One Step Further Than Before
Composing a Life Worth Living
The day before my thirteenth birthday I decided that I didn't want to perform for other people anymore. I didn't want to bend myself into shapes just to be understood. I didn't want to edit my softness until it was sharp enough to pass as male strength. I wanted to exist without a script, without rehearsal, without any proof, and without applause. Because life was never meant to be a stage, and we were never meant to live only as performances for others.
Sometimes I thought about leaving it all, dropping out - not out of bitterness, but from a hunger for quiet. The kind of quiet where no one is asking for anything, and nothing is demanded except presence. A quiet that feels like a homecoming, where my worth is not tied to how much noise I can make in the world, or how much attention I can grab, but how deeply I can breathe it all in.
I visualise disappearing, becoming a hermit, starting a new life somewhere else, where no one knows my name. Not a glamorous rebirth, nor a dramatic erasure; just a slow retreat into a rhythm that feels closer to what I was designed to be. I cannot believe we were meant to spend our days sprinting, and scrolling, and striving, and trying to be seen in a crowd that isn’t even looking. On the contrary, I am sure we were meant to grow flowers in a small patch of dirt. To take afternoon walks when the sun is low and golden. To listen to the wind and the rain without reaching for our phones. We were meant to live in a way that makes sense to us, even if it doesn’t look spectacular from the outside.
We were meant to cry without apologising for it. To laugh too loudly. To be awful at things and still do them because the act itself is reason enough. We weren’t engineered for constant achievement; we were built for moments: small, soft, ordinary moments that somehow end up meaning everything. The smell of garlic caramelising in butter. The weight of a blanket pulled over your lap by someone who thought of you before themselves. The first sip of cold water after a long walk home. The welcome purr of your cat. These are the things that carry us through a lifetime, not the medals, not the applause, not the endless race.
Social media has captured our understanding of what a healthy, settled life feels like. Today everything is a race. Who is achieving more, who is moving faster, who is shining brighter. And I am not saying this because I am now eighty and begging for comfort. Trust me, my life is full of discomforts, the aches and pains of old age, and I am grateful for them because they allow me to remain sensitive to reality and to keep maturing. But before we look outward at what everyone else is doing, we need to look inward and ask, do we really care? Are we even living for ourselves, or just keeping pace with a tempo that was never ours to begin with? Everyone you see experiences a unique life; they are carrying struggles and dreams that you will never know. So why measure your worth against their pace, when your own life deserves its own music, its own rhythms, its own distinctive tempo?
Disappearing is not about running away. It's about choosing solitude and slowness in a world that desires engagement and worships speed. It's about unlearning the performance of productivity, of consumption, of constant visibility, and relearning the art of being present. It's a refusal to measure yourself only by how much you have generated, or how much you have been noticed. It is saying: I will not let the world define me by its commotion. I will define myself in my own stillness.
To start over is to grant yourself permission to be new again, without the weight of past expectations. It is not about forgetting who you were, but about allowing who you are becoming to take up more space. Perhaps that means moving to a place where no one expects you to be the old version of yourself. Maybe it just means sitting with your own company long enough to find that you like it. Either way, starting again is not an erasure but an expansion, a way of making room for the life you’ve always been quietly craving.
Slowness is not lethargy. It's attention. It's devotion. It's a willingness to notice the way sunlight stretches across your floorboards in the morning, or the way your breath deepens when you finally stop rushing. It's remembering that life was never meant to be a constant sprint, but a series of pauses, a collection of tender moments that anchor you to the earth. When you move slowly, you see more clearly; when you pause, you finally arrive.
I am not saying that if you want to live slowly you have to vanish or abandon everything that you know. You can begin right where you are. Slowness isn’t always about grand gestures, it can be found in holding your cup of coffee a little longer before the day begins, in noticing the way steam curls and disappears. It can be pausing at your window for a breath of evening air, or listening to the final echoes in the cloisters of your mind. The smallest acts, repeated with intention, can soften the pace of an entire life.
Everything around us insists we must always be visible, always be producing, always be climbing, always consuming. But what if the real courage is in disappearing, stepping back from the commotion until you no longer need applause to feel alive. Maybe the greatest rebellion is to live quietly, slowly, with dignity. Not to chase success, but to create a life that feels significant to you, in your body, in your small corner of the world.
That kind of life doesn’t need constant validation; it already carries its own quiet truth. Starting over is sometimes less about escape and more about return. A return to your own rhythms, your own breath, your own unhurried rituals. Cooking a meal that takes all afternoon. Writing letters no one may ever read. Watering a plant and watching it unfold without demanding that it bloom faster. There's an acceptance in these acts, a resistance too. Because to return is to remember that nothing is missing, that your life is already enough when you live it with care.
Strangely, no one teaches us how to be still. Stillness frightens people, because in the silence you may listen too loudly, and hear yourself too clearly. You hear your longings, your griefs, your untended hopes. But isn’t that what beginning again really asks of us? To stop running from ourselves. To sit down in the garden of our own life and say: I am here now, and that is enough. And maybe, just maybe, that is what we’ve been searching for all along; the quiet permission to belong to ourselves again.
And if you ever feel like nothing is working in your favour, if you feel trapped in a loop that keeps pulling you back to the same path again and again, I need you to know this: there is violence in it, yes, the kind that wears you down quietly, the kind that makes you wonder if it’s worth carrying on. But alongside that violence, there's always a flicker of hope, that possibly this time something will change, possibly this time you’ll take one step further than before.