You Are Allowed to Reroute Your Life

A few years ago, I never would have imagined that one of the hardest seasons of my life would completely reroute the life I was building.

I was a bedside ER nurse in the middle of the pandemic, and at the same time, I was struggling significantly with my own mental health. I was dealing with depression and anxiety, and there were times when it became so dark that I experienced suicidal ideation. I was still going to work, taking care of patients, showing up for the people around me and functioning well enough that you probably wouldn’t have known how much I was struggling internally. Looking back, I think that was part of the problem. I had become very good at functioning while I was hurting.

As a nurse, I was used to advocating for other people. I could recognize when a patient needed something, speak up when something wasn’t right and make sure other people were taken care of. I just wasn’t very good at doing those things for myself.

During that season, I found coaching. At first, I didn’t know that it would become anything more than something that helped me get through a difficult time. But coaching gave me a completely different perspective on my life. It helped me put words to things I had struggled to understand about myself and made me start questioning how much of my life was actually built around what I wanted versus what I thought I was supposed to want.

I started realizing how much I had been living according to expectations. I wanted to be successful, make other people happy, keep the peace and make choices that looked like the “right” choices from the outside. I hadn’t really stopped to ask myself what kind of life actually felt right to me.

That realization eventually led me to become a coach myself. I built a coaching business while continuing to work in healthcare, and eventually I made the decision to leave bedside nursing. That was a huge decision for me because nursing had been such a significant part of my identity. It was a stable career that I had worked hard for, and leaving it meant stepping away from something I knew for something I was still building.

But I knew I couldn’t keep living a life simply because it was the life I had already created.

As I continued doing my own work, it started affecting my personal relationships, too. I had to learn how to set boundaries, particularly in difficult family and in-law relationships. I had to learn that advocating for myself didn’t mean I was selfish, difficult or trying to hurt someone else. Sometimes it simply meant acknowledging that something wasn’t healthy for me and deciding what I was willing to participate in.

That has been one of the biggest lessons of my life. I used to think that if someone was upset with me, I must have done something wrong. I felt responsible for keeping everyone comfortable, even when doing that came at my own expense. Learning that I can love people and still have boundaries with them changed the way I approach relationships entirely.

More than anything, I learned how to advocate for myself. I learned to listen to my own instincts, take my own needs seriously and stop automatically looking outside of myself for permission to make decisions about my own life.

My life today isn’t exactly what I imagined it would be years ago, and honestly, I’m grateful for that. I don’t think there is one right path that everyone is supposed to follow. What is right for one person may be completely wrong for another, and I think we lose a lot of ourselves when we spend too much time trying to fit our lives into someone else’s definition of success.

For me, rerouting my life meant leaving a career I had spent years building, becoming a coach, starting a business, learning how to set boundaries and learning how to advocate for myself. It also meant doing the much harder internal work of figuring out who I actually am underneath the expectations, the people-pleasing and the version of me I thought everyone else needed me to be.

I’m still doing that work. I don’t have everything figured out, and mental health isn’t something I believe you simply move past forever. There are still hard seasons and moments when I have to recognize that I need support and take care of myself differently. But I am not the same person I was when I was sitting in that ER trying to hold everything together while struggling so much internally.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is that you are allowed to reroute your life. You are allowed to decide that the path you started on isn’t the path you want to stay on. You are allowed to disappoint people, change your mind, set boundaries and make choices that don’t make sense to everyone else.

For so long, I thought living a good life meant meeting the standards that had been handed to me. Now, I care much more about whether my life is actually aligned with me.

And that has made all the difference.

Kelsy Manger Frederick