Are You Climbing Someone Else’s Ladder?
I was fifteen rungs up someone else’s ladder when I realized I had no idea where it led or why I was climbing it. The law degree my father wanted, the career path my professors recommended, the lifestyle my peers were pursuing—I had been scaling heights that belonged to other people’s dreams, following blueprints drawn by other people’s definitions of success.
The realization came during a partner meeting where I should have felt triumphant. Twenty years of climbing, and I had finally reached a level that impressed everyone who knew me. But sitting in that conference room, listening to conversations about cases I didn’t care about, I felt like an actor who had forgotten they were performing, who had spent so long playing a role they had lost track of who they were underneath the costume.
When did I stop asking what I wanted and start asking what I should want? When did external expectations become so loud that my internal voice became inaudible? When did other people’s visions for my life become more compelling than any vision I had for myself?
The borrowed blueprint had been so detailed, so convincing, so supported by everyone around me that I never questioned its origin. Parents who projected their unlived dreams onto my future. Teachers who channeled students toward familiar paths. Society that defined success in terms too narrow for the full spectrum of human fulfillment.
I had been an excellent student of other people’s ambitions, a dutiful follower of other people’s roadmaps, a successful implementer of other people’s strategies for happiness. But I had never learned to distinguish between what I was taught to want and what I actually wanted, between borrowed dreams and authentic desires.
The weight of this recognition was crushing: I had spent decades becoming excellent at being someone I never chose to be. I had optimized my life for goals that weren’t mine, developed skills for games I didn’t want to play, built expertise in areas that didn’t match my interests or values.
But the borrowed blueprint hadn’t been maliciously imposed—it had been lovingly offered by people who genuinely wanted the best for me. They had given me the blueprint that had worked for them, or that they wished had worked for them, or that they believed would lead to security and respect. Their intentions were pure even if their vision was limited.
The day I realized I was climbing someone else’s ladder was the day I had to face an terrifying question: what would I choose if I could start over, if I could ignore all the advice and expectations and expertise about what constitutes a good life, if I could listen only to the voice that knows what makes me feel alive?
Maybe the ladder I’ve been climbing will turn out to lead somewhere I actually want to go. Maybe the borrowed blueprint will prove compatible with my authentic self. But maybe not. And maybe it’s time to find out.
Tonight I want to stop climbing long enough to look around, to ask whose ladder this is and whether the view from the top is one I actually want to see.