everything I know about doing it right and doing it wrong

A reflection upon finishing Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton— the memoir of a British journalist navigating friendships, relationships, and growing up through the infamous “defining decade” I currently reside in, our twenties.

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So here I am in the earliest of twenties, with some of the least responsibility I’ll ever have again, wasting it away by wishing and wondering and watching for “what’s next”.

I spend a large majority of my time obsessing over what I’m doing ‘right’, how I could be doing it better, but most of all trying to preemptively encounter regrets from a future that doesn’t yet exist… in order to go back and avoid them in the past… which is actually just right now.

Right now is actually all there is.

Then what if I just decided I am inevitably doing it ‘wrong’?

The inherent issue being how we define and label ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. There’s infinite grey area. Who is presiding judge of all rightness and wrongness, filing away each action we take and step we make as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’?

Something that feels very ‘wrong’ upon experience can lead you somewhere very ‘right’— days, months, or years down the line. It’s only in hindsight when we’ve stepped far enough away from the canvas that the little dots of paint resemble the bigger picture of our lives like a carefully crafted pointillist painting by Seurat.

The freedom comes from realizing that that knowledge of ‘how I could have done things differently knowing what I know now’ only arrives in going through the experience of right now in whatever shape it takes.

Hindsight vision requires the experiencing of the sight to be able to look back upon it from a more informed place.

So what if instead I just decided I am inevitably doing everything ‘right’ because there is no wrong.

it’s all a lesson, it’s all clarity, it’s all experience.

Getting caught up in the details that won’t matter once the wisdom of living through the experience sets in is only deterring me from experiencing it, whatever it is, right now.

What if doing it ‘right’ is as simple as experiencing it?

This journey requires a full spectrum— from mistakes to wins, from sorrow to celebration, from recognizing that every imperfection is perfect in its own perfect way.

keep writing, keep reading, keep walking around outside in nature, keep sitting in silence and stillness and feeling the feelings that come up for you

keep leaning into what feels exciting and what you’re curious about and how you feel around people and places and what your body wants and what it needs

keep inviting in more kindness, more love, more ease, more play, more imagination from the inner depths of your being because they all live deep within you for a purpose

The process of creating the external life you dream of comes from first realizing it internally, that it not only already exists but is yours to bring into this world.

let it live out through you, let it twist and turn in ways your human brain can’t conceive the details of, let it come to life as you remember your true essence and as you connect back to being, let it take all the time it needs

let yourself remember in your own way because whatever it looks like, it is ‘right’ for your story

and let the distraction of the details fall away