Your Own Reason
For a long time, I lived on borrowed reasons.
And it didn’t happen only in big decisions. It happened in small, everyday choices too.
If a place looked good in someone’s story, I wanted to go there. If everyone was trying something, I felt I should too. If something was trending, I assumed it must be worth my time.
I now know this is common. Many of us do it in different ways: joining things because everyone else is, saying yes when we are already exhausted, buying things we don’t need, or chasing a version of life that looks good from the outside but feels empty inside.
I want to be clear: I’m not dismissing any of these things. Posting photos, creating content, dressing up, exploring cafes — all of these can be real and joyful hobbies. They just didn’t bring me real happiness in the way I was pursuing them, because I was choosing them from comparison, not conviction.
So even when I enjoyed those moments, the feeling faded quickly.
The moments that stayed with me were very different. An ordinary evening with family at a simple place. A walk without posting it. A deep conversation at a tiny food stall about philosophy, songs, space, underwater life, and all the random questions that make life feel alive. No performance. Just presence.
I sometimes made choices just to belong. One example was food: I ate non-vegetarian meals mostly because I didn’t want to be the only one in my friend group saying no, not because it reflected what I truly believed. Over time, that disconnect became hard to ignore — especially when I’d come home to my cat and feel how deeply I cared for animals. It was a quiet but important wake-up call: when we choose acceptance over alignment, we slowly move away from ourselves.
The same pattern appeared in bigger decisions too.
In school and during my bachelor’s, I worked hard, followed instructions, and got good results. But I rarely asked why I was doing what I was doing. Then came my master’s — a decision I chose consciously. I left a stable job, my family, the love of my life, and my home country.
My reason was clear: I wanted to rebuild confidence and understand my fundamentals deeply, so I would stop feeling like an imposter later.
But once the degree started, I got pulled into a cycle many students know too well: submissions over understanding, grades over growth, job anxiety over curiosity, comparison over clarity.
It looked productive from the outside, but inside I felt disconnected again.
That’s when the lesson became unavoidable: if you forget your first reason, you start living by someone else’s priorities.
Looking back, I realize my parents were helping me in every way they could to find my happiness. They enrolled me in singing classes, took me to plays and shows, and brought me closer to nature. But at that age, I couldn’t see the value. I thought “important” meant what looked glamorous, social, and visible.
Years later, I felt deeply grateful that someone else reflected the same truth back to me. This time, I was ready to listen. He helped me understand what real depth feels like. When I started losing my way in the later phase of my master’s, he stayed steady and kept guiding me back to what truly mattered.
Now I return to one question — before both small choices and big decisions:
What is my first reason?
Not the loud reason. Not the social reason. Not the impressive reason. The real one.
Because life is not shaped only by major turning points. It is shaped by daily habits, tiny choices, repeated actions — what we consume, what we chase, what we ignore, and what we normalize.
I’m not rejecting ambition or trends. I’m only choosing not to outsource my meaning.
Because when your reason is real, even slow progress feels peaceful. When your reason is borrowed, even success feels hollow.
Maybe maturity is simply this: remembering your first reason before the noise makes you forget it.