Too Many Anti-Role Models

I’m sprawled out on my therapist’s couch (a familiar position by now) when she looks at me with that knowing tilt of her head.

“You know what the issue is here?” she asks.

I smirk. Here we go again.

We’ve combed through childhood terrain, generational dysfunction, attachment styles, the whole buffet...What new revelation could possibly be unearthed about me now?

Then she says it.

“You have too many anti-role models.”

I pause.

She continues,

“You grew up around people you vowed never to become. Overweight, emotionally immature, checked-out, angry, stagnant…You’ve formed your identity by negation. You know exactly what you don’t want. But you don’t fully know what you’re heading toward.”

And suddenly I’m not amused anymore.

I’m quiet.

Because she’s right.

I think a lot of us live like this. Running from familiar chaos instead of working towards forming our own blueprint.

Our sense of self is built out of a refusal that sounds something like:

I will not be complacent.
I will not be like them.
I will not settle.

That rage-fuel is useful. It motivates you to do and be better. It gives you ambition before you even understand ambition fully. But at some point, the propulsion system breaks down.

Fear tells you what not to do.
Desire tells you where to go.

If your entire life strategy is “not that,” you only get as far as the opposite, not necessarily your own truth.

So lately, I’ve been sitting with the harder questions:

What do I want that has nothing to do with surpassing, resisting, or outperforming someone else’s limitations?

What does it look like to choose based on joy instead of avoidance? To build my life from vision rather than vengeance?

To say, this is who I am, instead of this is who I refused to become?

Cause anti-role models can spark awareness, sure, but they can’t architect your future.

At some point, you have to graduate.

You gotta stop running from the fire behind you, and start walking toward the horizon in front of you (as cheesy as that sounds).

That shift, from avoidance to authorship, feels to me like the real work of adulthood.

So, maybe that’s what growing up actually is.

Moving from rebelling against to becoming for.

Because the people who shaped us by being our “never again” taught us plenty.

But they can’t tell us who we are.

That part is all ours.

*Photo is a screenshot from thatcoolmoodboard