Aligned & Awake: Living The Dream (Allegedly)
What happens when a stranger in a rearview mirror sees your life better than you do
Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.
I’m back in Canada for a bit.
Lake Ontario, a sunny Tuesday, and me walking along like I’ve got my life together. The sunshine is doing its absolute best, even if the air is still cold. I love to people-watch; it’s free, fascinating, and requires zero commitment, which is very on-brand for me right now.
Very much the main character of this particular afternoon.
And then life does what life does.
A man in a wheelchair. No arms. No legs. A dog sitting beside him like a small, loyal planet in his orbit.
I keep walking. I don’t stare. I don’t walk away thinking, "Be more grateful, Tanya.” I walk away thinking, I have absolutely no idea what a full life looks like anymore.
I genuinely cannot tell whether it's a crisis or a breakthrough.
A few days earlier, I’m in an Uber from the airport.
The driver asks where I came from and what I do. I give him the casual version: writing, travelling, building something new, living between countries, figuring it out as I go.
He looks at me in the rearview mirror like I’ve just described a film he’d watch on a Friday night with a good bottle of wine.
“That’s the dream,” he says. “You’re actually living it.”
And I’m sitting in the back thinking, yes, and also, my financial situation currently has the energy of a countdown timer. This morning I had a minor spiral, and I’m fairly certain I’ve been winging it since approximately 2024.
Same life. His edit: main character, freedom, adventure. My edit: shaky handheld camera, several unresolved plot points, craft services have run out of everything good.
Two completely different films. One life.
Someone always has it worse. Someone always has it better. Both true, all the time, and neither gets you out of bed on a hard morning.
The man by the lake didn’t hand me a lesson. He handed me a mirror I wasn’t expecting to look into on a Tuesday afternoon.
The Uber driver handed me another one.
And standing between those two reflections, I’m looking at a life I don’t fully recognize yet. One that looks like freedom from the outside and feels like a construction site from the inside. Loud, unfinished, occasionally exciting, frequently covered in dust.
The facts are the facts. Some of it is genuinely hard. Some of it is genuinely extraordinary. Most days it’s both, usually within the same hour, sometimes within the same sentence.
And I keep defaulting to the behind-the-scenes cut. The one where I know all the debt, all the doubt, all the context that didn’t make it into the trailer.
The Uber driver got the trailer.
Maybe I should watch that version more often.
I’m not going to tell you to count your blessings. I find that advice faintly condescending, and I’ve read enough content ending in “choose gratitude” to last several lifetimes.
I am living a life someone else would call a dream. I also know exactly what it costs. Both of those things are true and I still get to choose which one I hand the microphone to today.
Today I handed it to the Uber driver’s version.
Walked along the lake. Watched people getting on with it.
Somewhere between enlightened and mildly panicked. The Uber driver would probably still call it the dream. He's not wrong.
Tell me…
Which edit are you running today, the trailer or the behind-the-scenes cut?
You are the master of the moment. The Madonna of the mood. You are on the inside looking out. I am on the outside looking in, but the curtain is closed, and I never know what's going on inside. I guess we need both kinds of people to write both points of view. Keep going! You're growing.
Ah yes, that razor’s edge between enlightenment and panic. I know it well. Brilliant piece as always, Tanya!