Lately these thoughts have been coming to me a lot again. Questions about where I will end up. Whether the things I want will work. Whether I am taking the right steps or wasting time without realizing it. Whether I am building something real or just keeping myself busy. I am scared of things not going well. That is the truth.

A while ago I talked about this with GPT and one explanation stayed with me. The constant doubt. The inability to feel fully safe inside unclear situations. The need to know. The fear of chaos. It tied some of it back to childhood, to unclear environments, to family chaos, to growing up in places where things were not stable enough to trust. Maybe that is part of it. I do not know. But it makes sense that uncertainty does not feel neutral to me. It feels dangerous. And the future is uncertainty in its purest form.

Of course there are things I want

Of course there are things I want. There are paths that can take me there too. I want to walk those paths every day. I want to make progress. I have goals and I want to reach them in this lifetime. Looking back, I am not bad at reaching things I set my mind on. I can say that. I have done things I wanted to do. But there are also things I keep failing at. Things I keep dropping. Parts of life that keep slipping while I hold onto others. That is where it gets heavy.

Life has branches. Business. Gym. Family. Classes. Money. Health. You hold one and another escapes. You try to help your mother with something. Your training starts disappearing. You try to get disciplined again. Something else breaks. You try to be fully present in one domain and another starts rotting quietly in the background. It makes you feel split. And then the bigger fear comes in. What if this never comes together? What if I build the wrong life slowly, day by day, while telling myself I am trying? What if I wake up too late?

I do not want a miserable life. I know that much. I want freedom. Real freedom. Not needing anyone. Not being trapped by money, place, permission, or some weak structure that limits what my life can become. I want to be able to move because I chose well, not because I was cornered. But then the question returns. How are we going to do this? Really. How is this going to happen? That question bothers me more than I want to admit. Some nights it affects my sleep.

I am in my mid-twenties. One third of life, maybe. These years feel too important to waste. Probably the years with the most energy, the most courage, the most room for risk. You know that while living them too. That is what makes them heavy. They are not just passing. They are valuable while they are passing. You want to do something with them. But nothing happens immediately. You set goals. Time passes. Some things build slowly. Almost nothing happens when you want it to. Maybe for some things to happen, you need to be obsessed for a while. Maybe you do need a few nights where sleep does not come easily because your mind is asking the same question again and again. How will this happen? How will I build this? What am I missing? Maybe that pressure is not always the enemy. Maybe sometimes it is the cost of wanting something enough.

And sahiden, looking back

And sahiden, looking back, some of it does bear fruit. That anxiety. The overthinking. The missed sleep. The dark clouds. They do leave something behind. They make me take things more seriously. They make time feel more expensive. They push me to fit more into each day. I have seen this in my own life.

When I was at ODTÜ ENTASTA, even as a second-year student, I was already obsessed with gaining experience because I knew I needed money and I knew I did not want to wait around passively. I saw people above me getting internships and doing real things, and it drove me half crazy. I felt like I had to move too. That obsession made me find an internship a year before many of my classmates. Then after the internship, they hired me as a designer. I started making money. I started building experience. I was working as a UI/UX designer while I was still in my second year of design education.

If you looked at my journals from that time, you would not see some calm, balanced, healthy ambition. You would see misery. You would see how badly I wanted it. How consumed I was. My friends used to say they only saw me in front of my laptop. And when they said that, I did not even know what to say back, because it did not feel strange to me anymore. It had become normal. That was my life. That was the shape my ambition had taken.

So when people say you should live without anxiety

So when people say you should live without anxiety, I do not fully believe them. I do not think a person can live completely free of worry and still build something meaningful. I do not think being fully stress-free is normal if you are trying to make something of your life. Some anxiety has to exist. Some concern. Some fear of wasting yourself. Some relationship with the darkness ahead. The future is not clear. It is probably more likely to go badly than beautifully if you move through it half-asleep. The problem is not anxiety itself. The problem is what kind. There is anxiety that keeps you moving. And there is anxiety that rots the present while pretending to protect the future. I know both very well.

Right now I am in the second year of my master's. I know I do not want to stay in Italy. I know I want to be abroad. I know I want to build my own business. I know there are too many decisions to make and that the picture is not clear enough yet. And I remember this feeling from before. Waiting to hear back from Polimi in my final year at ODTÜ. The same dark clouds. The same uncertainty. The same feeling of being cornered by a future that had not shown its face yet. Those clouds did clear eventually. But they did not clear because I became relaxed. They cleared after nights of no sleep. After exhaustion. After calling my mother and crying because I was tired, scared, and lost inside the uncertainty of whether success would come at all. That image is still in me. So yes, worry can produce movement.

But there is another layer

But there is another layer to this that bothers me more. When I look closely, the center of most of these anxieties is not even fully mine. That is the worst part. The expectations behind them. The pressure. The image of what success should look like. Who set those? Was it really me? Or did I inherit them so deeply that now I mistake them for my own voice? Sometimes I think almost everything I call "my ambition" has other people's fingerprints on it. Family. Society. Comparison. Status. Fear. The quiet standards that entered me before I was even aware enough to reject them. They shaped me so deeply that now even the life I am trying to build can feel suspicious. Is this actually my path? Are these actually my decisions? Is this road mine? Or am I just executing a script that entered me years ago and never left? That question goes deeper than success. It touches everything. The work I choose. The city I stay in. The things I panic about. The things I think I am late for. The things I call failure. Even the shape of the future I am afraid of.

And this is where mindfulness has been helping me recently. Not by removing the anxiety completely. More by helping me catch it while it is happening. If I notice it early enough, I can stop myself from drowning in it. That is what it feels like sometimes. Like being dragged into a huge dark sea with my eyes closed. I do not even know where I am. I just know I am somewhere bad. Somewhere that gives me fear, not clarity. But if I catch it. If I stop. If I breathe. If I ask where this is coming from. Then something shifts. I see that a lot of these worries are not helping me build a better future. They are just damaging the present. And because they damage the present, they damage the future too. They do not make me act better. They make me heavy. Unfair to myself. Ungrateful. They make me stare at what is missing instead of what is already there. They make me think more about what I failed to do than what I have actually done. That state is not useful. A clear mind plans better. A clear mind decides better. A clear mind can think about the future without kneeling in front of it.

Maybe that is the real work now. Not becoming someone with no anxiety. That sounds fake to me. More like becoming someone who can tell which worry is real and which one was planted there. Which fear belongs to the soul and which one belongs to the crowd. Which pressure is a signal and which one is just poison wearing the clothes of ambition. Because one of them builds a life. The other one steals it. And I think a person has to stop sometimes and ask the hardest question there is. This life I am moving toward. These choices. This pressure. This version of success I am chasing. Is any of it actually mine?