How I Became Too Good at Adapting
NOTES FROM LIFE
For thirty years, travel taught me to adjust when plans changed without losing sight of what I wanted. After bankruptcy, I used the same ability differently: I adjusted to whatever felt safest, until a broken ankle gave me enough stillness to see the life I had accepted.
· 6-minute read
I broke my ankle on the first day of my first vacation in a very long time.
The holiday was supposed to be active. Instead, I needed surgery. I was in too much pain to manage the six-hour drive home, so we had to remain at the hotel.
Suddenly, there was nowhere to go.
I had books, drawings and long, quiet hours with myself. Somewhere inside those hours, I realized how much I had changed. I was functioning, taking care of my responsibilities and managing my life, yet I no longer felt as if I was truly living it.
I allowed myself to be lived.
It was a strange realization for someone who had spent most of her life going places.
Travel taught me to change the plan without losing the purpose.
One memory from Melbourne shows me the person I used to be.
We had arrived after a nine-hour flight from Hong Kong and needed to shower before an appointment with an Australian politician. Our hotel room would not be ready until noon, exactly when we had to leave.
The receptionist told us there was nothing they could do.
The room could remain unavailable; our need for a shower remained. So I continued asking what other possibilities the hotel could offer. Eventually, they arranged access to a shower in the spa. We prepared for the appointment and left on time.
It was a small incident, one of those practical travel problems that should disappear from memory as soon as they are solved. I remember it because accepting the first answer never occurred to me.
The receptionist had described the current situation. I did not hear it as the end of all possibilities.
Travel is full of such moments. Flights are delayed, connections are missed, reservations disappear and rules make sense only to the person explaining them. You can prepare carefully, but reality will edit your plans without asking permission.
Over thirty years of travel, I naturally responded to those edits. I knew when to insist, when to improvise and when to let the original plan go. A wrong turn could reveal something I would never have chosen deliberately. A delay could lead to an unexpected conversation. Often the alternative was even better than the idea I had arrived with.
THE ROUTE COULD CHANGE WITHOUT TAKING THE PURPOSE WITH IT.
I trusted myself in unfamiliar situations because adapting was simply one of my skills. I did not need to know every step before leaving. Whatever happened, I would look at the conditions and decide what to do with them.
At that time, this felt completely natural to me.
After bankruptcy, adaptation changed its direction
When I lost the life I had built, I adapted again.
From the outside, I was doing well. I made practical decisions, fulfilled my responsibilities and created stability. I knew how to survive a crisis and begin rebuilding afterward.
Fear entered the process quietly.
I became more cautious and accepted things I would once have questioned. I reduced my expectations and increasingly chose the option least likely to expose me to another loss. Each decision appeared reasonable on its own. Together, they built a life around protection.
Perhaps this is why I did not notice what was happening. Adaptation looked like competence from the outside and felt like responsibility from the inside.
There was no dramatic day on which I decided to stop wanting more from my life. I arrived there through a long sequence of sensible choices. I avoided unnecessary risks, adjusted to circumstances and learned to tolerate what I had.
The woman who kept questioning the receptionist in Melbourne was buried under experience, fear, maybe even aging.
During my years of traveling, I changed the plan to protect the purpose. After bankruptcy, I began changing the purpose to protect myself.
That is a very different use of the same strength.
Adaptability had helped me cross countries, solve problems and remain open when I did not know what would happen next. Now it helped me arrange almost any circumstance into something I could endure.
I became very good at managing a life I did not genuinely want.
My body finally stopped me
On vacation, there was no alternative worth negotiating. My ankle was broken and the active holiday was finished. For someone accustomed to finding another solution, my body had produced an unusually clear answer.
I had to stop.
At first, the pause was simply practical. I could not walk properly, continue with the planned activities or distract myself by moving on to the next thing. As the days passed, the stillness revealed its purpose.
I began to see how much of my life I had organized around avoiding disappointment. My plans were careful. My expectations were manageable. My deeper wishes remained somewhere in the distance, where they could neither fail nor ask too much of me.
I had called this stability.
The absence of another catastrophe had become enough.
What frightened me was how normal it all felt. I had not been obviously unhappy every day. I was working, thinking, drawing and taking care of what needed to be done. Life can become smaller without appearing empty. We become accustomed to its size.
The broken ankle did not create the problem or solve it. It interrupted me long enough to notice it.
I had spent years naturally adapting to almost anything. I had forgotten to ask why I was adapting, how long the situation was supposed to remain temporary and whether managing it well was a good enough reason to keep it.
Those questions changed my understanding of strength.
Adaptability is precious. It carried me through unfamiliar countries and helped me rebuild after enormous loss. It also allowed me to remain too long in circumstances that no longer belonged to me.
A strength does not always lead us in the right direction simply because it is a strength. We still decide what it serves.
I continue to believe in adjusting the route, releasing plans that no longer work and meeting reality as it is. Now I also watch what I am preserving through those adjustments.
Am I adapting so that I can continue toward something that matters, or am I using my ability to make an unwanted life tolerable?
Sometimes circumstances truly cannot change yet. Responsibilities, health, money and other people place real limits around our choices. Even then, I want to know whether I am living through a temporary condition or quietly turning it into my future.
My broken ankle gave me no grand answer about what to do next. It showed me that I had to begin choosing again.
I did not need to recover the exact person I had been before bankruptcy. Too much had happened, and much of what I had learned deserved to remain. I needed to use my ability to adapt in its original direction again: in service of a life I wanted, rather than a life I knew how to survive.
JOURNAL YOUR NEXT DIRECTION
Take a few quiet minutes and write honestly:
- What do I currently dislike about my life?
- What do I want instead?
- What would my desired life look and feel like?
- Which parts of my current situation can I change, influence or reinterpret?
- What is one small step I can take to begin transforming my present circumstances toward what I want?
- Where am I adapting to survive, when I could begin adapting to create?
You do not need to solve your entire life today. Start by naming what is no longer working and giving yourself permission to imagine something different.
If you want support as you reflect, rebuild and choose what comes next, you are invited to join the free NOVALISM community.
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