> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.withlovesm.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # This is the part where you go. - URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/this-is-the-part-where-you-go/ - Published: 2026-08-19T01:10:42.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-20T06:11:09.000Z - Description: August 18, 2026 - Author: sasha mekker - Tags: blog Please don't spend your life waiting for a version of yourself that has never existed. Life does not stop and start again when you finally feel ready and know what you're doing. Life doesn't wait around for you to not be afraid and stop caring what people think. So don't wait around for the version of yourself who finally believes they're enough to begin. Stop waiting to take the first step towards something in the far far distance. 10 years ago I was on a hike through the narrows in Zion National Park with my fam. "The end is JUST around the next bend!!" My dad said it like 20 times. It's a joke we all reference on hikes now when we don't wanna keep going. If you've never done it, the narrows isn’t a typical hike where you get to a summit and turn around. You hike upstream through a river, there's landmarks and routes, but the experience is basically: keep going until you decide you’re done. I think I've spent a decent amount of my life convinced that the end, the final, ideal, healed version of Sasha is JUST around the next bend. One more achievement in my career. One more relationship. One more ten pounds lost grinding at the gym and not eating. One more year. One more this. One more that. One more sign that now is the right time. But what if like the narrows, that "end" doesn't exist? Well that's okay, at some point I'll be sooo content and decide I'm done! (I know myself, that day ain't coming) There will always be another bend I could convince myself I need to reach. I've gotta stop mistaking preparation for living. We often believe confidence is something we'll feel before taking action. Like maybe eventually we’ll think enough, heal enough, know enough, become enough, and then we’ll finally feel ready to go. If you believe this, I want you to truly look back on your life. Any amount confidence you do have right now was built through repeatedly showing yourself that you can survive uncertainty, disappointment, rejection, depression, loss, heartbreak, failure, all the hard things. Don't brush this evidence off. I'm sure you didn't plan for that shitty stuff to happen. I'm sure you didn't purposefully set yourself up for failure in order to survive and gain confidence. You probably would've avoided a lot of it if you could've known how things would play out. But it happened anyway and every time, you learned something you couldn’t have learned by preparing for it: what you actually do when life doesn’t go according to plan. The greatest tragedy isn’t that people don’t get what they want. It’s that many people never truly begin because they’re waiting to become someone else first. Or they're waiting for things to unravel according to plan. Or the things they’ve always wanted are right in front of them, but because they don’t look or feel the way they always imagined they would, they go unnoticed. We think we need to level up or become a different version of ourselves before we can fully receive or dive deeper into these beautiful opportunities and experiences that are made available to us. Big beautiful things can be so scary. We think we’re protecting ourselves. By preparing JUST a little more, we're being smart. We can avoid failure, we don't have to be embarrassed when something goes wrong, because it simply won't go wrong if we're prepared. We won't fuck up the beautiful thing. We'll take it and make sure it only brings us happiness. So we wait to take it. But every day you postpone your life is still a day of your life. Time doesn’t stop while you figure yourself out. This morning? Seems like just a few hours ago? Maybe you have similar mornings everyday and this one was nothing special? Well I'd say something is special when it's once in a lifetime. Time doesn't stop. There will never be another August 18th, 2026 where you are exactly this age, living exactly this life, knowing exactly what you know and not yet knowing everything that comes next in your day. This exact minute feels completely disposable because another one is coming right behind it. But this one isn’t. Another minute is coming. This one is leaving. Forever. The once in a lifetime minutes you've spent replaying conversations in your head that no one else remembers? The once in a lifetime minutes you've spent trying to predict how something would turn out before letting yourself enjoy how it was going? The once in a lifetime minutes you've spent worrying about something that never ended up happening? They add up, oh and also, they're gone. You don’t get extra years because you were too in your head during the ones you had. You don’t get extra years because you spent the past few waiting to feel ready. Please realize there was never a practice version of your life before the real thing started. It's not too late to understand you were never getting ready for your life, you've always been in it. I promise you life isn't hiding in some month down the road, where you're more confident, more successful, more attractive, or more certain. It's happening on the drive to work tomorrow morning, it's happening while you make dinner, while you're laughing with your friends, while you can look out your window or walk outside and watch the sunset every night. Ask yourself some uncomfortable things. How many decisions have you made because they were true to you? And how many have you made simply because they reduced your anxiety? Those are not the same thing. How much of your personality is actually yours? How much of it was built around avoiding rejection? How many dreams have you labeled “unrealistic” simply because they required becoming unfamiliar? Or because they required you to take a different, maybe more uncomfortable route than the one you wanted to take? How much of your life has been organized around staying emotionally safe instead of feeling fully alive? Audiobook #2 for me: The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. By a nurse named Bronnie Ware, who spent years working in palliative care with people at the end of their lives. One of the things that stuck with me most was how simple people's regrets were. > *"I thought I had more time."* > *"I wish I had lived a life that felt true to myself instead of one I believed others expected of me."* At the end of life, people rarely regret that they hoped too much. They rarely wish they had been more cautious, more guarded, or less vulnerable. Again and again and again, the regrets center around the conversations they didn’t have, the risks they didn’t take, the love they didn’t express, and the version of themselves they kept waiting to become. The life they postponed. That stopped me. That should stop all of us. What if the life you’re postponing isn’t waiting for you, but it's quietly becoming the life you never lived? This is a death. The kind of death that happens long before your heart stops beating. It happens when you become so afraid of choosing the wrong life that you stop fully participating in the one you’re living. When every decision needs to prove it was the right one. When every accomplishment immediately becomes the starting line for the next one. When rest feels like falling behind. When you need to be healed before you let yourself be happy, be certain before you choose, and be successful enough to finally feel proud. You're so busy asking all these things that you stop noticing the life happening right. in. front. of. you. Obviously no one believes they'll live forever. But you wanna know what, I think a lot of people believe that tomorrow is guaranteed. Yeah we’ve heard it a million times like “life is short!", “tomorrow isn’t promised!!!” blah blah blah we know. You can know that. Do you choose to know it AND let it change the way you live? I'm not saying throw your hands up and quit your job tomorrow, drain your savings, book a flight across the world, and start checking shit off some bucket list because you could die. I mean something much less dramatic and more realistic. You can implement this NOW. In this very moment. Say the thing, make the plan, wear the outfit, take the picture, tell someone you love them, let a good thing just be a good thing. Stop saving things for an occasion worthy of them. Stop waiting until you feel completely ready. Stop treating ordinary weekdays like they’re somehow less valuable than the big beautiful moments you’ll remember forever. We can't go around driven by fear that we'll die tomorrow. We can find truth in the fact that tomorrow seems to be the place we hide everything that scares us. "I’ll start tomorrow." "I’ll tell them tomorrow." "I’ll write the book someday." "I’ll do this when things settle down." "I’ll become that person later." Tomorrow has never made a single decision. Only today has. Life is so precious because there is an ending we all know is coming. It's the only certain thing we have. We really don't know how long we have til that ending. Every day we spend waiting is a day that we’ll never be able to reclaim. It's a day closer to our ending. Before you read this and immediately make a list of 47 things you need to start doing because LIFE IS SHORT!!!! That’s not the point. Trust me, I've done this. And that's not the mindset I'm writing this from. You don't have enough time to do the 47 things today. You don't have enough time to do everything. That’s the point. You have limited time. You have limited attention and energy. Some people, some Instagram reels will say the answer is squeezing more into your life. More out of each day. Personally, I think this is fun and exciting and intense and crazy for a bit, but it has ALWAYS set me up to crash and burn. Failure to live fully. Failure to check off boxes on my to do list. As I've been trial and erroring methods, reading stuff, scrolling psychology reels, etc. I've learned I have to constantly check in with myself and stay really honest about what's going on in my life. I just did a "time audit". Where are my hours actually going? Not where I THINK they go. Where do they REALLY go? What gets the best hours of my day? What gets the leftover? How much time am I spending doing things I care about vs thinking about doing them? How much disappears into worrying, scrolling, analyzing, preparing, waiting? This is EXPOSING. Then I did an energy audit. What makes me feel more like myself? What consistently drains me? What am I giving huge amounts of Sasha to because I genuinely care about it? And what am I giving huge amounts of Sasha to simply because I've never stopped to question why? I don't want to waste my life or waste time, but god I'm so over trying to become my highest self by Friday. Look at the finite amount of time and energy you have and ask:does the way i’m spending my life actually resemble what i keep saying matters to me? Living urgently, living now, doesn’t mean doing everything. We can't. We can just be much more intentional about what gets to have us. A time and energy audit only helps us if we do something about what it uncovers. It might be uncomfortable or feel like a ton of work. Sit and think about it, sure. But remember that sitting there reflecting can just become another form of waiting. You can journal about the life you want, you can \* manifest \*, you can print out and hang up your values on the wall above your desk. You can dig deep and understand your childhood and why you hold yourself back. You can can make a pretty aesthetic vision board and read the books and become incredibly self aware. All that and more and you can still not move. There are things you already know. The thing you need to start. The thing you need to stop. The boundary you need to set. The idea you keep saying "someday" about. The beliefs you hold so tightly onto, that you know damn well aren't serving you. You know the hard things that you should do. You know they'll take extra time and patience and maybe cause a little discomfort. You don't need another sign (if you really think you do, let this be it). You don’t need to feel less scared first. You don't need to feel ready. Scared and unprepared are coming with ya. This whole time we’ve been talking about waiting for the version of yourself around the next bend. Yeah that person is not coming. I'm sorry but there is no future version of you who shows up one morning completely healed, completely confident, completely certain and finally gives you permission to begin. It's just you. Figure out what matters, what needs to change. Then do it. Not all at once. Just stop making later and tomorrow responsible for all of it. You're gonna meet the future version of yourself you keep talking about. Are you excited? Which version of current you will be harder for them to forgive? The one who tried and got some of it terribly wrong? Or the one who knew what mattered, knew time was passing, and still spent decades waiting for the go? That's hard to answer because every choice has an opposite you didn’t choose. Action doesn't protect you from regret. Stay and you’ll never know exactly what would’ve happened if you left. Leave and you’ll never know exactly what would’ve happened if you stayed. Take the job and there’s another path you didn’t take. Move away and you miss things at home. Stay home and wonder who you would’ve become somewhere else. Choose one person and you give up every hypothetical person you could’ve met. Spend five years building something and you give up five years you could’ve spent building something else. This is the cost of choosing at all.As thankful as I should probably be to have so many options and so much say in my life, sometimes I really wish I didn't have any of it. It pains me to think about the fact that choosing anything means letting another possibility die. But waiting is a choice too and it also has an opposite. You can easily spend another year trying to guarantee you won’t regret your decision, or another year deciding whether to start or not. That year itself will become a decision you made. Time is still choosing for you. It is quite literally impossible to build a life your future self couldn’t possibly regret. When I look back on my college years, and even younger, I do give myself grace. I don't think I have regrets. I understand that everything has played out the way it has for a very important reason. It feels good when I can say"I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known. But I was there for it, I chose, I participated, I changed my mind when I knew more. I fucked things up and I tried again. I let myself love things and people and experiences without knowing how they’d end." I want to be able to say that about this version of me someday too. And I want you to be able to say it about you. If you're in a season where that feels harder than it has before, I hear you. I feel you. I'm there too. I feel like I'm older and the stakes feel higher. I have more to lose and a wrong choice can cost years that I don't have. Starting over sounds a lot different when you’ve already spent years building something. Fucking up and trying again doesn’t feel as harmless as it used to. You can be scared. At the same time, it's true that being scared of wasting time doesn’t give you the ability to predict the future. It literally just gives you another way to waste time. If you wanna continue being alive (??? lol) you're gonna have to make choices without knowing how they end. You'll misunderstand yourself. You will think back and say shit I wish I did that differently. You can't think your way out of being a human who only gets to know what happens after they choose. You don’t need to make a decision today that 40 year old you will approve of. You need to make the best decision you can with what you know right now and trust that when you know more, you’ll still be there. You'll be okay. You'll have your own back. You are allowed to keep responding to your own life as it plays out. No one's telling you when to go. No one's pausing the clock and waiting for you to say "ok start it I'm good!!". You're so good right now. This is the time. This is the moment. This is the part where you go. *with love, sm*