“One foot in front of the other.”
These are the words I kept repeating after nothing seemed to be going right.
There is something strange about feeling behind. Sometimes, nothing has completely fallen apart, but nothing feels like it is moving forward either.
You watch other people announce new jobs, promotions, marriages, opportunities, and milestones. Meanwhile, you are trying to make sense of loss and a lack of direction in your own journey.
Two years after graduating, I thought I would feel more certain.
Instead, I found myself building freelance projects in uncertain markets, navigating rejections in a shifting tech landscape, losing my foundations while moving across countries, and losing relationships. It made me constantly question whether I was moving forward at all, or if it was just bad luck.
The hardest part was believing that uncertainty did not automatically mean failure.
While cringing, I gave in to the idea of a gratitude journal. I forced myself to write one thing I was grateful for every day, even when nothing seemed to be going right. At first, it felt ridiculous.
When you are worried about what comes next, writing down something small that went well can feel completely disconnected from the bigger problem and like a waste of time.
Slowly but surely, I started viewing situations differently. Time started slowing down, and I was no longer in a fight-or-flight state of mind. Not everything had to be a drastic loss. Not knowing what came next did not mean that nothing was coming.
Maybe it was a road to something better. And now that I reflect on it two years later, that was exactly true.
Some of the opportunities I was most disappointed about losing eventually pushed me toward things I would never have considered otherwise.
Some plans had to fall apart before I was willing to make different ones. And some periods that felt completely stagnant while I was living through them eventually became the moments when I changed direction the most, often the most uncomfortable and painful moments too.
I think that is what makes uncertainty so difficult.
You have to live through the loss before you know what the loss was leading toward. There is no clarity when you're in it. Like pilots flying blind through turbulence, you just need to trust that they'll get you to the destination.
Loss is painful, but it needs to occur to show you different paths, and you never know how it could change your trajectory.
I still do not think every setback happens for some perfectly orchestrated reason. Sometimes things simply do not work out. But, maybe falling behind is not always the right way to describe it.
Maybe sometimes you are recalibrating to learn what you actually want.
I still have moments when I look too far ahead and question how to persist without guarantees.
But now, when everything starts feeling overwhelming, I return to the same sentence: “One foot in front of the other.”
Not because I know exactly where it leads. But because that's the only move forward.