You Shouldn’t Meet Your Heroes

I don’t know when it shifted.

At some point, it stopped being about chasing something specific and just became how I live. There’s always something ahead. Something to fix, to reach, to get right. It feels productive, even when it isn’t.

At fifteen, I was already acting like life had started without me. I had a CV before I had anything real to write on it. I made a LinkedIn profile like someone was about to judge me any second. I told myself I was preparing. Looking back, I think I was just scared of falling behind something I didn’t understand yet.

So I stayed ahead. Or at least I tried to. I worked more, pushed more, expected more from myself. And it worked, in a way. I became someone people rely on. Someone who can carry things without complaining.

That version of me doesn’t stay contained though. It leaks into how I deal with people.

I didn’t realize that until one of my team members told me he wanted to quit.

It wasn’t dramatic. No argument. No big reason I could grab onto and fix. Just a quiet conversation where he had already decided.

What bothered me wasn’t that he was leaving.

It was how he talked about me.

There was respect there. Maybe even admiration. And instead of feeling proud, it made me uncomfortable. It felt like he was looking at a version of me that didn’t show the full picture.

So I did something I don’t usually do. I tried to break that image.

I told him I was wrong.

Not about everything, but about how I’ve been doing things. I told him there’s more to life than getting everything right all the time. That perfection isn’t the point. That I really hope he doesn’t take the same path I did, even if it looks like it works.

I meant it.

Because in that moment, it hit me that maybe you’re not supposed to meet your heroes. Not because they disappoint you in obvious ways, but because you see what it actually takes to be them. And it’s not always something worth copying.

After that, I started thinking about how I work. The pace I expect. The standards I set without saying them out loud. The way I push, not aggressively, but enough that it becomes normal.

It never felt like pressure to me.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t pressure.

Maybe I pushed too hard. Maybe I assumed that because I went through something, others should be able to handle it too. That if it built me, it’ll build them.

But it doesn’t work like that.

What builds one person can just exhaust someone else.

And that’s not easy to sit with. Realizing that someone respects you and you might still be part of the reason they’re tired. That you became something they had to keep up with, instead of someone who made things easier.

I kept thinking about Icarus. Not in a poetic way. Just the simple part of it. Getting too close to something that feels like progress until it burns you. It’s not the flying that’s the problem. It’s not knowing when to stop.

I’ve never been good at that. Moderation always felt like wasting potential.

Now I’m not so sure.

Because if everything around me requires the same pressure I needed to survive, then I’m not really helping anyone. I’m just repeating the same environment.

And not everyone needs that.

This ties back to something I’ve been realizing slowly. That idea that there’s something out there that will fix everything once you find it.

I’ve been living like that’s true.

It reminds me of Silent Hill 2, especially James Sunderland. Spending all that time searching for something, only to realize it was never out there to begin with.

It’s acceptance.

And acceptance is uncomfortable because it doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like stopping.

There’s no secret ingredient.

There’s no one thing that makes everything click.

There’s just what works for me for a while. And then it changes.

I used to think my thirties would come with answers. Like I’d finally understand things in a way that sticks.

Now it just feels like I’ll be asking the same questions, just without expecting them to go away.

And in between all that, there are moments where things are just… okay. Not perfect. Not solved. Just okay in a way that doesn’t need fixing.

That’s probably the closest thing to happiness I’ve felt.

It doesn’t last. It doesn’t need to.

If anything, I think I’m starting to understand that I wasn’t missing something.

I just thought I was.

And that belief affected more than just me.

Some of that I can change.

Some of it I just have to accept.