If life is indeed a highway...many of us careerists can be found squinting at a dog-eared, crinkled, coffee-stained foldout map, from the backseat of our parents’ ‘73 Chrysler LeBaron.
We can’t see the full picture. We don't even know what we don’t know. And we’re swerving, as big trucks pass by uncomfortably close.
In the morning, we chose jobs, built careers, let them shape our identities. By the late afternoon, a question we've never fully answered still has its hand on the wheel.
It keeps influencing the choices we make. The things we hear ourselves say. The risks we avoid. The rabbit holes we slide down. The vices we take on to escape the utter confusion.
Photo by Maia Habegger on Unsplash
This question persists, steering you across rocky fields, into barn doors and against stone walls. You keep bouncing, flailing, bruising.
When your external needs and the internal wants aren’t aligned, this invisible struggle keeps affecting your behavior. And you end up living an incomplete version of your self. You hear yourself lodging the same complaints, immediately followed by the same justifications, out loud, to yourself and others, over and over and over.
Try as I might, I truly couldn’t understand myself until my 40s.
And I was driving around with a more obvious version of this problem than most.
I was adopted at birth. At three days old, I was on a flight from Arizona to New York.
So as an adult, the incomplete picture for me was literal. I spent years making major decisions, career pivots, creative leaps, the whole accumulation of a life, with maybe only 50-60% of an understanding of who I even was.
In my 30’s, while navigating arguably the most demanding job of my career, I found my birthmother. When I first called her on the phone, I was shuffling slowly through thick snow in a very quiet Prospect Park. I swear I recognized her voice. It filled my heart.
I won't spill every detail right now. But here’s a snapshot from my POV at my wedding: my birthmom and my adoptive mom holding hands, with tears in their eyes. Two women who had never met, each having had a massive influence on the man standing before them. And there he stood, solid on his feet, having brought them together. Trading vows with the next most-influential woman in his life.
I thought my picture was complete.
Years later, after I'd moved across the country, after I’d chased an opportunity to executive produce a sitcom, and after I'd thrown myself into the men's work that would reshape everything, I finally sought out my birthfather.
When he and I met up in person, something clicked in a way that I hadn't expected.
Suddenly I could map it. All of it: Which instincts came from where. Which tendencies I'd inherited and which I'd chosen. Which interests were mine and which had been handed down. Mindblowing stuff.
At one point, I remember blurting at him, “this experience is literally giving me life!”
For the first time ever, I could look out at the full terrain. Four parents from entirely different worlds, and me, standing in the middle. Clarity, with a wide-angle lens.
I suddenly felt free to move forward with new purpose.
The more complete my picture, the less I kept auditioning for everyone else's version of me and the more I trusted the instincts I'd spent years second-guessing.
Concepts like autonomy, self-agency, groundedness, confidence, self-love - they all became a daily practice.
Here's what I've come to believe, and why I'm sharing this with you specifically:
Most people aren't adopted. But many stumble around with an incomplete picture of themselves.
Maybe you've spent so long being defined by your work or your job title that you've forgotten what you actually care about when nobody's watching. Maybe you made a series of practical, or irrational, decisions in your 20s and 30s that took you far from something you once wanted, and you've been so busy moving through your days that you haven't stopped to consider that distance. Maybe you're standing at a bifurcation point right now: a layoff, a resignation, a restlessness you can't quite name, and the reason the way forward feels unclear is that you don't yet have a complete enough picture of yourself, to trust your instincts.
I avoided this work too. I untangled myself a bit during my 20s and 30s, but it wasn’t until completing this picture for myself in my 40s that I finally got it.
The truth is, this work can be genuinely hard.
Completing the picture means sitting with things you've successfully outrun for years.
It isn't necessarily therapy or navel-gazing. I think it's actually the most practical thing a creative professional in transition can do.
And you don't have to do it alone. Thanks for joining The Courageous.
Drop me a line and tell me what you're working through. And tell me what came up as you read this. I read every single response.
You’ve got this.
Onward,
Kevin
Founder, THE COURAGEOUS