I keep thinking about this version of my life that never actually happened.
You know the one. The montage life. The one where I’m somehow managing chronic illness and trauma and capitalism and my inbox with this gritty, endearing determination. I drink iced coffee out of a glass I definitely rinsed properly. I go on fun vacations and make content about them. I answer texts within 24 hours. My hair is always doing the thing I want it to do, and if it’s not, it’s at least bad in a charming way.
In that life, my days are full. Not just with obligation, but with impressive things: calls, projects, travel, “opportunities.” I am very tired, of course, but in a sexy, aspirational way. People write think pieces about people like me.
In this life, the one I am actually living, I get overwhelmed by things like trying to cancel a phone contract.
I really wish that were an exaggeration, but recently I realised I’d been putting off cancelling my phone plan for weeks. Months, if we’re being honest. It wasn’t because I love giving money to a faceless corporation. It was because every time I thought about doing it, my whole body reacted like I’d suggested walking backwards into a firing squad.
All I had to do was enter my login details, navigate a website designed by someone who hates humanity, and either click a few buttons that definitely wouldn’t be where they claimed to be, or call a stranger whose primary job is to talk me out of what I want. Fifteen, twenty minutes of my life, tops.
And yet, it sat there on my to‑do list, this tiny, humming source of shame. I would open my planner app, see “cancel phone contract,” feel my chest clamp down, and go reorganise my photo album instead. I would watch myself avoid it in real time like I was piloting a very anxious, very fleshy drone.
The story I learned to tell myself about moments like that is simple:
you’re lazy, you’re disorganized, you’re bad at being a person.
But the more I actually pay attention to what’s happening inside my body during those “simple” tasks, the more it feels like something else: evidence that the life I keep trying to live is a few sizes too big for the nervous system I actually have.
And lately, whether I want to or not, I keep bumping into the idea that maybe the answer isn’t to fix myself until I can live a bigger life.
Maybe the answer is to simply choose a smaller one.
~
### The Myth of the Big Life
It feels important to say: no one sat me down and told me, “You must live a big, optimized life or you’re worthless.”
They didn’t have to. It’s just…everywhere. It’s pervasive and impossible to escape.
It’s in productivity culture, where every moment of downtime is a personal failure. Why rest when you could be monetising your hobby, learning a skill, curing your ADHD with yet another new planner?
It’s in those soft-focus Instagram posts where someone writes a caption about “choosing rest” from what looks suspiciously like a villa. Where burnout is something you recover from with a yoga retreat and a new supplement, not something that quietly ruins your ability to unload the dishwasher without crying.
It’s in disability narratives that only make it to the front page if they can be framed as “inspiration”: look at this person who overcame everything and now runs ultramarathons. Don’t you feel better about capitalism now?
The rules are rarely said out loud, but they’re clear:
– Your life should move in an upward, expanding line. Bigger job, bigger following, bigger network, bigger income.
– Rest is not just a need; it’s a reward for how efficiently you’ve squeezed yourself dry.
– If you “downsize” your life on purpose, you must brand it as intentional minimalism, something trendy, not admit that you physically and emotionally cannot keep up.
I’ve internalised all of that so deeply that when my body taps out, my first response isn’t curiosity or care. It’s panic. It’s grief. It’s that invasive sense of failure that shows up when I can’t handle what other people talk about as “just adulting.”
So when my brain short‑circuits at the idea of contacting a phone company, I don’t think, “Wow, that’s good information about what my capacity looks like right now.”
I think, “If you can’t even do this, how are you supposed to live the rest of your life?”
Somewhere along the way, I picked up a story that a “real life” looks like more. More output, more contacts, more constant engagement. There’s this unspoken assumption that if your life gets smaller, less social, less ambitious, less productive, it’s because you’ve failed or given up.
I don’t think that’s true. Or at least, I’m trying very hard not to think it’s true, because my reality keeps wandering in a different direction.
~
### The Scale My Body Actually Lives At
My body does not care about the myth of the big life.
My nervous system is not taking a poll on what “everyone else my age” is doing and saying, “Right, let’s match that.” It cares about how much pain I’m in. How much sleep I’ve had. How many open tabs are buzzing quietly in the back of my skull. It cares about whether I have enough spoons left for a shower, never mind a twelve‑hour day working at my computer and drinks with friends after.
There was a time when I kept trying to brute‑force my way into someone else’s pace. I stacked my days like Tetris pieces: if I could just fit everything in, I’d prove I was okay. I’d say yes to things that made my joints cry just so I wouldn’t have to admit out loud, to myself, to anyone that my body was already at capacity just doing nothing.
I cycled through apps and systems and routines, convinced that if I found the right combination of habit tracker, supplement, and moral outrage, I’d unlock the energy I was apparently supposed to have.
Instead, my life started to feel like one long, badly lit hallway in-between crashes and flare-ups.
The thing about living that way is that it doesn’t just exhaust you physically. It warps your sense of what’s reasonable. If everyone around you seems to be juggling ten flaming swords and you’re already shaking holding one spoon, you start to think the problem is the hand, not the fire.
So for a long time, the idea that I might need – not want, not aesthetically prefer, but need -a smaller life felt like failure. Like shrinking in shame, not resizing for survival.
Only recently have I started to ask a different question:
What if the amount of life I can hold at once is neither a moral issue nor a personal failure?
What if it’s just…a measurement?
~
### Tiny Acts of Refusal
Choosing a smaller life sounds dramatic, like I sold everything I own and moved to a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere. In reality, it’s been much more boring.
It’s been things like:
– Not going to events that require three hours of travel for two hours of socializing, no matter how much I may want to be there.
– Turning down exciting opportunities because I already know they would send my body and brain into a downward spiral.
– Allowing myself to be the friend who can’t stay out too late, the one who leaves first, the one who sometimes cancels plans altogether.
And yes, it’s been staring down tasks like cancelling a phone contract and realizing that, for me, this is what a razors edge looks like.
On the outside, none of this looks radical. It barely looks like anything at all. From the vantage point of Big Life Myth, it probably just looks like flakiness and laziness.
But internally, these are little acts of refusal.
Refusing the idea that I must say yes to everything I technically can survive.
Refusing the expectation that I should tolerate systems designed to confuse and exhaust me.
Refusing to pretend that my body is a minor inconvenience instead of the whole damn vehicle.
I’d love to tell you that these refusals feel empowering. Sometimes they do, a little. But often they just feel like grief with better boundaries. I don’t float away on a cloud of self‑acceptance after saying no. I sit in my room and feel the aching void of yet another thing I’m missing out on.
The louder part of me whispers: you’re disappearing.
A quieter part, that I’m trying to feed, whispers back: you’re still here.
~
### Autonomy, but Make It Messy
When I talk about autonomy in politics, it sounds noble: people having control over their own bodies, time, and choices; not being crushed by systems they never signed up for. It’s a value that makes sense to me in big, structural ways. I get angry about laws and policies that treat autonomy as optional.
What I don’t always admit is that autonomy feels terrifying on a personal level.
No one is stopping me, technically, from cancelling my phone contract. Or from rearranging my life to actually match my capacity. The company didn’t come to my house and surgically attach the SIM card to my brain stem. There’s no productivity cop who’ll arrest me if I stop trying to optimise myself every waking moment.
The person who keeps forcing me into a too‑big life is mostly…me. Me, acting on instructions I absorbed from everywhere.
So when I think about autonomy as a core value, I have to include these small, unglamorous moments where I either choose myself or choose the life I still think I’m supposed to have.
Autonomy isn’t just the right to make big, dramatic decisions about my future. It’s also the right to:
– Decide that my day’s capacity is “I answered two emails and ate something,” and not frame that as a crisis.
– Refuse a call with a stranger whose job is to bully me into staying with a service that doesn’t work for me.
– Admit that constant availability (on my phone, on social media, in relationships) is not a neutral setting but a demand I am allowed to push back on.
In theory, this sounds empowering. In practice, it looks like me sitting at my desk, heart racing, talking myself through a script so I can hit “cancel” on a contract without throwing up.
It looks like the very boring reality that autonomy is not just a flashy political stance but a series of tiny, shaky choices to live at a scale my body can actually hold.
~
### Grieving the Imaginary Large Self
Here’s the part I wish I could skip: the grief.
I am mourning a version of myself who might never have existed, but who still feels real enough to ache.
She was going to do more. She was going to say yes more. She was going to travel, collaborate, host things, be the friend who always shows up, the person in the room who has both interesting ideas and the energy to execute them. She was going to be the kind of disabled or traumatised person who’s, you know, inspiring about it.
I can see her wardrobe. I can see her calendar. I can see the pace and size of her life.
And in the quiet moments, when I’m cancelling plans, or realizing I need another nap, or putting off yet another admin task that everyone else seems able to do on their lunch break, I feel like I’m letting her down.
I don’t think we talk enough about that layer: how much of our self‑loathing is actually grief for an imaginary life that was never ours to begin with.
Because even if I had never become disabled, or never been traumatized, or never had my nervous system wired the way it is, there’s no guarantee I would have become that person. The montage life is a story, not a promise.
Still, the grief is there. It shows up as envy when I see friends running from thing to thing without collapsing. It shows up as shame when I need to block out entire days for recovery. It shows up as this quiet, persistent question in the back of my mind: what would you be capable of if you weren’t…like this?
I don’t have a good answer. On bad days, I weaponise the question against myself. On better days, I try to remember: I am not failing that imaginary self. I am outgrowing her.
She was built for a story where worth equals expansion. I am trying to live in a story where worth equals presence.
~
### What a Smaller Life Actually Looks Like
When I say “smaller life,” I don’t mean worse, and I don’t mean devoid of colour. I mean a life with fewer simultaneous tabs open. A life with more white space around each thing.
Right now, a smaller life for me looks like:
– Having a limited number of social slots per week and honouring that budget, even when I wish it were bigger.
– Accepting that some weeks, “creative output” means one short post and nothing else.
– Organising my days around what my body can realistically do, not what a hypothetical future version of me might handle if I cured myself with vibes.
It looks like paying attention to the quiet five minutes in the afternoon when the big exhale happens, instead of trying to bulldoze through it with caffeine and spite. It looks like noticing the background hum of worry when I open the news and deciding that sometimes, closing the tab is not avoidance, but survival.
It looks like letting small things count.
One good thing from today.
One text I did send.
One task I finally did, even if it took weeks and three emotional support snacks.
Sometimes I worry that if I let myself aim for “enough,” I’ll lose all ambition, all drive, all capacity to care about anything beyond my own comfort. But the opposite seems to be happening. The smaller my life gets in terms of scale, the more room I have to actually care about the things inside it.
When I’m not constantly faking capacity I don’t have, I listen better. I notice more. I have slightly more patience; for myself, for other people, for the broken systems I will not single‑handedly fix this Tuesday.
A smaller life is not a morally superior choice. It’s just the only one that fits without cutting off circulation.
~
### Choosing, Not Just Collapsing
I don’t want to romanticise any of this. Some of the “smallness” of my life is not a choice. I didn’t opt into disability or trauma or exhaustion as a lifestyle. There’s nothing empowering about being forced to make decisions out of sheer lack of capacity or choice.
But within those constraints, there is a difference between collapsing into a tiny life and consciously choosing one that treats my limits as parameters, not punishments.
Choosing looks like:
– Naming what I actually have capacity for instead of what would look impressive.
– Designing routines and commitments that assume my bad days are real, not rare exceptions.
– Allowing myself to say, “This is as much life as I can hold right now,” and resisting the urge to translate that into, “This is as much as I’ll ever be.”
It’s not neat. Choosing a smaller life does not mean I never get jealous or bitter. It doesn’t mean I am perpetually grateful for my tiny joys like some enlightened being.
It just means that, on more days than not, I am trying to align the size of my life with the size of my actual capacity, instead of with someone else’s fantasy.
Right now, that looks like finally cancelling the phone contract, not because it will transform my life, but because each small decision to stop tolerating unnecessary drain adds up.
It looks like writing this instead of another self‑dragging monologue about productivity. It looks like letting this be good enough for today.
~
I don’t know if I will ever fully make peace with needing less. I suspect there will always be a part of me that aches for the big, loud life I thought I was supposed to live.
But more and more, I’m starting to believe that the point of my life is not to be big.
The point is to simply live it, no matter how it looks.
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