An Ordinary Life

I’m not sure when we begin to sense that we are meant for something more than an ordinary life.

Maybe it happens before we have language for it.

Before we know what makes a person impressive.
Before we understand credentials or money or beauty or status.
Before we begin studying the faces around us for evidence that we are getting life right.

There is simply a spark.

A felt sense of being fully ourselves.
A private aliveness.
Something inside us - that we love - that is particular and unmistakably ours.

We don’t have to prove it yet because we haven’t learned that proof is required.

And then.

We begin to notice that other people have opinions about us.

We learn that some parts of us are welcomed and other parts make people uncomfortable. Some qualities earn applause. Others earn a raised eyebrow, a correction, a laugh at our expense.

The unmistakable feeling that we’ve gotten ourselves wrong.

Too loud.
Too sensitive.
Too much.
Too weird.

Not enough.

And because we are children, we never think, “These people may be limited in their ability to see me clearly.”

We think, “Maybe they’re right.”

Maybe that thing I thought about myself was foolish.
Maybe I imagined it.
Maybe I’m not who I thought I was.

But the spark doesn’t disappear simply because we begin to distrust it.

It stays.

And it quietly shapes the life we try to build.

We become determined not to live an ordinary life, although we may never say those words aloud. We long to create something that proves the thing we once knew instinctively: that there’s something here worth seeing. something particular. Something shiny.

So we begin collecting evidence.

The degree.
The promotion.
The house.
The marriage.
The good children.
The beautifully handled crisis.
The reputation for being competent and generous and endlessly dependable.

None of these are inherently hollow.
None of them are wrong.

The problem is that, somewhere along the way, many of us stop asking whether the life we’re building feels alive from the inside.

Instead, we begin asking whether it looks convincing from the outside.

Before we know it we’ve set our sights on a version of extraordinary that can be measured in the reflection of other people’s eyes.

And here, things become terribly slippery.

Because in our attempt to escape an ordinary life, we slowly bend ourselves into one.

Not because the life itself looks any particular way. It may be objectively impressive with a corner office, a wall of diplomas and a LinkedIN profile that makes other people sit up a little straighter. Or it may be the life of the woman who learned early that approval is earned through service to the ambitions of others.

What matters is that when we build a life primarily for the viewer rather than the experiencer, something essential begins to flatten.

The life may be full.
It may be successful.
It may even be enviable.

Yet, from the inside, it feels strangely ordinary.

And the reckoning begins.

For decades, those external measures kept us moving. They provide structure and momentum. They make us feel safe. They reassure us that we’re progressing toward something.

Somewhere between 40-something and 60-something that which was hidden, stuffed down and ignored begins to emerge.

All that we worked so hard to earn, create, and catalog as evidence of being enough starts to crumble, and that voice, long suppressed begins to whisper…

I am here.

We keep attempting to measure ourselves with that same old stick of approval but it now it feels more off than ever - it feels like failure.

We tell ourselves we should be grateful.
We wonder what is wrong with us.
We worry that it’s too late or too greedy to want something different.

But the whisper only grows louder.

I think about my grandparents. Sunday afternoons around the table. Wine, pasta, the windows open. Someone tells a dirty joke - a paper napkin blows across the table.

I wasn’t watching.

I was in it.

Laughing and full and completely unaware that this was a moment worth cataloging. No one was performing. No one was watching to see if it was going well.

It just was.

That’s what I mean by extraordinary.

And we can be gloriously, authentically alive while running a company, writing a book, raising a family, or leading a movement.

The shape of the life is not the point.

The question is whether the life belongs to the person living it.

The whisper doesn’t ask that you prove, once and for all that you’re extraordinary.

It’s reminding you to listen again for the thing that existed before the applause.
Before the criticism.
Before the expectations were set.

And to ask a much simpler question…
Does this life feel like mine?

Share

Liminal is a space for women who know that some part of their life no longer feels fully their own.

It is where we slow down long enough to hear what has been buried beneath the roles, responsibilities, and expectations, and begin creating a life that feels more deeply inhabited.

If the question Does this life feel like mine? landed, you can learn more about Liminal here.