I turn 27 on Monday. I suffered a lot, wasted years, lost people I loved and somehow I’m grateful for all of it.

When I was a kid, I thought life would be simple. I was always one of the “gifted” ones. Straight A’s, winning competitions, teachers telling me I had potential. Then high school happened and I completely fell apart. I stopped caring about school, drank, smoked, wasted time, my grades crashed, my parents divorced, my girlfriend left me, and for a while it felt like everything that had given me some kind of identity was disappearing at once. I suffered a lot during those years, but looking back now, I think losing that version of myself was necessary because once I stopped being “the smart kid,” I had to actually figure out who I was.

So I started saying yes to things that scared me. At 19 I hitchhiked around 3,500 km with basically no money. I lived in France, learned to dive and surf, tried all kinds of sports, worked completely different jobs, did 100-day challenges, forced myself into public speaking even though I hated it, and got obsessed with health, psychology, business, performance, spirituality and basically every possible way of understanding myself and life better. I went through a phase where I rejected God completely, thought I had outgrown the whole idea, and then slowly started exploring it again from a very different place. I’ve started projects that failed, worked jobs I hated, trusted the wrong people, made stupid decisions, had periods where I felt unstoppable and others where I genuinely had no idea what I was doing.

And somehow, all of it gave me something. Hitchhiking taught me the world is less scary than it looks from your room. Shitty jobs taught me what I never want my life to become. Sports taught me that your body usually has more left than your mind tells you. Heartbreak taught me you can lose someone you thought you needed and still become a better person afterward. Failure taught me that embarrassment lasts five minutes and regret can last years.

Now I’m about to turn 27. Life still isn’t easy. I still overthink, compare myself, take risks that may look stupid later and sometimes feel behind. But I genuinely love being alive. And the strangest thing is that if someone gave me the chance to go back and remove the painful parts, I don’t think I would. Not failing in school, not my parents separating, not the heartbreak, not the lost years, not the shitty jobs, not the stupid decisions. Every one of those things pushed me somewhere I probably wouldn’t have gone voluntarily.

At 15, I thought a good life meant avoiding failure. At 20, I thought it meant achieving impressive things. At 27, I think it might just mean being fully awake for the whole thing. The wins, the losses, the chaos, the rebuilding.

My life went absolutely nothing like I imagined it would.

Thank you God.