Have you ever felt like you missed your moment? Like everyone else got handed a purpose and you’re just… here? I’m talking about that deep-down ache that maybe your life was supposed to mean something more. That if you just found the right job, or read the right book, or got visited by the right talking animal, you’d finally know why you exist.
I spent years waiting for a destiny.
It started with fantasy books. I didn’t even know they were fantasy, back then. I just knew they had talking cats and magic, and once you’ve read something with talking cats and magic, anything without it seems like a step backward. Add to that a TV diet of Buffy, Xena, Highlander, Charmed, and Star Trek: TNG (yes, I’m aging myself), and you’ve got a brain full of stories where people are destined—literally fated—to matter.
Buffy wasn’t just a teenage girl. She was the Slayer. Hercules was the son of a god. Duncan MacLeod was minding his own business until, oops, immortality. Even Rand al’Thor (I never finished the series, but I assume he got around to saving the world eventually) was fated to do something enormous and difficult and important.
And I? Was not.
I was just a girl with a notebook and a lot of feelings.
No prophecy. No mentor with a cryptic warning and a magical weapon. No talking cat (though my old cat, bless him, did his best). My life seemed painfully ordinary. And the more I watched and read and absorbed stories about people destined to do Big Important Things, the more convinced I became that I was doing something wrong.
So I tried things. Volunteer work. Creative projects. Endless existential Googling. But nothing felt capital-I Important. Nothing felt like destiny. And because of that, nothing felt like it mattered. Eventually, I had to admit it: the whole destiny thing was making me miserable.
And that’s really what I want to say here—not just that I don’t believe in destiny, but that I think it can quietly damage us. It feeds the need for external validation. It makes us wait for someone—or something—to tell us our life matters, instead of turning inward and asking the harder question: What if the real issue is that I don’t believe I’m enough?
That was the part I couldn’t see for a long time. Not because I was avoiding it, but because I didn’t know how to name it.
Believing in destiny was easier than facing the quieter truth.
That I didn’t think I was enough. Not as a writer. Not as a person. And when you don’t believe in your own worth, you start searching for something outside yourself to make you feel important.
But when we wait for meaning to show up and tap us on the shoulder, we discount the meaning we already carry. When we compare ourselves to characters with prophecies and plot armor, our real lives start to feel insignificant. You wait for a lightning strike instead of lighting your own matches. You discount the unassuming, real things—your friendships, your small joys, your terrible poetry from 2003—because they weren’t assigned to you by fate.
But here’s the thing.
Destiny is a story. It’s a dramatic one, and sometimes a comforting one, but it’s still fiction. No one is coming to swoop in and hand you a purpose. Which is terrifying… and freeing. Because if you’re not destined to be anyone but yourself, then everything you choose to do—every act of kindness, every bumbling attempt at creativity, every boring Tuesday afternoon—counts. Not because it was written in the stars, but because it came from you.
Maybe that’s enough.
Maybe we’re not here to be chosen. Maybe it’s us who choose.
And maybe that’s the most important thing of all.