Only through the persistent reminders of others can I understand that I can live a life that isn’t centered entirely around the goals of those around me. This is an epiphany that people should have at some point early in life so they can build what they want.

I started off by choosing the most obvious path that was laid before me, not realizing that I would shelve this epiphany for decades. Now I’m 42 and as I have alluded to many times, I am just now starting to understand this fundamental truth.

The life I want is attainable, but I first need to decide what it looks like. I find this to be as daunting as I would have as a young man because it is the first time I have understood this to be true. In reality, I could have done this all along. I could have abandoned the easy path in front of me in favor of a course of my own design, but being a young man at the time, I saw no advantage in such an unknown and potentially risky choice. So I took the easy way and convinced myself that I should do the same given any chance in the future.

I take responsibility for all of those choices now as a man who has decades more life experience to show me that even a road of easy turns can lead you to a dead end. That is where I have found myself. A long stretch of road sits behind me and a dead end before me that I coasted to get to. There are an unlimited number of other roads surrounding me, stretching in every direction imaginable. Every one of them is new to me, so I lack any understanding of the difficulties they may pose. So I am staring down a new life that I’m starting from scratch with the potential lives of many different stripes.

I am left to discard the life I have known because the baggage I continue to drag along from this chapter is a burden I no longer wish to bear. When I say “from scratch” I genuinely mean I am starting from zero. This means that I have innumerable and unknown challenges, but I will, perhaps for the first time, be entirely in charge of my future. There is no easy path. There is nothing approaching certainty.

But it will all be as I choose it, and for myself alone. So that I may become who I was meant to be all along.