inner peace

At 35, I’ve come to realize something mildly tragic but also kind of funny: I’ve had not one, but two major blind spots about inner peace. And the result—spoiler alert—was that I hardly ever felt at peace 🙃

1. First off, I completely missed the point that inner peace is... well, inner.

You’d think the name would've clued me in, but no. I spent years outsourcing my sense of peace to whatever was going on “out there.” I genuinely believed that if I could just get things in order—the schedule, the relationships, the apartment storage system—then peace would finally descend upon me like a well-behaved cloud.

But let’s break down this truly impressive trap I walked right into:

“The peace out there would somehow bring about the peace in here.”

1.1. "The peace out there" — does it even exist?

I mean… has there ever been a single moment in the history of humanity where everything was chill? Personally, no matter how many goals I checked off, life always found new ways to shake me up. A missed deadline here, a minor existential crisis there, or, you know, an entire global pandemic starting some time in 2019.

1.2. Depending on the outside for inner peace = A guaranteed disconnection.

It’s like trying to satisfy all my creative needs by endlessly scrolling Etsy instead of picking up a paintbrush. The more I relied on external things to deliver me peace, the less I was able to access it within myself. I basically became a passive consumer of tranquility, waiting for it to arrive in the mail with two-day shipping. (Spoiler: it never did.)

So yeah, I’m officially unsubscribing from the trap that says “outer peace equals inner peace.” That myth can kindly go jump in a lake.

2. Secondly, I wasn’t actually choosing peace—I was just wishing for it.

I liked the idea of inner peace. Loved it, in fact. But when it came to real life? The first thing I usually did was throw peace out the window the moment life got slightly inconvenient. Emails, texts, last-minute work things, unexpected feelings (ew), hunger, moods—every single one of them got prioritized over peace.

And then I’d be like, “Wow, why do I feel so frazzled?” as I chugged my third coffee and tried to meditate for 90 seconds while scrolling some spreadsheets.

Needless to say, treating peace as an afterthought is a great recipe for stress… not serenity.

It’s taken me a while to see all this, but hey—I finally had my aha moment. 

I now recognise that inner peace isn’t something I have to earn or stumble upon when everything finally stops being chaotic. It’s not “out there,” waiting for me on the other side of some ideal version of life.

Inner peace is here. It's quiet, it's humble, and it’s entirely up to me to choose it. On purpose. Like, with actual intention.

Because at the end of the day, inner peace is... inner. And I’m the one who has to show up for it.