You Were Never Chasing the Goal. You Were Chasing the Feeling After It.

And that feeling has a shelf life nobody warns you about.

You know the four days. The ones right after you finish something big. The project lands, the deal closes, the number hits, and for a few days you feel good. Solid. Like you've earned your place.

Then it fades. And you start looking for the next thing that'll bring it back.

I know those four days well. I've had them after a finished report, after building a store from nothing, after landing a district manager role for half a country's worth of bathroom fixtures, which is a real job title I once had. Nurse, store manager, sales, district manager. Different careers, same short high each time. When it faded, I figured I just hadn't found the right achievement yet. So I found another one.

It took me a long time to notice it was never about the achievement itself. Almost anything would do the same job: a compliment, hitting a goal, someone telling me I'd done well. What mattered wasn't what I did. It was that doing it proved something. That I was okay. That nobody had noticed I might not be.

You probably know that feeling too, if you're reading this. The relief right after you deliver. How fast it goes again.

The problem isn't that you get worse at achieving. It's that the good feeling was never built to last. Every finish line just turns into the start of needing the next one.

For me, it stopped working during the easiest year I'd had in a long time, not the hardest. For most of my adult life I'd been the strong one. The one holding things together, because I assumed nobody else would. Then I met someone who made me feel like I didn't have to be that person for him, or for anyone. I remember how much relief that was. My body actually relaxed, maybe for the first time.

And that's when everything I'd been holding caught up with me. Depression, if we're calling it what it actually was.

I wasn't sad exactly. I was lost. Numb, in a strange way, and trying to work out something I'd never stopped to ask before: was I doing any of this for myself, or had I been doing it for everyone else the whole time?

I'd spent decades being told how capable I was. Nobody had ever asked who I'd be without the capability. Not even me.

So if achieving the thing stopped feeling the way it used to, if you did it, hit the number, got the title, and felt strangely little, I don't think you're broken and I don't think you're ungrateful. I think the good feeling was never really about what you did.

What were you actually trying to prove?

– Eva

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