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My life has been carved out of pleasing everyone I know but myself.

What do I really want in my life? Instantly the thought pops up, almost blocking the end of that sentence. You can’t have what you really want, it says. Interjections like this have been responsible for the existence of the muddy vision I have been following. They slap the natural creative energy, the potential of imagination, out of my brain.

I contemplate that if I allowed myself to live how I actually want to live – if I really, really loved my life – I would feel no emotional need to reach for a substance or a crutch at the end of a really long day, because my days would be filled with so much genuine satisfaction. Maybe the physical want would remain, but that can be mitigated through logic and is easier to control – don’t buy the thing, don’t go to the place where you did the thing, etc. I know too well that putting the physical brakes on an emotional want does not work: the brain finds a way to justify the want.

Going cold turkey on something I have depended upon to get through the day for too long does not solve the problem. Instead, it exposes the dull, tedious life I have been living, draws it out into the light. Imagine wanting to socialise and meet people and not having anything to share with them because you haven’t actually been living, you’re as dead and as dull as the majority of adults you despised when you were younger and more free.

There’s the rub.

When I interject the thought, I ask why?, it responds, you are not special, you are no different than all the other people that work for the sake of paying their bills, what makes you think you are any better than them? It is so easy to stay mediocre, and to try and climb out of the hole you fell into reminds others of the existence of that option. However by that point, people’s minds have been entrenched with layers upon layers of comforting justification for their own downfall that it’s really painful to see someone around them actually succeed at making their life better.

My parents never got what they really wanted in life. How could they, both from a very early age suppressed by a cult-like religion, surrounded by individuals devoting themselves not to bettering their lives but to an organisation that did nothing for them but take their donations and their time and gave them a fractured value system rooted in cognitive dissonance. And though they are the most free they’ve ever been in their life in their fifties and sixties, they still play small. Taking risks as mild as going on a holiday in a new place or trying a new food, things that are meant to be full of joy and adventure on the smallest level – shakes my father’s exhausted nervous system into fight and flight, which if not coddled, can easily turn into defensiveness and anger. Their lives were dictated for decades by the familiar hum of a routine that reassured them they were ‘normal’ in a time when they were certain that their internal worlds were not.

Always playing small means not taking a promotion – not even if you’re offered the opportunity, or whether people recognise you as a good worker – because you don’t want the extra responsibility. It means friendships are sparse because you’re conditioned to believe that other people’s ambitions represent the wickedness of the world. To be good means to suffer, to sacrifice. To be bad is to invest in yourself. Such is an example of the inverted value system of the religion.

It means you respond to compliments people give you with you demeaning yourself, instead of saying ‘thank you’. It means you grow to contain immense amounts of jealousy towards people you see thriving with a busy, complex life. It means you never move or travel beyond what is absolutely necessary, because you can’t handle being in a different environment. It is the restriction that you fall in love with – and at the same time, you convince yourself that it is all you ever want and all you ever wanted, while at the same time, faintly yearning for just… something more.

And to see my parents sacrifice everything that could be in their hearts to two pillars: a religion, and a stable income. No matter what, I and my brother never had to think about money as young children. A guaranteed salary at the end of every month anchors the grip of the work and school routine as something necessary. My parents did everything right to ensure that we were brought up financially responsible and successful, so much that it became a burden of anxiety for them, just like everything else. I grew up living in a household that had money, but refused to do anything adventurous with it, leading me to develop a pseudo-scarcity mindset. The majority of money had to be saved, not spent. Everything measured under a sensible light.

I made do with stained clothes, clothes with holes or clothes I owned for a number of years. I bought all my clothes from charity shops with inconsistent and clunky fashion styles. I never did anything with my nails, I kept makeup products far past their expiry date. As a first-year university student I would obsess over the numbers in my bank account and would get obsessively anxious on the rare occasions that I would lend money to people. I convinced myself that my peers who could clearly afford to show off their success through what was on their body were conceited and arrogant. On the other hand, here was me, a martyr, a incredibly judgmental victim to my circumstances. I was taught that to spend money on such things was superficial, not necessary for success, and so they remained at the bottom of my priority list. After all, it was drummed into me that brains matter more than beauty, right?

I remained – and have remained – on the bottom rung of the world in working-class, entry level jobs, stuck in an atmosphere of cognitive dissonance. I want more for myself but I have done very little to prove that, stuck in the traps and the blocks of nothing but my own mind. I intrinsically believe that my life is too valuable to be at the mercy of a routine dictated by some faceless conglomerate when there is so much freedom out there. I get frustrated at the behaviour of the people I work with because it is clear that a lot of them are not happy with the state of their lives either, but they are not doing anything to change it.

I am trying to become ruthless with my life, I am trying to prioritise myself, and in doing so, I am letting go of values and beliefs that are holding me back from being free. Thought pops up again – why should it only be you that is free? Don’t you want everyone to be free? but then the system wouldn’t work, so if you are free and other people are not, that means you think that you’re better than everyone else! That acts like a trigger to the people-pleaser in me.

Why do I care so much about other people’s lives but not my own? Why do I let my own life fall by the wayside but expend so much energy over comparing and judging others?

Because, I was not exactly taught to take charge of my own life.

So now, I am learning.

And one day, my life will be free.