What If You Haven’t Forgotten How to Live?
The difference between surviving your life and inhabiting it.
Perhaps we don’t realise how much of our lives we spend simply functioning. At some point we become responsible, we cope, we manage, we show up, we survive difficult chapters and we become very good at doing what needs to be done. And just like that without consciously deciding to, we stop inhabiting our own lives.
Then something or someone awakens something in us. It’s a conversation that makes us laugh, a piece of music that makes us want to move, or a new possibility that makes us curious. Sometimes all it takes is someone looking at us in a way that makes us remember something about ourselves, and suddenly we feel energised, curious, playful and present.
Leaving us wondering – when was the last time I felt this alive?
It is worth noting that this kind of aliveness is not the same as impulsivity. Feeling intensely doesn’t automatically mean follow the feeling. One can experience enormous excitement and still remain discerning. One can enjoy chemistry without building a story around it. One can feel anticipation without needing to know where something is going. And one can let oneself be delighted without surrendering agency.
The experience is happening within you and that is an important distinction. Because it means your aliveness doesn’t belong to the other person – it belongs to you.
Someone can awaken something in us without owning it. They can invite playfulness, curiosity, anticipation or confidence, but the capacity to feel these things was always ours. Sometimes another person doesn’t give us a new version of ourselves. They simply create enough space for a version of ourselves that has been dormant to finally emerge.
The important realisation is that the other person is the stimulus, not the source. They haven’t given us our aliveness. They’ve helped us remember it was still there.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of being truly seen; sometimes another person sees something in us that we have stopped seeing in ourselves.
We don’t need to make them responsible for keeping it alive. We can take that discovery home with us. The realisation that this is me. This is something I want more of. This is how I want to participate in my own life.
We speak often about healing as learning to regulate, to set boundaries, to understand our patterns, to let go. All of these things matter. But perhaps healing has another dimension we sometimes overlook and that feels like coming alive again.
Because there is a difference between surviving your life and inhabiting it.
It is also worth remembering that wellbeing isn’t simply the absence of distress. There is also vitality, curiosity, play, wonder, pleasure and connection. We can become so focused on managing difficult emotions that we forget to ask ourselves the simple question: what makes me feel alive? Not what makes me productive. Not what makes other people comfortable. But what makes me feel awake inside my own life.
When I look back, I realise that for a long time I wasn’t really living. I was existing. I had things to work through, and I don’t diminish those years. But I don’t want to spend the next chapter merely functioning. Not living is an injustice to my soul.
Healing asks something more of us than survival. It asks us to participate. To feel. To desire. To be curious about what is still possible.
Perhaps the question isn’t “Who makes me feel alive?” but rather “What becomes alive in me when I am truly engaged with my life?”
Maybe this is what it means to come alive again. Not to find someone who gives us a life, but rather to rediscover the parts of ourselves that make us want to live it. And to remember that another person can be a beautiful catalyst, but they are never the author of our aliveness. That pen has always been ours.
I am not handing someone else the pen. I am discovering what it feels like to hold it while I am alive and dance in the magic of my life.
