I learned the term recently: hurry sickness. The compulsive needs to race toward the next thing, mistaken often for ambition. I do this. I treat the present like a waiting room - something to survive until the real part begins.
Lately I've been mourning being eighteen. Which is absurd, because I was not happy at eighteen. But at twenty-eight, ten years later, I look back on that period with a tenderness my teen self would not recognize. Memory is a stealthy editor. It buries the dread and keeps only the soft parts.
Which means my future self is already doing this to right now.
Somewhere ahead, a version of you has everything sorted. The restlessness settled, the ambition paid out, the questions finally answered. And that person - the one you're so desperate to become - sits with the strange grief of someone who got what they wanted. They'd give it back, all of it, to be here again. To not yet know how it turns out.
I'm not interested in forced gratitude or pretending the hard parts aren't hard. But I think I need to let this chapter count - the side projects slowly taking shape, the accumulation of small skills and stranger experiences, the particular uncertainty of this age that I'll one day describe as freedom. These are becoming the past I'll miss.
The ask isn't to be grateful every minute. It's just: show up for your life before it becomes something you used to have.