People talk about slaying their demons in order to achieve more in life.

Our minds like to turn disappointment into evidence.

A career that didn’t become what we imagined. An opportunity we didn’t take. Someone who passed us while we stood still.

We collect these moments and build a case against ourselves.

See?

This is who I am.

This is who I’ve always been.

The problem is that memory is a biased archivist.

Once we believe something about ourselves, we become very good at finding the evidence that confirms it. We remember the failures, the hesitation, the years we think we wasted.

And eventually:

I haven’t become what I hoped I would become.

turns into:

There must be something wrong with me.

Those are not the same thing.

Fear may have cost us something.

We procrastinated. We gave up too easily. We stayed somewhere too long. We let doubt make decisions for us.

Or at least that’s the story we’ve learned to tell ourselves.

We don’t have to rewrite the past into a triumphant story.

But we also don’t have to spend the rest of our lives trying to defeat every part of ourselves that may or may not have held us back.

Maybe the goal isn’t to slay the demons.

Maybe we just need to learn to move while they’re still there.

Be afraid and make the thing.

Doubt yourself and move forward anyway.

Regret yesterday and still do something today.

We don’t need to prove anything about the past.

It’s done.

We just need to decide what to do with the next five minutes and be open to the possibility that the wings we seek have always been there.

We just need to use them.

However imperfectly.

Better is a direction.