Today All Groan Up welcomes this insightful guest post from Mackenzie Belcastro. Find out more about Mackenzie at the bottom of this post. Enjoy! ~ Paul Angone

Sometimes life feels so out of whack that all we want to do is run away.

Our relationships are confusing, our jobs borderline degrading, and our sense of self feels like it’s quickly dissolving. Meanwhile, our Instagram feeds are riddled with our friends’ sunny lives, lives we know intellectually are mere highlight reels, and yet make us feel subpar anyway. We wonder if we’re “doing life wrong.”

Would that e-course or growth service really change my life? We ask. Should I be filming myself jumping off furniture like that 10 year old millionaire on YouTube?

Enter: the urge to throw our hands in the air and run—be that to our Netflix queue, the bottom of a wine bottle, or even another country.

Here’s the thing though, our lives don’t need escaping.

What they need, when everything feels wrong and we hopeless, is the opposite.

Instead of trying to outrun our pain points, we’d be best served if we held them close and honored them for what they really are: a call to sit still and reflect.

1.     What do I dislike about my current situation? And what do I enjoy?



Maybe you like the structure and stability of your job, but you hate the content of it. Or maybe you like what your job entails, but you hate having to respond to someone else. Maybe you like the freedom of being a freelancer but you hate working alone and would benefit from a communal workspace.

Perhaps your pain has nothing to do with your work and everything to do with your personal life. Investigate. You can only design the lifestyle most appropriate for you when you know what’s not working in your life, and what is. From that place of self-awareness, and only from that place, can you move forward.

2.     What excites me?

Don’t limit yourself to activities here. Simply think of words that, when curled into your ear, draw a smile across your lips. Don’t explain them. Just make a list of bullet points.

Say you wind up reading “fresh air” and “hiking” or “old movies” and “thrift shopping”—it doesn’t matter what—you will be reminded of what lights you up, and what to make space for in your life.

Note, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to make a career out of your favorite hobbies, but what it does mean is you need to carve out time to honor what makes you happy. Often, these lists bring up memories buried in our past, creative treasures we’ve pushed aside in the name of “growing up.”

Don’t be ashamed of whatever comes up for you. If you liked reading Nancy Drew when you were eight, look into that. Dig around.

As Robert Greene once said, finding your calling is about looking back to who you were when you were young, noticing what you were drawn to.

3.     What does my ideal day look like?

As you ask yourself this, note what you include and what you leave out. For instance, does your ideal day include a lot of people? Very few people? No one? Are you creating something? Helping someone? Or are you at a party? Throwing a party? Is there something going on every hour until bedtime, or is there a lot of downtime? Are you exploring? Reporting? What are you wearing? What’s the weather like?

Here are two ways to go about this exercise. One, take out a blank sheet of paper and begin journalling, in as much detail as possible, starting from the moment you awake—noting the time of day—to the moment you lay your head to sleep. Two, spend ten minutes meditating.

Visualizing yourself moving through your ideal day is extraordinarily powerful. Imagine what your home looks like, where it’s situated, what you’re doing, where else you’re spending your time—everything you’re doing, again, from the moment you rise, to the moment you sleep.

If you want help, there are lots of great videos on YouTube that can help with this.

4.     What is one thing I can do to close the gap between my present and my ideal day right now?

This is the most important part. Numbers 1-3 are about becoming self-aware in order for you to get here: the action phase. If you want to change your life, and I mean really change it—so that you no longer want to run away but rather you crave more days to continue doing exactly what you’re doing because it brings you life—you must take action.

“Where do I start?” This is where we often get stuck, caught up in making the “right” first move. But here’s the truth: there is no correct move, ever. There are simply things that jive with us, and those that don’t. And we will never know, truly, what those things are until we start experimenting.

In writing, we say you can’t edit a blank sheet. And so goes the same in life. You have to begin somewhere, anywhere, and then pivot from there, as need be.

If you want to write, write anything—any genre, on any platform, and, again, stay aware of what feels right for you. Same goes for everything, even business. You need to start with a messy rough draft. As Paul writes in his book 101 Secrets For Your Twenties, “Success in your twenties is about having the courage to write a lousy first draft.”

You need to remember that the only real failure is never starting at all. Everything else is a learning opportunity, really.

5.     What does it mean, to me, to be “figured out”?



A lot of this anxiety we feel when we compare ourselves to others comes down to this feeling that we are off in the obscure mist, a long way off from where we’re “supposed to be,” meanwhile, our peers are “figured out.”

It seems often like everyone around us is “arriving” in their chosen fields, or settling down in their personal lives, or both. So how can we ease our anxiety when we feel like we’re still zig-zagging in the dark, trying to find our proper path?

One, by doing the above and coming to a clearer understanding of what it even means for us, personally, to be “figured out.” Because, for everyone, that means something different. Some wish for career goals to be met by a certain age, while others rank personal goals ahead on their list.

Ultimately, we can strive to come to a place internally where we don’t put so much pressure on ourselves, where we learn to surrender—let things unfold as they will. But if that’s too “woo” for your Type A personality, then at least understand your own goals, and know that you can only do so much at a time.

Two, we can shift our mindset by reminding ourselves repeatedly that all this topsy-turvy-ness we’re experiencing is, in fact, us on our proper path. This second adolescence we’re swimming through can be a period of exponential growth, if we quit running and start paying attention to how we’re feeling and ask ourselves why.

If and when we do, we will find ourselves gradually more and more aligned with who we are, and if we’re taking action, we’ll find our days increasingly filled with what lights us up.

Remember: change doesn’t happen overnight. It happens through years of listening to our internal signals, starting, pivoting, learning and growing.

P.S. We’re all in this together.

Today’s post was written by Mackenzie Belcastro. Mackenzie is a debut novelist, poet and the co-founder of Saturday Social TO, a biannual event series geared at gathering and educating aspiring creatives and entrepreneurs. She also blogs about her and her arts community’s journeys at mackenziebelcastro.com. Find her at Twitter and Instagram at macbelcastro.