don’t let it come to this.

What’s the worst insult someone could give you?

Think about it.

Liar? Untrustworthy? Unreliable? There’s lots of answers you wouldn’t want to hear. Lots of traits that you don’t want to embody. Maybe you’ve given it some thought, or maybe someone has even called you one of these things, and you’ve since done some work to try and disprove that claim.

Now here’s another question that I’m betting you haven’t asked yourself. What’s the worst insult or adjective that someone could use to describe your LIFE? Not you. Not your job. Your LIFE, to date. A descriptor that you would never want to have to use to describe your time on this earth when looking back.

Take 30 seconds and really think about it.

I’ve given this a lot of thought over the past few years. And the answer for me isn’t what you might think. It’s not “disappointing.” It’s not “boring.” It’s not “sad.”

It’s stagnant.

Look up the definition of stagnant and the first one to populate will be something like this: unmoving, without flow, and smelly, usually describing a body of water. Delve deeper and you’ll find other definitions: not growing or developing (Cambridge dictionary). Stale, sluggish or foul (Dictionary.com).

None of the descriptors paint a pretty picture. But what I think epitomizes stagnancy for me is the lack of growth or development definition. Standing still. Purposelessness.

In my experience, there is no worse feeling. Looking back on your existence for the past few weeks, months, even years, and thinking….what the hell am I doing? What did I just do over all this time? And having the answer be…nothing.

I can think of one particular instance where I first felt truly stagnant. It was 2022. I had just spent 6 months living in Bellevue, Washington and working 2 contracts as a travel physical therapist fresh out of school. I had made the choice to move to Washington for a dead-end relationship that I was very unhappy in, and which I had trapped myself in with some sort of twisted emotional sunk cost fallacy. My days passed soullessly through 10 hour shifts at an outpatient clinic, where I was double-booked with patients most hours, and I lived each week counting down for the weekend. I was starting to have the mental itch to start my own business, but I consistently self-sabotaged myself every time I felt like I was about to start (so I didn’t start). I felt alone and isolated, since all my friends and family were either in California or Colorado.

Looking back, I was really not doing myself any favors with any part of the situation. And I REALLY wasn’t doing myself any favors with a consistent lack of action.

I remember watching the end of 2022 crawl closer, wondering what I was going to do with my life. Because this clearly wasn’t it. I had never felt more unhappy. And as I looked back at the year, I realized that I had been standing in concrete. I was stagnant. It was a terrible, icky, heart-melting-into-your-stomach kind of realization. And I knew that something needed to change. Everything needed to change.

That stagnancy goaded me into immediate action. I resolved then and there to never let myself become stagnant again. Any discomfort or friction associated with taking on a challenge, or starting something scary, or breaking out of the frozen “normalcy” of what I had allowed my life to become, was far better than the alternative of stagnancy.

My resolution to change propelled me into what I can only describe as a “season of WTF”, as in I was asking myself daily “WTF am I doing with my life?” I singled up, moved back to California for a different travel contract, joined a mentorship to level up my PT skillset, and began laying the foundation for finally starting my own business. I started taking action, and even though I didn’t know where I was going to end up, I knew that I needed to grow. To get better. To get MOVING.

As chaotic and full of unknowns as that season was, it was a far better place to be than in that stagnant season. And it led to the birth of what has since become a defining life principle for me: anti-stagnancy.

What does anti-stagnancy entail?

Well, for that…you’ll have to wait for another article ;)