You Can’t Outsource Knowing Yourself

I woke in the middle of the night at my sister’s place in Iowa and the window shifted.

Not the curtains. The window. The window tilted upward. I lay there for a moment trying to decide if I was dreaming. I wasn’t. When I got up to walk to the bathroom, I needed the wall to get there. I crawled back to bed.

By morning I knew something had changed.

Justin Welsh wrote recently about floors and ceilings. The financial version. The ceiling is what you’re chasing. The floor is what keeps you from falling through. Most of us, he argued, spend our lives focused on the ceiling and barely know what we’re standing on.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Not the financial version. The whole-life version.

Followers. Output. Income. Toys collected, trips taken, proof of a life going well. Culture hands you the list before you’re old enough to question it. The market keeps score. And neither asks whether any of it is actually yours.

What you cannot outsource is knowing yourself.

What the Narrowing Revealed

The first time the floor shifted beneath me, it happened slowly.

I was working in IT when the department got acquired by a large consulting firm. Everything that had been somewhat personal became even less. Everything that had been possible narrowed. I realized how little control I actually had: over who buys whom, over who I’d report to, over whether my department would even exist next quarter. None of it was mine to control.

What I discovered, in that narrowing, wasn’t frustration. It was clarity. I didn’t want to change a few lines of code. I wanted to write the whole thing. I wanted to be involved earlier, in defining the problem, shaping the solution, building something I could see whole. The corporate structure couldn’t give me that. Not anymore. Maybe not ever.

The floor shifted and I found out what I was standing on. It wasn’t the title or the trajectory. It was the need to do work that felt like mine.

So I left. And built something that did.

It Just Looks Differently For Now

The Iowa dizziness didn’t leave after that first night. It stayed for ten days. Subsided. Still shows up now and then, quieter but present.

For the first four days I didn’t exercise at all. Then I started asking a different question. Not when will this go away. But what can I still do.

Turns out: quite a bit. Just nothing that required turning my head quickly, or moving suddenly up and down. I modified. Found a new version of the exercise routine. Told myself what I apparently needed to hear: it just looks differently for now.

That phrase surprised me when it arrived. It wasn’t resignation. It wasn’t performance. It was something steadier. A kind of internal footing I didn’t know I had until the floor moved.

That’s the floor beneath the floor.

What the Market Can’t Measure

You can track ceiling metrics all you want. The market will tell you how you’re doing. But the capacity to meet disruption without losing yourself? That isn’t something any acquisition, any algorithm, any tilting wall in the middle of the night can take from you.

What’s inside you doesn’t show up in a dashboard.

Last week my husband and I walked through Lithia Park.

We didn’t hike. We didn’t bike. His heart has been asking us to slow down, and my inner ear has seconded the motion. So we walked, slower than we used to, while the sound of the mountain stream running through the park did what moving water always does. It quieted everything else.

At some point I stopped tracking what we weren’t doing.

The ceiling can wait. This. Right here, the two of us, the park, the pace that fits the season. This is the floor. And it’s holding.

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