Curating your life; feeling stuck, aesthetics and going on a life diet
You are what you consume
Feeling Stuck
It’s easy to feel stuck as you get older, you can start to feel a sense of being tethered to where you are, this might be because you have children, a mortgage or elderly parents that you care for. All of these things are like anchors keeping you in place even when you feel like you want to wander. I have really felt this over the last 9 months, this urge to be something else and to create something else for myself.
I know that it’s never too late to change something, I know that I could up and leave my hometown and find a new job and a new house and take my children and partner with me. However, part of being an adult is knowing that these decisions no longer only effect me. As someone who is trying to heal childhood wounds, I don’t want my children to feel everything they know has been stripped from them to support some dream I have had a little too late.
Ultimately, I am no longer the main character with all the options ahead of me. I am Lorelai Gilmore, I am trying to live my best life whilst also trying to make sure my children do too.
Romanticising everyone else’s lives
We all know the saying, ‘you are what you eat’, well that’s true for everything you consume and I think that consumption has a huge part to play in the way we feel and the lens with which we see our lives. For example, I seem to be on the ‘thought daughter’ side of Substack. I’ve found myself following a bunch of 20-year-olds as they ponder the meaning of life, navigating living in exciting cities and just being completely free to make decisions. My life couldn’t be further from this and I have to tow the line of appreciating their writing whilst also not berating myself for never living that life.
We romanticise constantly how everyone else lives and forget to appreciate how we live ourselves. I have seen people online romanticise growing up like the teenagers in the 00’s tv series ‘Skins’. That was exactly my experience as a teen and it was a messy, alcohol fuelled hell to be quite honest. The fact that people romanticise that is beyond me but it highlights the point I am trying to make well, what we see online or screen has been dwindled down to an aesthetic. It’s the aesthetic of skins that seems fun but the characters living those lives are often unhappy and lost and too young to be making some of the decisions they do make.
Curating your life
All is not lost though, you have the power to decide what you want to consume and how much of it you want to consume. Many years ago I listened to ‘The Life Diet’ by Laura Jane Williams
The Life Diet is Laura Jane Williams' brilliantly funny, painfully honest and inspiringly insightful philosophy of what it means to curate your life in order to fill your time, thoughts and relationships with inspiration, motivation, and love - by getting rid of everything else.1  Â
I don’t remember much of the intricacies, I really need to have a relisten, but Laura spoke about how we get to choose what we watch on tv, what books we read, what places we visit, who we make time for and so on. Through this we get to create our best lives with what we have. It is not dissimilar from the pillars of life, the idea that we need to balance all the pillars to create optimum enjoyment and if you’re feeling stuck I think deciding what you want your life to be made up of is a good place to start.
For me, I want real connections with people, I want to do things that make me feel good both physically and mentally, I want financial security, I want to feel content and I want excitement. My best life won’t be your best life and on your list might be travelling the world, making music or feeling like you make a difference to society and that’s the joy, YOU get to decide.
With this, you also get to decide what doesn’t serve you like that pair of jeans that hasn’t fit you since you were 23-years-old and makes you feel like shit every time you see them or that influencer you follow who lives in Dubai and makes you angry because they only care about making money promoting diet supplements to their teenage following. Remove that shit from your life.
Journaling Prompts
I will leave you with some journaling prompts to start you off -
If you had a whole day to yourself that you were free to do whatever you wanted with, how would you spend it?
What parts of your life can’t you change?
Of the parts you can’t change, how can you improve them.(For me, I can’t change where I live right now but if I could I would definitely be somewhere more off grid where I can escape the constant noise of people and go swimming in lakes as much as I want. To make this more my reality within the parameters I can, I have deleted some of my socials and found a lake that’s 20 minutes away to go swimming in regularly - its about small, achievable changes)
What are your 5 priorities in life?
How can you work on/do more of these things?
The Life Diet — Laura Jane Williams (laurajaneauthor.com)
this is one of the best Substack essays I’ve read. I don’t have an answer to the first prompt and that got me, you triggered major thinking that needs to be done. Thank you for your words!