What I chose instead of certainty
I saw this quote the other day:
"Live as if the answers don't matter, only the questions, the passions, and the moments that make you feel alive. Chase knowledge, embrace the unknown, and write your story with open hands."
It stayed with me, not because it offered a new truth, but because it pointed to something I’ve always quietly believed. That the answers, in all their polished finality, are often less alive than the questions that haunt us. That the moments where we feel most awake are rarely the ones where everything makes sense, they’re the ones where everything doesn’t, and we still keep choosing it. Choosing to stay, choosing to feel, and choosing to become.
There is no roadmap for the life you are meant to live, only the pull of your own longing, the quiet hum of the things that set your soul on fire.
And how strange it is, that our bodies often know before our minds catch up. That biology itself can signal a kind of knowing: a tightening in the chest, a lurch in the gut, the flutter that arrives before any language forms. I used to think longing was weakness—something to be disciplined or outgrown. But I’ve come to believe it is intelligence in its rawest form. A direction without coordinates. A compass without words.
Do not wait for certainty before you begin. Do not let fear keep you tethered to the shore while the tide calls your name.
I’ve waited before and waited for the right time, the right signal, the right level of readiness. And each time, I confused stillness for safety. But safety, I’ve learned, can be a trap disguised as discipline. There is no perfect moment. There is only this one and the chance to respond to it.
Go, even if you must go alone. Learn, even if the lesson is hard. Love, even if it doesn't last forever.
There is a particular kind of education in solitude. A curriculum of the self. The kind that isn’t taught in lecture halls but in mornings you wake up unsure of who you are becoming. The lessons that gut you, that sharpen you, that ask for every ounce of presence you can give. And love—yes, even if it breaks. Even if it ruins the version of you that once clung to permanence like it was a lifeline. That, too, is worth it.
The point was never to have all the answers; it was to live the questions, to follow where they lead, to let the unknown shape you into something wilder, freer, truer.
I think we forget that life is less like a formula and more like an unfolding. It doesn’t solve, it reveals. And often, the most important transformations happen quietly, inconveniently, or without applause. But the unknown has a way of demanding authenticity. It forces you to choose yourself before the outcome is guaranteed. It asks for faith, not the spiritual kind, but the brutal, daily practice of believing in something before it has shape.
You are not here to wait, to hesitate, to ask for permission. You are here to become.
And becoming isn’t passive. It’s violent, sometimes. Tender, other times. But always precise. It dismantles everything you were taught to protect; your predictability, your performance, your posture. It asks for your rawness, not your résumé. It teaches you how to hold both doubt and determination in the same breath. That is the evolution that matters.
And becoming will not always be easy. Some doors will close before you are ready. Some dreams will demand more of you than you thought you had to give.
There are no shortcuts through that kind of ache. I’ve tried to take them—numbed my way through it, intellectualized it, tried to make it small enough to carry without trembling. But there are certain thresholds that require your full weight. And some dreams will burn through you before they build you.
There will be days when the path is obscured, when doubt sinks its teeth into your skin, when solitude feels heavier than adventure. But keep moving. Keep asking. Keep trusting that even in uncertainty, you are not lost, you are in motion.
The motion is the truth. Even when it’s quiet. Even when it’s just a single breath taken while kneeling on the bathroom floor. There is dignity in movement. There is grace in not knowing and still continuing. This is not the kind of clarity you can map—it’s the kind you live your way into.
Life was never meant to be something you mastered, only something you met fully, without reservation. So step forward, unafraid. Let the questions pull you toward the life that is waiting for you. And when you look back, let it be with awe, at how far you have come, at how much you have dared, at how beautifully you have lived.
I don’t want a life that fits neatly into a narrative. I want one that resists summary. One that holds the unbearable and the beautiful in equal measure. Not a clean cut, but a lived tension, a constant negotiation between longing and surrender. I want to know I touched the edges of what I could not name. That I did not sleepwalk through my becoming. That I stayed awake to it all.
And if, in the end, I still don’t have the answers—if all I hold are fragments, scars, the memory of a thousand almosts—will that be enough to say I was truly here?
Or, what if the point was never to find the answer, but to live in a way that made the question worth asking?
