We were all taught to follow the script.
Go to college. Get good grades. Graduate. Get a job. Work hard. Get married. Buy a house. Make a family. Retire someday. Don’t question things too much. This is just how life is.
But the script has been crumbling before our very eyes. Honestly? It’s been dying for a while, and we’ve been dragging around its corpse and pretending it still smells fresh.
And even if you haven’t been quite able to name the issue, you can feel it.
In the way your chest clenches when you arrive at that job you hate, and you question for the 4572th time what the fuck you’re actually doing with your life.
In the way you want to melt into the floorboards when you open Instagram and see yet another friend getting engaged, and the shame goblin that lives rent-free in your head starts whispering stories of all the ways you’re falling behind, all the ways you will never be enough.
In the way you forget how to breathe when you think about all the possible paths you could choose, and the multitude of options available feel like a prison sentence instead of promised freedom, and you spiral about whether you’re making the wrong choice.
You know something is wrong. So, you’ve done the work.
Gone to therapy. Read the self-help books. Listened to the podcasts. You can diagnose yourself faster than a Psychology MD-PhD with 30 years of experience.
And yet, you’re still stuck. Reliving the same dead-end relationships, the same soulless jobs, the same existential dread every Sunday night until you wonder if you’re the problem.
You’re not. All these things — the therapy, the books, the podcasts — are great at teaching you things about yourself. What they’re not so great at is disrupting your autopilot (you know, that part of your brain that keeps you in NPC mode: running the same loops, spirals, and patterns), and turning all that self-knowledge into action.
And that’s why I’m writing here: to show you how to turn OFF the NPC mode and become the author of your own story, so your life becomes something you’re excited to wake up to on a Monday instead of something you’re spiraling about at 2am on a Tuesday.
For the longest time I was you. Honestly, in many ways I still am. I spent most of my life following the script: chasing degrees, jobs, relationships, and definitions of success that were not my own. Graduating high school, I bought into the script that creativity was a luxury, not a career, so I left my country, Costa Rica, to study biomedical engineering in the US. After graduating, I landed a job at a regenerative medicine company, working on cutting-edge tech that felt like science fiction.
On paper, it was everything I thought I wanted. Everything I was told to want. And yet I didn’t feel more enough, or worthy, or happy. I just felt like the human equivalent of a deflated balloon at the end of a kid’s birthday party. And I slowly realized somewhere in my mid-twenties, with growing horror, that the path that I thought was so “right”, that I had crafted so carefully, wasn’t mine at all. This knowledge haunted me like a poltergeist, always reminding me at the worst possible moments that it was still there. But I stayed because, while the poltergeist was scary, the unknown was way scarier — until my visa expired and life forcibly ejected me out of that path for good.
So I decided to go off-script and do life on my own terms, starting with taking a gap year to achieve my life-long dream of solo traveling. I thought I would “find myself”. I didn’t. What I found instead was a lot more confusion, anxiety, and uncertainty (and amazing food, which made it all worth it!). And so many people in their 20s and 30s who were asking the same questions as me: what do I do with my life? how do I create a life that is fulfilling? what do I even want? Everyone seemed to be in a quarter life crisis, yet no one seemed to have the answer.
For the past year, I’ve been on a quest to create this answer for myself and for all those quarter lifers who are done pretending the script is working.
And while I’ve learned a lot, that quest is still ongoing. I’m still a recovering perfectionist. I still lowkey have a panic attack every time I think of all the uncertainty before me. I’m almost 30 and I still don’t exactly know what I’m doing with my life. I don’t have it all figured out but I do know this:
Life can be exactly what you want it to be. And we can figure it out together.
Because the problem isn’t that you’re stuck. It’s that you’re following a script that was never yours to begin with.
So here’s your permission to lay down the baggage that is weighing you down — the shame that keeps you frozen, the voice that whispers that “you’re not ready yet”, the “shoulds” that keep you moving in a direction that looks good on paper but makes you die a little inside — and do life differently:
Your way.
Come join me on this quest to ditch the script and create a life that feels so good it makes you question if you finally escaped the matrix.
— Lucy Herrero
