I keep a version of "there" in my head. The point where I'll have made it, where the work will feel like enough and I can stop having to prove things. For most of my life it has been a specific, nameable place. The problem is that I keep arriving at it, and it's never where I thought.
When I was trying to get into ALX, "there" was finishing the program. I finished it. In school, "there" was the degree. I have the degree now. For a while it was shipping an app that people could actually download and use. I've shipped several. It was landing a real client who paid me real money for my work. That has happened more than once, and one of them left me a perfect review and told me I'd delivered early.
By the measure I used a few years ago, I am standing exactly where "there" was supposed to be. And I don't feel like I've made it. I feel like I'm still near the bottom of something, looking up.
What I've noticed is that the line moves the moment I reach it. The degree quietly became "but what have you built since." A hundred projects became "but are any of them big." Every mark I hit redraws itself a little further out, and I start chasing the new one without ever deciding to. I think a lot of us are running toward a place that steps back exactly as fast as we step forward.
I don't have a clean fix for this. I'm writing this on a day I feel pretty low, not from the far side of having it figured out. If "there" is a real place, I haven't found it, and I've already reached everything I once believed it was.
The only thing all those old finish lines have taught me is to stop trusting the next one. It won't be the spot where I finally feel done either. That isn't a comforting thought, but it's a true one, and it leaves me somewhere a little better than pure chasing: standing on ground a younger me would have called the finish line, trying to let that count for something even on a day it doesn't feel like much.
Cover photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash
