, we begin constructing the story of an experience before the experience has even ended.

Perhaps I notice this tendency because I work in communication. For much of my professional life, I have been asked to take events, decisions, and ideas and turn them into clear messages. I have written for organizations and leaders, each with a particular audience, purpose, and voice. This work has trained me to identify the important details, find an appropriate angle, and explain what something means to the people who need to understand it.

There is value in that process. Stories help people make sense of complicated events, and good communication can create understanding where there was previously confusion. However, working as a communicator can also make it difficult to experience something without considering how it might eventually be presented. An event becomes a possible article. A conversation offers a potential quotation. A difficulty becomes a lesson, while an achievement becomes a milestone. Even while something is happening, part of the mind is already organizing it into a narrative.

This is where phenomenology has become meaningful to me beyond the classroom. It reminds me that there is a difference between observing an experience and immediately turning it into a story. Before we decide what a moment represents, we should first allow ourselves to encounter it. This requires us to suspend, even temporarily, the instinct to explain everything according to what we already believe.

In phenomenology, this suspension is sometimes described as “bracketing.” The idea is not that we can completely remove our beliefs or personal histories from the way we see the world. Rather, we make a conscious effort to recognize those assumptions and prevent them from determining everything we notice. In everyday life, bracketing may be as simple as listening to someone without preparing a response, revisiting a familiar place with greater attention, or allowing an emotion to exist before deciding whether it is reasonable.

This way of observing can also change how we encounter other people. We often understand individuals according to the roles they occupy in our lives. We see someone as a colleague, supervisor, friend, family member, public official, or stranger. These categories are useful, but they can also make us believe that we already know who a person is. Once we become comfortable with our interpretation of someone, we may stop paying attention to the details that complicate it.

The same problem applies to how we understand ourselves. Over time, we develop stories about the kind of person we are. We describe ourselves as ambitious, reserved, successful, uncertain, independent, or responsible. These descriptions may contain some truth, but they can also become limiting. When an experience does not fit the identity we have constructed, we may dismiss it or force it into an older narrative rather than consider what it might reveal about us now.

Observing life as it happens, then, is not merely about noticing more details. It is about becoming more open to what an experience might show us. It means accepting that we do not always know immediately what a moment means. Some experiences need time before they can be understood, and others may never offer the clear lesson or resolution we expect from them.

This can be uncomfortable because we live in a culture that encourages immediate interpretation. We are expected to have an opinion about every development and a response to every question. Social media has made it possible to document an experience and publish our reflections on it almost simultaneously. The distance between living and narrating has become increasingly small.

There is nothing inherently wrong with documenting our lives or sharing what we have learned. I continue to believe in the power of storytelling. However, I am also beginning to understand that a story becomes richer when it comes from careful attention rather than immediate reaction. If we move too quickly to the lesson, we may overlook the contradictions and uncertainties that made the experience human.

Many of the moments that shape us do not announce their importance while they are happening. They may appear ordinary at first: a conversation we did not expect to remember, a quiet gesture from someone, a familiar routine that later disappears, or an unremarkable day that acquires meaning only in retrospect. If we are always searching for the obvious story, we may fail to notice the experiences that do not immediately present themselves as significant.

My report on phenomenology began as an academic exercise, but its central question has followed me into my life as a communicator and writer. It has made me think more carefully about the relationship between experience and storytelling. Writing requires us to interpret life, but good writing also requires us to observe it closely. We cannot describe honestly what we have never allowed ourselves to experience fully.

Perhaps this is what it means to pay attention: to resist the urge to make every moment immediately meaningful, productive, or shareable. It is to give life enough room to unfold before deciding what it has come to teach us.

There will always be time to find the angle, choose the words, and shape the narrative. Before we turn life into a story, however, we should first allow ourselves to live it.

When the joy in my work found its way back

The first half of this year felt like a turning point, although I did not recognize it immediately. There was no single defining moment when everything suddenly became better. There was no dramatic realization, no carefully written plan, and no particular morning when I woke up feeling like a completely different person. The change happened gradually, almost quietly. I simply began to notice that I was approaching work with more enthusiasm. I was becoming excited about ideas again. I was looking forward to projects instead of immediately feeling weighed down by everything they would require. Somewhere along the way, work began to feel less like something I had to get through and more like something I genuinely wanted to do.

That realization became even more meaningful when I compared it with how I felt last year.

Last year, my mental health was constantly up and down. Some days were manageable, while others felt much heavier. There were moments when I was motivated, productive, and hopeful, but that energy could disappear just as quickly. The instability affected more than my mood. It influenced the way I saw myself, the way I interpreted situations, and the way I approached my responsibilities. Work that would normally feel manageable could suddenly seem overwhelming. A minor setback could feel like evidence that I was not doing enough, while an ordinary challenge could make me question whether I was capable at all.

When you are struggling internally, it becomes difficult to keep that struggle contained in one part of your life. 

It follows you into your routines, your relationships, your decisions, and your work. Even if you continue showing up and completing what needs to be done, there can still be a quiet heaviness beneath it all. From the outside, you may appear productive. You may attend meetings, meet deadlines, respond to messages, and carry out your responsibilities. But internally, you may be working twice as hard just to remain present.

There were times last year when work felt like a reflection of whatever I was going through emotionally. On better days, I could see opportunities and possibilities. On difficult days, I saw pressure, uncertainty, and reasons to doubt myself. The work itself may not have changed, but the lens through which I viewed it certainly did. That is one of the difficult things about mental health: it can change the meaning of experiences that once felt familiar. It can make you question your abilities, even when your skills have not disappeared. It can convince you that you are falling behind, even when you are still moving forward.

Perhaps that is why the first half of this year has felt so different.

I began noticing a new kind of energy in myself. There was a sudden burst of enthusiasm, excitement, and joy in the things I was doing. I found myself becoming deeply invested in projects—not only because they were part of my job, but because I genuinely wanted to see them succeed. Ideas began to excite me again. Challenges made me curious instead of immediately anxious. Even the pressure that came with bigger responsibilities felt different. It was still pressure, but it was accompanied by purpose.

I found particular happiness in doing big things.

Large projects can be demanding. They require patience, coordination, decision-making, and the willingness to remain committed even when the way forward is not always clear. They can occupy your thoughts long after the workday ends. They can test your confidence and expose the areas where you still have much to learn. Yet, strangely, these were also the things that made me feel most alive. The more meaningful and ambitious the project was, the more engaged I became.

Maybe it was because bigger projects gave me something clear to move toward. They allowed me to use different parts of myself—the part that enjoys solving problems, the part that wants to create, the part that finds satisfaction in bringing people and ideas together, and the part that still believes good work can make a real difference. These projects demanded a lot from me, but they also gave something back. They gave me momentum. They gave me a reason to stretch beyond what was comfortable. They reminded me that I was capable of carrying responsibility and turning ideas into something tangible.

More than anything, they made me feel valued.

Feeling valued is not always about receiving praise or being publicly recognized. Sometimes, it is found in the simple act of being trusted with something important. It is in being asked for your perspective because people believe it matters. It is in knowing that your contribution affects the direction and outcome of a project. It is in realizing that your presence is not incidental—that there is something you bring to the table that is distinctly yours.

That sense of trust changed the way I saw my work, but it also began to change the way I saw myself. Instead of focusing only on what I lacked or what I could have done better, I began to notice what I was already capable of doing. I saw the experience I had accumulated, the instincts I had developed, and the strengths that had perhaps become invisible to me because I was too accustomed to carrying them. 

I started to recognize that growth does not always announce itself. Sometimes, you only see it when you are placed in a situation that requires you to become the person you have quietly been becoming all along.

I am still not completely sure what motivated this turnaround. Perhaps it was the nature of the projects themselves. Perhaps I was finally given the kind of work that matched my need for creativity, challenge, and purpose. Perhaps something within me had begun to heal, allowing me to experience enthusiasm that had been buried beneath exhaustion and self-doubt. It may have been a combination of many things: better circumstances, greater trust, meaningful opportunities, the right people, and the gradual return of my own confidence.

Maybe motivation is not always something we can explain neatly. We often talk about it as though it must come from a single goal or a clearly defined source. We assume that motivated people wake up knowing exactly what drives them. But my experience has been much less straightforward. Sometimes, motivation appears only after we begin. It grows when we become immersed in something that matters to us. It strengthens when our work challenges us without making us feel invisible. It becomes joy when we realize that what we are doing connects with a part of ourselves that has been waiting to feel useful again.

At the same time, I do not want to reduce this experience to the idea that staying busy is the answer to struggling. Busyness can sometimes distract us from what we need to confront, and productivity is not a substitute for healing. I learned this the hard way. Our value should never depend entirely on how much we accomplish or how much responsibility we can carry. There will be slower seasons, difficult days, and moments when rest is more necessary than achievement. I am learning that these realities can coexist: 

Work can give us purpose, while rest reminds us that we are worthy even when we are not producing anything.

What made this season different was not simply that I had more things to do. It was that the things I was doing felt meaningful. There is an important difference between being occupied and being engaged. Being occupied fills your time. Being engaged gives that time a sense of direction. The projects I worked on did not merely keep me busy; they invited me to care. They allowed me to contribute, imagine, lead, learn, and build. They made me feel connected to something beyond the completion of another task.

In that sense, work became one of the places where I found parts of myself again.

I found the version of me who gets excited by possibilities. I found the person who enjoys taking on challenges and thinking about how things could be done better. I found the confidence to make decisions, offer ideas, and trust my own judgment. I found joy not because everything was easy, but because I could once again see meaning in the effort. After a year of emotional uncertainty, that return felt significant.

Of course, the first half of this year was not perfect. A turnaround does not mean that every difficult feeling disappears. There were still stressful moments, tiring weeks, and situations that tested my patience. I still had moments of doubt. The difference was that those moments no longer seemed to define the entire experience. They became part of the work rather than proof that I was failing at it. I could feel tired without believing I had lost my passion. I could encounter a setback without assuming that everything was falling apart.

Perhaps that is one of the clearest signs that something had changed: I became more capable of holding both difficulty and joy at the same time.

I could acknowledge that a project was exhausting while still feeling grateful to be part of it. I could recognize the pressure of responsibility while also appreciating the trust behind it. I could admit that I did not have every answer without immediately questioning whether I belonged in the room. The challenges remained, but my relationship with them became healthier. They stopped feeling like judgments of my worth and started becoming opportunities to grow.

Looking back, I feel deeply grateful for this season. I am grateful for the projects that demanded more from me and, in doing so, showed me that I had more to give. I am grateful for the people who trusted me, included me, and allowed my ideas to take up space. I am grateful for the moments when work felt exciting again—not because I had forgotten how difficult the previous year had been, but because I understood exactly how meaningful it was to feel that excitement return.

I also feel grateful to myself for continuing to show up, even during the periods when I could not see where things were heading. 

We often celebrate the version of ourselves that succeeds, creates, leads, and accomplishes something visible. We do not always give enough credit to the version that simply survives uncertainty. But perhaps the joy I experienced this year was made possible by the person I was last year: the person who kept going even when motivation was inconsistent, confidence was fragile, and the future felt unclear.

There is something comforting about realizing that a difficult season does not get the final word. It may change us, slow us down, or make us question things we once knew about ourselves, but it does not mean that enthusiasm is gone forever. Joy can return in unexpected forms. Sometimes, it returns through rest. Sometimes, it returns through people. And sometimes, it returns through a large, complicated project that reminds you how much you still care.

As I move into the second half of the year, I want to carry this realization with me. I want to continue choosing work that allows me to grow without losing myself in the process. I want to remain ambitious while also respecting my limits. I want to celebrate the excitement I feel without turning it into another expectation I must constantly meet. 

Most of all, I want to remember that my value is not created by the work I do, even if meaningful work sometimes helps me recognize that value more clearly.

I still cannot name the exact reason things turned around. Maybe I will understand it better with time, or maybe it will always remain a combination of circumstances, opportunities, healing, and choice. What I know is that something shifted. The weight became lighter. My confidence began to return. Work became a source of energy instead of only an obligation.

And after everything that last year carried, feeling excited, joyful, and valued again has been one of the most meaningful accomplishments of all.

It was not death. It was grief.

I wrote this on May 9, 2023, after my first therapy session.

At the time, I was not writing to make sense to anyone else. I was writing because I needed somewhere to place the weight of what I could not yet fully understand. I went there thinking I needed answers about death, about fear, about the thoughts that kept appearing in the middle of ordinary days and quiet nights. But what I slowly began to realize was that fear is not always about the thing it names. Sometimes, fear is only the shape grief takes when it has been ignored for too long.

I am sharing this now not because I have all the answers, or because healing has become a straight and finished line. It has not. I am sharing this because this was the day I first allowed myself to ask for help, and the day I began to understand that some fears are not warnings, but wounds asking to be seen. Some fears are grief trying to speak.

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Today, I finally decided to see a therapist.

Since my birthday, I have been thinking about death a lot. Not because I want it. In fact, I fear it.

It has become a persistent thought, an idea that creeps in while I do the most ordinary things: walking, eating, riding a motorcycle, sitting inside a car, taking public transport.

What if 29 is the age I am destined to die?

What if it is not 50, like what I constantly tell people when we talk about the perfect human shelf life?

What if I walk on the street and get killed by a crazy bystander? What if I get into an accident because I do not know how to cross the street properly? What if I get food poisoning? What if I suddenly develop a food allergy I never had before? What if the motorcycle I am riding crashes? What if it is a car?

I thought I could easily brush the thought off, but it lingered.

It never went away.

It stayed.

It started affecting the way I saw life, and even the way I moved through my daily routines.

Until one night, it broke into my sleep like a thief in the night. Like an uninvited guest at a birthday party. Like a prisoner who had escaped from jail and found the perfect spot for a hideout.

My eyes were closed, and death came in from my head down to my chest, making my heart beat twice as fast as it normally would. It woke me up, as if sending a reminder that if I closed my eyes any longer, they might never open again.

Not anymore.

So today, I finally decided to see a therapist.

I wanted to understand what was happening to me. Why I was thinking this way. What I should do to make it stop.

I was desperate for answers.

I was longing for answers.

All I could think about were the answers.

On the fifth floor of a six-story building was a small white room where I decided to see a therapist. She was there, sitting on a black swivel chair, waiting for me.

I came in, said hi, and apologized for not showing up on our original schedule, to which she kindly said she understood.

I told her my story.

I told her how I had become scared that death was coming for me soon. I told her this was my first time asking for help, because I had never needed help before.

Or maybe because I always thought asking for help meant inconveniencing people.

I told her I wanted answers.

I told her why I could not die just yet.

Mom left three years ago with three requests I needed to fulfill.

Keep the family together.

Celebrate my little sister’s 18th birthday.

Make sure she finishes college.

They sounded simple when said as sentences. But to me, they became commandments. They became the last shape of my love for her. They became the proof that even after death, I could still be a good son.

I had done two out of three, I told her. But I still had a long road ahead before I could complete the last one.

That was why I could not die yet.

Not because I believed I had control over death, but because the idea of dying before fulfilling all three felt like failing her again. I did not want to meet her in the afterlife with unfinished promises in my hands. I did not want her to look at me and say that I failed her when she was living, and I failed her even after she was gone.

“Let’s talk about your mom,” the therapist said. “Her passing. Can you tell me more?”

I wanted answers, so why were we going there? I asked myself.

But I answered anyway.

I told her about Mom’s death, or at least the version of it I had learned to say out loud.

I told her how everything happened in a way that still feels both slow and sudden to me. How there were days when I knew we were already losing her, but I still kept looking for signs that we could keep her a little longer. How I held on to every possible option, not because I was ready to make difficult decisions, but because I was afraid of what would happen if we stopped trying.

I told her about the dialysis.

How she did not want it. How my dad did not want it. How my siblings did not want it.

And how I did.

Not because I wanted her to suffer. Not because I wanted to go against what everyone else felt. But because I thought that if there was still one more thing we could try, then maybe we should try it.

Maybe that was what love was supposed to do.

Maybe love meant refusing to surrender, even when the body was already tired, even when everyone else was already afraid to hope.

But grief has a cruel way of rewriting intentions.

What I once understood as an act of hope slowly became evidence against me. In my mind, I stopped being the child who wanted his mother to live. I became the person who made the wrong decision. The person who pushed too hard. The person who asked for one more chance, only for that chance to become part of the ending.

I told her how, after Mom died, I did not know where to place that guilt.

There were people to talk to, papers to settle, visitors to receive, decisions to make, messages to answer, and a family to hold together. So I did what I thought I was supposed to do.

I stood there.

I moved.

I answered questions.

I thanked people for coming.

I looked composed enough for everyone to believe I was strong.

And maybe I wanted them to believe it.

Because if they believed I was strong, then maybe I could believe it too.

I told her how I only cried once, inside my apartment, when I got home after the first night of her wake. It was the kind of cry that did not feel like release. It felt like something escaping before I could stop it.

After that, I packed it away.

I wore the bubbly, jolly version of myself again because that was the version people knew. That was the version that did not make people uncomfortable. That was the version that could still function.

Everyone kept saying, “You’re going to be okay.”

But not a single person asked me if I was really okay.

And I think, had even one person asked, I might have fallen apart. I might have admitted that I was not okay. That I was scared. That I was angry. That I felt guilty.

That I did not know how to be a son without a mother.

Or an older sibling with too many responsibilities.

Or a person expected to keep moving after the person who held everything together was gone.

I told her how I felt that the three things Mom asked for became my responsibility alone because she told them to me.

I told her how afraid I was to ask for help, even during the toughest times and the lowest lows, because I did not want to inconvenience the people around me.

I told her how asking for help made me feel less capable. Less competent.

I told her how I had approached life through temporary happiness because, deep inside, I still blamed myself for Mom’s death.

As if I killed her.

As if I caused it because I pushed her to undergo dialysis when she did not want to. When my dad did not want to. When my siblings did not want to.

It was me who wanted it.

And in my mind, it led to her demise.

“I think what you are experiencing now is part of what happened three years ago,” she said. “The thought of death consumes you because you see it as a failure, not a conclusion.”

I see it as a failure, not a conclusion.

Make it make sense.

“We need to unpack more of that grief because it is important to let it out,” she continued. “You have kept it for three years, and healing takes time. One year for others, five for some, twenty for a few. What is important is that you are showing up now.”

Today, I finally decided to see a therapist because I wanted answers about my thoughts on death.

Only it was not death we were answering.

It was grief.

Third Time's the Charm (And Why That's Okay)

 

Twelve years ago, fresh out of college and brimming with the kind of confidence that only comes from not yet knowing what you don't know, I enrolled in a master's program. I thought it was the logical next step. Everyone seemed to be doing it. I wasn't doing it for any particular reason, and maybe that was exactly the problem. Life had other plans, as it often does, and I didn't finish.

The second attempt didn't even make it past the first tuition fee. I paid it, looked at the number again, and realized, with a mix of defeat and reluctant clarity, that this wasn't something I could sustain. Not then. Not that way.

So I let it go. Again.

There's a particular kind of grief that comes with giving something up, especially something you wanted, or thought you wanted. It doesn't announce itself loudly. It just quietly settles into the back of your mind, occasionally surfacing as a what-if, a not yet, or a maybe someday.

For years, the master's degree lived there. In the background. Patient.

And life, to its credit, kept moving. I built a career. I figured out what I was good at and, more importantly, what I actually cared about. I traveled. I grew into myself in ways I couldn't have predicted at twenty. Those years weren't lost time — they were the years that gave me something to bring back to the classroom. I just didn't know it yet.

There's a version of this story where I feel guilty about the detours. Where I look at the years between attempt one and attempt three and see wasted time, missed opportunities, a dream deferred for no good reason. But I've made peace with a different version: that I wasn't ready then, and that's okay. Readiness isn't something you manufacture. Sometimes you just have to live until you get there.

Last year, in my early thirties, I tried again.

This time felt different from the very start. Life had settled into something I could recognize. Not perfect, not fully figured out, but mine. I had a clearer sense of what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be. So when the idea came back around, I didn't dismiss it. I leaned in.

I'm now midway through a Master's in Communication Management, and I'm doing it while working full time. Let me be honest about what that looks like: it means squeezing readings into lunch breaks, writing papers on weekday nights when my brain is already running on fumes, and spending a good chunk of weekends in a classroom instead of on a couch. It means saying no to things I'd rather say yes to. It means operating in a near-constant state of "a lot."

And yet. I love it.

Not in a breezy, Instagram-caption kind of way. I love it the way you love something that asks a lot of you, something that stretches you just past the edge of comfortable and dares you to keep going. That's always been my motto: embrace the uncomfortable. Not because discomfort is noble or because suffering builds character in some abstract sense, but because the things worth doing almost never feel easy at the start. The discomfort is usually a sign you're in the right place.

Being back in school as an adult is a strange and wonderful thing. You notice everything differently. You ask better questions, not because you're smarter, but because you've lived enough to know what you don't understand. You bring your actual life into the room: the career pivots, the hard conversations, the things you've had to unlearn. There's a texture to it that simply wasn't there at twenty, when school was just the thing you did before real life began.

What I didn't expect was how much it would remind me that I'm always a student, in every sense of the word. Not just here, sitting in class with a notebook and a running list of deadlines, but everywhere. In my work, in my relationships, in the quiet moments when something shifts and I realize I've been thinking about something all wrong. Learning doesn't have an endpoint. It just changes shape.

Right now, mine happens to be very literal.

I'm writing this for anyone who has a dream sitting quietly in the back of their mind, waiting. The one you've started and stopped. The one that felt impossible once, or twice. The one you're not sure is still meant for you.

It might be. Timing is not failure. A detour is not a dead end. Sometimes the reason the first two attempts didn't work is simply that they weren't supposed to. The version of you who needed to do this thing hadn't arrived yet.

That version of you might be closer than you think.

Third time's the charm. But only because the first two times were part of the journey too.