The Life I Thought I Wanted

I Stopped Running

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from spending so long trying to outrun yourself that eventually, there is nowhere left to go.

I know because I eventually stopped running.

And when everything got quiet, I realized just how lost I had become.

What Actually Happened

I had a plan for what I thought my future would look like.

I’d be married, start a family, and eventually settle down somewhere in LA or Australia, close to my best friends, and we’d raise our kids together.

I really thought I knew where my life was headed.

Instead, the life I had imagined slowly started unraveling.

Moving to LA was a much bigger adjustment than I expected. I was adjusting to the pace, the traffic, the roads, the sheer number of people, and always having somewhere to be or something to deal with.

I was trying to take my brand to the next level, but I was finding myself increasingly frustrated with the direction my agency was taking. I wanted to build deeper relationships with my friends, but instead I seemed to find myself caught in constant misunderstandings and drama. And some of the people I was initially excited to get to know weren’t necessarily aligned with what I was looking for in friendship.

And underneath all of that, I was trying to move forward while being off and on with someone I was still in love with.

When things started to feel like they might work again, I decided to go all in. Instead of signing a new lease, I packed all of my things into storage and decided to travel the world with him before eventually settling down.

I really thought I was stepping into the life I’d been waiting for.

And then… we broke up.

I had already done most of my grieving during the last few months of the relationship. I had given everything I knew how to give. I tried my best. When we finally ended things, I was heartbroken, but I didn’t have regrets. I had already written about that relationship in another essay, so I won’t retell the whole story here.

I made a promise to myself that once I closed that chapter, I was going to commit to myself and move forward.

So I came back to the States alone, with a broken heart, no home, and no idea what to do next.

Since everything I owned was already in storage, I decided to travel.

I found people to look after my dog and went to Italy for three months, basically living out my own Eat, Pray, Love era.

Something about traveling alone woke something back up inside me. I remembered that I was the main character in my own life.

I could wake up one day and decide where I wanted to go. I could change my plans. I could follow a feeling without having to explain myself to anyone.

For the first time in a while, I remembered that I really could do whatever I wanted.

And I think I needed that reminder.

After my stay in Italy, I came back and eventually made the decision to let the people who had been caring for my dog keep her. They had grown to love her, and honestly, I had no fucking idea what I was doing with my life anymore.

I didn’t know if I was going to keep traveling and see where life took me, or reunite with my family in the Philippines after not seeing them for fifteen years.

I didn’t even know where I was going to live.

When I came back to the States, reality hit me again.

I learned something else about grief: it changes the way you see your relationships.

I already knew there were some relationships in my life, including friends and family, that didn’t feel good for me.

I knew what would happen if I kept trying to make those relationships work.

Conflict. Guilt-tripping. One-way dynamics. Defensiveness. Denial. Arguments. Endless back and forth. More explaining. More stress. More unnecessary pain and drama.

And I simply didn’t have the energy for that anymore.

I had already walked away from someone I couldn’t imagine my life without, and somehow, I felt better on the other side of it.

So I started wondering if I could apply that same honesty to other relationships in my life.

I made some really hard decisions to distance myself from people I loved so I could focus on myself.

I think the hardest part wasn’t leaving.

It was wishing things could be different while accepting them for what they actually were.

I also started realizing that I couldn’t keep expecting other people to love, communicate, or show up exactly the way I would. I wrote more about that realization in an essay called Stop Expecting You From Other People, because that lesson deserves its own conversation.

The Great Withdrawal

People were interested in dating me. People still invited me out. My friends and family still checked in.

And I’d always had a pretty full social calendar, so choosing to step away from all of that was a big change for me.

But I did.

I chose to spend the holidays alone.

I did feel lonely at times. But for the first time in a long time, I felt like I could finally hear my own voice.

I could process things without the noise of other people telling me how to feel, what to do, or how I should be handling everything.

I could sit with myself without having to put on the high-energy, social, charismatic, funny, playful, sexy version of me that everyone was used to seeing.

I didn’t have to be the strong one. I didn’t have to be the supportive friend. I didn’t have to make myself available to everyone else while quietly trying to hold myself together.

Because for so long, underneath all of that, I was hurting.

And I was tired of performing okay.

I lost interest in dating. I lost interest in socializing. That led me to naturally stop drinking.

I was curious to see how long I could go without a drink, and then it became a streak I didn’t want to break.

The Uncomfortable Middle

When you strip away all the noise—friends, family, socializing, and dating—you’re left with a lot of time with yourself.

And that’s when I started discovering things I hadn’t had the mental space to explore before.

I discovered AI and was having so much fun with it.

I was using it to solve problems, ease my workflow, bring ideas to life, and explore possibilities I hadn’t even considered before.

For the first time in a while, I felt like the sky was the limit. If I could imagine something, maybe I could actually figure out how to bring it into fruition.

But then I started hearing a lot of backlash and strong opinions about what AI meant for creativity, humanity, the environment, and the future.

So instead of blindly defending and continuing something I was excited about, I decided to pause, do my own research, and figure out how I wanted to move forward in a way that made sense to me.

And that instinct—to stop, question things, and do my own research—started bleeding into everything else.

I started questioning everything.

AI.

Government.

The food and health industry.

The system we’re all living in.

Organized religion.

Patriarchy and matriarchy.

Human behavior.

The more I learned, the more questions I had.

And honestly, at first, that didn’t make me feel empowered.

It made me feel overwhelmed.

I was already grieving and depressed, and I had lost almost all of my creativity and spark.

I was consuming more and more information about what was happening in the world while trying to process everything happening in my own life.

My nervous system felt completely overwhelmed by all of it.

At times, I felt so cooked that I was losing any will to keep going.

And I had no idea how to move forward.

I felt so lost.

Between distancing myself from loved ones, and questioning almost everything I thought I wanted, I had no idea what I was supposed to do next.

It felt like I was pushing a boulder up a hill.

The Rebuild

Eventually, after spiraling in what felt like a pit of hopelessness, I got to a point where I thought:

This is enough. I need to get it together.

Not “figure out my entire life.”

Just:

What can I actually do?

I started with what I could control.

I started letting go of beliefs that were never mine to begin with.

I worked through my relationship with religion, shame, love, family, and all of the invisible rules I had inherited about what my life was supposed to look like.

I started questioning the life scripts we’re conditioned to follow before we’re even old enough to question them.

I started questioning the milestones I had once assumed I needed in order to be happy.

I realized I didn’t need any of those things to be whole.

And that was incredibly freeing, because it meant I could finally ask a different question:

Do I actually want these things, or do I just want to cross another thing off the list?

I realized I didn’t need marriage to validate my life. I didn’t need children to give it meaning. I didn’t need a particular home, relationship, career, or timeline to prove that I was doing life correctly.

I could want those things without needing them to complete me.

There’s a difference between choosing something because it adds something beautiful to a life that already feels whole and chasing it because you believe you need it to finally feel whole.

I don’t think I had understood that distinction before.

I started paying more attention to what I could control—what I consumed, what I put into my body, what I watched, what I read, who I surrounded myself with, and what I allowed into my mind.

I stopped automatically absorbing every narrative I was presented with and started thinking more critically about what I was consuming. I became more conscious of the ways media, advertising, social media, and the people around us can shape what we think we should want.

I stopped valuing things simply because they made me look a certain way and started becoming more grateful for the things money can’t buy.

I started asking myself: Do I actually want this, or do I want what I think having it says about me?

And then I started filling my life with things that made my days feel like mine again.

I started gardening, which was not an easy goal in an environment like Vegas. It was actually a very humbling experience.

I was trying to grow things in the desert and quickly learned that wanting something to grow doesn’t mean you get to control how it grows.

Somehow, that lesson led to getting chickens.

Then I started making my own bread and researching ways to live a more sustainable lifestyle.

I started taking better care of myself and my body.

I started reading more and doomscrolling less.

I got back into a consistent routine with hot yoga and Pilates.

I started playing pickleball.

I started going on nature walks.

And slowly, I started surrounding myself with people who felt healthier and more aligned.

None of these things magically fixed me.

But they gave me somewhere to put my energy.

Step by step, after almost a year of celibacy, no alcohol, and very little distraction, I finally started seeing the light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

I wasn’t becoming a new person.

I was finding my way back to myself beneath all the things I had been taught I was supposed to be.

What Comes Next

I think the biggest thing that changed wasn’t my circumstances.

It was my relationship with myself.

I stopped trying to control things I couldn’t control.

I became more protective of my attention.

I became more discerning about who and what I allowed into my life.

I became more comfortable with uncertainty.

And I started understanding that I don’t have to have everything figured out in order to trust myself.

I realized I get to decide what happens next.

I don’t have to follow a blueprint someone else handed me.

I don’t have to know exactly what the finished house looks like.

I get to build it.

And if one day I decide I don’t like what I’ve built, I can burn it down and start over.

As many times as I need to.

For the first time, I’m not building a life based on what I thought I was supposed to want.

I’m finally building a life I chose for myself.

xo, Ria