We like to believe the future is a clean decision: choose what you want, walk toward it, and one day arrive. It feels logical, almost responsible. But the truth is simpler and far more unsettling, your mind cannot imagine a future it has never lived. It can only rearrange what it already knows.

So when you “dream,” you’re not actually creating a vision. You’re assembling a collage from old memory, old desire, and old wounds. Even your most ambitious goals are stitched from yesterday’s fabric. And when reality refuses to match that familiar picture, you read it as failure.

You punish yourself for not recreating an emotion you once labelled as joy. You assume the unfamiliar is the undesirable. You think you got it wrong, when in fact, you may have built something better, just not recognisable yet.

Every turning point in an artist’s life works like this. The moment itself feels disorienting, even disappointing. Only later does the shape reveal itself. You see how the wrong door, the unexpected collapse, the detour you resented… secretly positioned you for the life you live now. But your brain couldn’t recognise it then, because it didn’t look like anything it had known before.

This is why living in the present isn’t some mystical ideal; it is the only place your perception is accurate. The past is a softened story. The future is a projection. But the present, this second, this breath, this version of your life is the only thing your mind can actually comprehend.

And this leads to a quieter truth I’ve learned the hard way:

If you didn’t get the life you wanted, learn to love the life you built.

That isn’t resignation. It’s recognition. Resentment comes from clinging to an outdated blueprint. Acceptance comes from finally seeing the architecture you created without comparing it to what you once imagined.

Most of us aren’t suffering because life turned out wrong.
We’re suffering because we’re insisting it should look like the past.

But the past was too small for who you’ve become.

Let the unfamiliar be allowed to be good. Let the new version of your life be allowed to be right. The moment you stop forcing your story to match an old picture… the resentment dissolves, and clarity finally arrives.