When I was young, the question that hung over my generation of women was deceptively simple. Are you going to have a career, or are you going to marry and have a family? As if a life could be sorted into a single lane on a highway someone else had already mapped.
Most of us inherited a blueprint. Go to school. Find stable work. Marry. Settle. Retire. It is not a bad blueprint. It offers security, continuity, a recognizable shape to hang a life on. But for many of us, it fits the way a borrowed coat fits. Functional. Just not quite ours.
I followed pieces of it and abandoned others. I changed cities, changed roles, changed the entire geography of my life more than once. I built a career that took me from a children’s hospital that filled my heart, through infection control and pandemic response, to a research role I still find deeply meaningful. I married, and that chapter ended. I lost my parents and moved alone across the country to an acreage in Nova Scotia with a dream of a permaculture food forest. None of that was in the original plan.
And here is what I know from living that arc. The moments that cracked the blueprint open were not disasters. They were invitations.
Every forced pivot, every door that closed, every chapter that ended before I was ready, led somewhere I could not have planned my way to. The richness was never in the safety. It was in the willingness to keep moving toward what felt true, even when the path was unclear.
This is not a post about throwing caution to the wind. Security matters. Stability matters. But there is a difference between building a life on solid ground and building one inside walls that were never meant to hold you.
What the blueprint rarely accounts for is the version of you that emerges on the other side of difficulty. The competence earned through uncertainty. The clarity that only comes from being lost for a while. The people you would never have met if everything had gone according to plan.
Seek out the places where your heart feels at home. Stay open to the unpredictable. Say yes to the nudge, the quiet pull, the door that opens unexpectedly. You may not live the expected or ordinary life. But you will live a rich one, full of trials and challenges and rewards that the blueprint could never have imagined for you.
The plan was never the point. You are the point.
