The Weight of Endless Possibility

We’re told anything is possible.  That with enough work, belief, and vision, you can become anything, achieve anything, have everything.

It sounds empowering.  Encouraging.  But often, it isn’t. 

Because what happens when you don’t get there?  When the relationship ends.  When the career doesn’t take off. When the body won’t heal.  When the dream doesn’t come to life.  When the book never gets written.  When the success you visualised never arrives.  When you can’t be everything, do everything. 

In a world where everything is supposed to be possible — where every outcome is marketed as achievable — ‘failure’ becomes personal.  It’s no longer that life is hard or unpredictable — it’s that you must not have tried hard enough. Or got it right.  

We’ve come to expect so much of ourselves that even understandable feelings in the face of struggle — sadness, disappointment, frustration, grief, exhaustion, overwhelm — can start to feel like symptoms.  And when life doesn’t go to plan, we turn inward, or toward medical diagnosis, asking: What’s wrong with me?  Because in this world where everything is supposed to be possible, you must be the problem.

But not everything is possible.  Every person cannot achieve their every dream.  We are finite. Embodied.  Shaped by history, chance, and circumstance.  We don’t all begin in the same place.  And wanting something badly doesn’t always make it happen.

That doesn’t mean we’re helpless.  But it does mean healing sometimes begins with naming — what we hoped for.  What we lost.  And what we may never get.

Therapy isn’t a place to push through or override.  It’s a space to be with our experience. To say: This mattered. This hurts.  

And to begin to question the idea that you always have to be more.

We don’t grow by pretending anything is possible.  

We grow by being met in the places where we feel most human.