"What to Do When It’s Your Turn - and It’s Always Your Turn"
Updated: 6 days ago
This particular title isn’t originally mine - it belongs to a book by Seth Godin that was gifted to me by my father the year I finally graduated from junior college after what felt like a lifetime of setbacks, detours, pain, and rebuilding.
And it's a book that's stayed with me, not because of who gave it to me, but because of what it represents: the truth that life doesn't wait for perfect timing, ideal circumstances, universal approval, or complete confidence before asking something of you.
Your turn often arrives in the middle of uncertainty - while you're healing - and when you still feel under-qualified, unseen, and unsure. It arrives after failure too, and sometimes while you are still carrying grief in one hand and hope in the other.
And when it does, you have to decide whether or not you'll step forward.
Directly from the cover of "What to do when it's your turn (and it's always your turn)": "SETH GODIN is the author of 17 bestsellers that have been translated into 35 languages. He's the founder of several companies, a member of the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame and an influential speaker around the world. He writes about treating people with respect, the changing economy and ideas that spread. Mostly, he creates projects, many of which end up failing."
The Feigned Success Trap
Failure is an unavoidable human experience. It comes with taking risks. Pain too… and fear. These are all normal occurrences whether we choose to face them head-on or not. When faced, they always lead to success at some point. A lot of people run away from these “negative” emotions and experiences, though.
They’re more concerned with looking successful than doing the embarrassing, taboo, or difficult work it takes to actually be successful. For many, that knowing - that everyone’s faking it - can drive them to mask for their entire lives. For me though, it’s the driving factor to do whatever I feel like doing, despite what others may think.
I would rather risk failing upward while being misunderstood, than spend my life avoiding everything that could give me real, lasting happiness and security.
As an Aries sun, with several other Aries placements, I guess I’ve always been that way though. I go against the grain, shoot my shots in the dark, and somehow manage to be both admirably confident and cringe at the same time. You could say those are some of my strongest qualities.
Since I’ve been this way my whole life, I’ve also gotten used to not being understood, liked, or taken seriously by many, despite my accomplishments. Which to me is even more reason to just say “fuck it” and do what gives ME LIFE.
And I believe everyone should live that way. In a way that speaks to their soul's true calling, despite what others may fabricate in their minds about “why” or “how” something came to be.
To me, the opinions of those who haven’t taken the time to inquire directly with me about my actions, or with themselves about their own, hold no weight. And that philosophy has allowed me to experience breakthrough after breakthrough in areas that those very same people doubted I could reach.
The same happens to everyone who chooses self-trust and internal validation above all else - the real success that many fake having.
A Life-Changing Lesson in Failure
I'm no stranger to failure, but for the sake of continuity (and all of our mental health), I'll focus on my time in junior college.
Right out of high school, I became an engineering major. I had ambition, intelligence, and a vision for what my life could become (within the limited constraints of my parents' expectations). But around the same time, I entered an abusive relationship, which brought chaos into every corner of my life.
There was narcissistic abuse, physical violence, sexual trauma, fear, and experiences that fractured my sense of safety and destroyed my fragile vision for what lay ahead. There was even an unplanned pregnancy and abortion that led to years of drug and alcohol abuse as I tried to numb what I didn't yet know how to process.
Naturally, during that whole experience, I started to fall behind in school and eventually got placed on academic suspension. At the time, it felt like undeniable proof that I had failed. I had tarnished my *thunderclap* "permanent record." My entire future felt like it had collapsed, and whatever potential I once had seemed gone - never to be seen or heard from again.
I was in the thick of the slow unraveling that trauma often causes. But I was too ashamed to tell anyone, and the outside world still expected me to function as if nothing had happened.
What I know now in hindsight though, is that some of the seasons that look like failure are actually survival. They aren't meant for achievement; they're meant for keeping yourself alive long enough to begin again.
Coming Back Different
After two years of recovering, rebuilding, and trying to find solid ground again, I returned to college and earned my associate’s in Business Admin. To some, that may sound small, but to me, it was monumental.
It represented resilience, discipline after devastation, and choosing not to let one chapter define the entire story. It was getting back up when staying down would have been the easier and more understandable option.
It was a big deal. I didn't know I could do that until I did. Yet even then, the validation I thought might come never truly arrived.
My father, who shamed and pressured me my whole life to "not be a disappointment" and to "get any degree" so that HE could brag about it, didn’t attend my graduation ceremony because he had a “dinner meeting.”
He knew what I had gone through, but none of that mattered. At the time, I also worked for him and my mother in their private practice, where I was frequently minimized, pushed aside, and treated in ways that made me feel small. I was still expected to live up to unrealistic standards and take on responsibilities that weren't mine.
Soon after my graduation and his lack of attendance or any real acknowledgment, he publicly celebrated a coworker for graduating nursing school while subtly shaming me for not going further. We even threw her a party.
It hurt deeply.
But it also taught me one of the most freeing truths of my life: Some people will never be pleased by your progress because they are at war within themselves.
And that's when my first awakening began.
The Freedom of Letting People Be Wrong
There comes a point when you realize that chasing approval from unhappy people - or anyone - is a losing game. Even when that unhappy person is YOU. But at least when it's you, you can learn to be happy.
You can become smarter, kinder, more successful, more beautiful, more accomplished, more generous, and it still will not be enough for those committed to misunderstanding you. Their dissatisfaction was never about you; you were simply the nearest surface for them to project onto.
Once I understood that, something clicked. I stopped trying to earn love through performance, treating acceptance like a prize someone else could hand me, and above all else, I stopped shrinking myself to fit inside other people’s comfort zones - and finally, began to live for ME.
Not perfectly, not without fear, and not without setbacks, but honestly.
I also learned how uncomfortable true authenticity could be. For me, yes, but ESPECIALLY for everyone else who was still faking.
Standing Up for What’s Right Changes Everything
Many people think standing up for what’s right means public battles, dramatic moments, or grand acts of rebellion. Sometimes it does, but often, standing up for what’s right is quieter and far more personal.
It's leaving what harms you. It's refusing to participate in your own diminishment. It's telling the truth after years of silence. It's choosing integrity over image, declining to betray yourself just to be accepted. It’s deciding that pain may have shaped part of your story, but it will not author the rest of it or stop you from moving forward.
Those choices create real change because they start internally first. They alter your standards, your identity, your tolerance, and your future by teaching you to trust yourself. Once self-trust is built, everything else shifts along with it.
Creating a Life Beyond Limitation
My upbringing was rough, and for a while, I genuinely didn't know what my future could look like, or if I would have one. But the more I sat with myself, even through painful thoughts and uncomfortable truths, the clearer my vision became. And that led me to be more honest about what I wanted, which opened up more opportunities to expand. And even more transformative than that, the more responsibility I took for my own life, the more powerful I felt.
Now today, I live a sovereign life.
That doesn't mean life is effortless or that the world has no constraints. It just means I no longer organize my decisions around common limitations, inherited fear, or other people’s projections.
It also means I create my own way forward, which I once did from survival but now do from Divine Inspiration.
Now the life that I dreamed of as a little girl, the life that once felt stolen from me, is something I participate in every day. Not because someone gave it back - that was never going to happen - but because I claimed it and took back what was always mine.
It’s Your Turn Too
As the aforementioned book title says, "It's Always Your Turn" and that may not look glamorous right now.
It may look like starting over, healing privately while others seem to be racing ahead, applying again after rejection, creating again after embarrassment, trusting again after betrayal, or trying again after failure.
And that all still counts.
"Your turn" is not reserved for people with cleaner pasts, more money, more support, more credentials, or fewer scars. It belongs to anyone willing to step toward the life calling them in spite of all of that.
Sometimes you'll see an opening, and other times you'll have to make one. But either way, move.
The market is not too saturated. You are not too old. You're not too late. Your mistakes did not disqualify you, and your pain did not erase your potential.
It is still your turn.
And the only real question is: What are you going to do with it?
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