I made a deal with life. It stopped working.

Make money here, enjoy there, stop complaining in between.

Dissatisfaction with my professional life followed me for most of my life.

Not a dramatic dissatisfaction. A dull, persistent one. The kind that doesn’t make noise but never fully leaves.

For the longest time I thought there was something wrong with me.

Why can’t I like anything I do? Why don’t I even know what I like?

I remember my mom telling me years ago how hard it was for her to understand what I was going through. She said: this was never really a thing for me. I knew I wanted to be a psychologist, so that’s what I did. She always knew.

Not me.

I remember watching her face, confused by my confusion. And then turning that confusion back on myself. If even she can’t make sense of this... it really must be me.

Maybe this is you too. And if it is, you are not alone. This is real. It doesn’t mean you are broken.

But I didn’t know that.

I did vocational tests and rolled my eyes at the results. Went over every course at every university around me and felt nothing. Not even a flicker of yes.

I picked tourism because I loved to travel, then hated the industry. No time, no air, nothing of my own.

Then business management, because if you don’t know what to do, go generalist. At least you’ll fit somewhere.

Even without knowing what I truly loved, I gave everything I had to whatever was in front of me. I was succeeding. On paper, I was doing great.

But nothing felt natural. Nothing ever felt like mine. You know that feeling… I was born to do this…. nah… not me.

And there was that voice. You know the one. Why don’t you just like what you do. Why can’t you enjoy it. Out of everything in the world, nothing? You are so complicated, so fussy, so hard to please.

Why are you the only one this lost?

I believed it.

So I made a deal with life. Make money here, enjoy there. Stop complaining in between.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

The dissatisfaction kept growing. The headaches too. The few weeks off a year were never enough to breathe. I was always waiting, for the weekend, for the vacation, for the time when I didn’t have to be there. And sucking it up in between.

I had accepted this as truth. This is just life.

But underneath the acceptance, something quieter knew better. A feeling I couldn’t shake, that it wasn’t right to live like this. I just had no reference for anything different. The people around me either genuinely loved what they did, or they did it for the money and complaining about it was ok.

Both options felt foreign to me.

I wasn’t either.

My life didn’t change overnight. But somewhere along the way I got tired of asking what was wrong with me. And something shifted, not overnight, not dramatically.

I just got curious.

Open to something I didn’t know was possible. Willing to stop making myself wrong for the confusion, the frustration, the dissatisfaction that had lived in me for so long.

From self-attack to curiosity. That was the move.

And life started responding. Slowly. In ways I was finally ready to see.

That I didn’t have to choose one thing. That I could take all the parts of me, and combine them into something entirely mine. Not a path someone designed. A container I built. One that finally felt natural. That felt like ease.

I didn’t need to fit anywhere.

I needed to build something that fit me.

With Love,

Carolina

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This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.