I still feel ashamed of not becoming the person I pictured

Dear Delyara, A school event. A conversation with someone younger. An online form asking for occupation. A question about “what I do.” Sometimes it only takes something very small to wake up that old shame about the life I thought I would have built by now, the certainty I thought I would feel, the identity I thought I would carry with more ease. I know life reroutes people. I know I’ve survived things I didn’t expect. Still, there are moments where my actual life and the imagined one sit too close together and the gap hurts in a childish, humiliating way. That shame is not logical. It is still real.