You cannot change what fate life gives you, but you can always decide whether to keep going or give up.
I’m writing this from a life I never thought would be mine. Business ventures that folded, job interviews that ended with polite thanks but no offers, relationships that cracked under the weight of what we both expected but couldn’t deliver. Family dinners where everyone talks but nobody really listens. My body keeps betraying me with one health problem after another, and my bank statements tell the story of dreams that cost more than they ever gave back.
The irony hits hard. There was a time when everyone around me saw nothing but potential, when my future seemed to glow with certainty. The gap between that bright beginning and where I am now feels like I’ve slipped through into some parallel world.
Which brings me to the question that haunts me, and probably you too: What is fate, really?
The Paradox We All Live With
We’re born knowing one thing for certain: we’re all going back to dust eventually. This knowledge sits quietly in our heads most of the time, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting. Should we just give up because of this inevitability? Should we accept that everything we build, every dream we chase, every person we love will eventually turn to nothing?
Some people are born with advantages, their paths seemingly clear from the start. Others spend their lives sifting through whatever circumstances left behind, looking for something valuable. A few seem destined for greatness, becoming billionaires or world leaders or thinkers whose ideas outlive them. But what about the rest of us? What about those of us struggling somewhere between extraordinary and ordinary, wondering if this middling existence is all there is?
The cruel paradox is this: we can never know if where we are today is our fate or just a stop along the way. We live suspended between possibility and giving up, never quite sure which one we’re looking at.
When I Believed I Was Special
I was the golden child in my small world once. Secondary school was my stage, and I performed brilliantly in everything: academics, extracurriculars, dreams. The adults around me painted my future with confident strokes. “You could be a rocket scientist,” my teacher said. “A doctor,” suggested another. I fancied becoming a billionaire, carried along by their certainty and my own teenage ambition.
My childhood friend’s words still echo: “I wish I had your brain.” God, those words were intoxicating. They fed this growing belief that I was chosen somehow, different. I was led to believe that fate had marked me for a life beyond anyone’s imagination, a life of achievement and recognition and significance.
How beautifully, devastatingly wrong I was.
When Reality Stripped Away the Illusion
University arrived like a cold slap. The ease I’d known, that natural flow of success, suddenly felt foreign. Struggles appeared where there had been none. At thirty, I launched my first business with the confidence of someone who’d never truly failed. Then came the second venture. Then the third. Each one collapsed, each one chipping away at the story I’d built about myself.
Unemployment followed like a shadow. The psychological weight of unmet expectations pressed down with relentless force. I found myself dancing on the edge of homelessness, counting coins for daily necessities whilst my body betrayed me with constant health problems. The golden child had become a cautionary tale, and I was both writing it and living it.
Was this the fate I was expecting? Was this where all those early promises had been pointing? This is where personal catastrophe becomes universal insight, when we realise that the gap between promise and reality is where most of human experience actually happens.
The Drowning
Years of sorrow accumulate like sediment in a riverbed. I washed my face with tears so often that salt seemed permanently stained on my cheeks. My self-esteem didn’t just diminish, it collapsed entirely, leaving behind a hollow space filled with visions of hopelessness.
I turned to alcohol, that ancient companion of the desperate, hoping it would swallow my pain and despair. Instead, I watched my body deteriorate whilst the ache in my soul remained untouched. The bottle promised relief but delivered only new forms of suffering, adding physical decay to emotional devastation.
Yet somewhere in the depths of my despair, I remembered Thomas Edison’s words: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Could my failures be discoveries? Could my pain be preparation for something I couldn’t yet see?
The Tyranny of Other People’s Expectations
Society whispers its definitions of success with the persistence of a prayer: money, status, fame. These become the measuring sticks by which we judge not just our achievements, but our worth as human beings. When you’re drowning in failure and poverty, these whispers become screams, drowning out any quieter voice that might speak of different kinds of value.
This is where my story meets yours, regardless of your circumstances. Here’s the crucial question that can save or damn us: Are your aspirations born from your true passions, or are they echoes of other people’s expectations? Are you chasing your dreams, or are you chasing the approval of a society that might never be satisfied with what you offer?
True happiness, that elusive, precious thing, lies in your honest answer to this question. It lies in the courage to distinguish between what you genuinely want and what you think you should want.
The Cruel Blessing of Not Knowing
Here’s what I’ve learned about fate: we cannot change what it gives us, but we can transform how we live through the journey it provides. Perhaps some of us are meant to walk through valleys of struggle before reaching our promised land. Perhaps the struggles themselves are the point, not obstacles to overcome, but the very curriculum of our lives.
The phrase “who knows” carries more power than we realise. It’s simultaneously our greatest fear and our most potent fuel. Who knows what might happen if we take one more step, make one more attempt, hold on for one more day? This uncertainty, this not knowing, becomes the energy that pushes us forward when logic would suggest surrender.
The Danger of Giving Up Too Soon
How many dreams die just one attempt before they would have succeeded? How many stories end just one chapter before the plot twist that changes everything? By going a little further, trying a little harder, we honour the possibility that things could turn out differently than they appear.
But, and this is crucial, if your dreams aren’t rooted in genuine passion, if they’re merely borrowed from others or imposed by social pressure, then the destination you’re chasing will forever remain hidden. You’ll be running towards a mirage, exhausting yourself in pursuit of something that was never truly yours to begin with.
The Unfinished Symphony
“I would rather have a moment of glory than a lifetime of nothing special.” These words carry both inspiration and warning. Sometimes, the lifetime of nothing special isn’t the consolation prize, it’s the preparation. The moment of glory might require that lifetime of seeming ordinariness, might demand that you walk through the wilderness of anonymity before reaching the promised land of recognition.
The tiny hope of that moment of glory becomes the fuel that carries you across the desert of the seemingly meaningless. Only when you reach the end, only when the final note of your life’s symphony is played, will you know whether the music was beautiful.
Redefining Fate Through Faith
Perhaps we’ve been thinking about fate all wrong. We usually imagine fate as some predetermined script: the circumstances of our birth, the major events that happen to us, whether we’re “destined” for success or failure. But I think that’s actually the least important part of fate.
Real fate, I believe, is the meaning we create from whatever raw materials life gives us. It’s the story we tell ourselves about our experiences, the faith we choose to maintain or abandon, and the passion we either nurture or let die.
Consider this: fate and faith are separated by just one letter, yet they approach the unknown from opposite directions. Fate suggests something predetermined, something beyond our control. Faith suggests something we choose to believe in, something we actively embrace despite uncertainty.
Perhaps your true fate is being written right now, in how you’re choosing to process your experiences. The fact that you can transform pain into wisdom, isolation into insight, and failure into lessons, that’s how fate is actually unfolding. You don’t just survive circumstances; you transform them into something meaningful.
I think fate is ultimately about becoming who you’re meant to be through the process of responding to what happens to you. It’s not about the hand you’re dealt, but how you choose to play it, and more importantly, why you choose to keep playing at all.
Can you have faith in your own fate? Can you believe in the unknown destination towards which your life is moving, even when the path seems dark and the outcome uncertain?
A meaningful journey travelled with faith and passion might constitute a well-fated life, whilst a blessed beginning squandered through meaninglessness might be the truly ill-fated existence. Perhaps your life’s fate is ultimately defined not by what happens to you, but by the faith you carry as you walk towards your dreams.
The Continuing Story
The journey isn’t over. Fate hasn’t given its final verdict yet. You’re still writing the story, still choosing each day whether to keep going or give up.
What does this look like in practice? It means waking up tomorrow and starting to do one small thing at a time, something perhaps aligned with your genuine passion, not society’s expectations. It means treating each setback as Edison treated his, as valuable data about what doesn’t work, bringing you closer to what does. It means asking “who knows?” instead of assuming you know how the story ends.
Maybe tomorrow you write one page of that book you’ve been thinking about. Maybe you have one honest conversation about what you actually want from life. Maybe you start on a project you’ve always dreamt about. Maybe you decide it’s time to move on after a prolonged period of difficulty in your relationship. These aren’t grand gestures, they’re acts of faith in your own unfinished story.
The story continues. The final chapter remains unwritten. And in that unfinished space lies all the power you need to transform not just your circumstances, but your understanding of what it means to be truly, deeply, meaningfully alive.
We cannot change our fate, but by refusing to surrender, we allow fate to reveal its true purpose.
