I Spent 6 Months Hiding in Toilets. Here's What Finally Got Me Moving.
When you don't know what to do with your life, the answer isn't reflection. It's evidence.
At 17, I spent most of my days locked in bathroom stalls.
Not because I was sick. Because I was hiding.
I'd transferred to a school called The Institute in Dublin after my previous school became a pressure cooker.
13 out of 50 students dropped out from stress.
The Institute was supposed to be different.
More independence.
More like university.
A fresh start.
Instead, I disappeared.
I barely attended classes.
When I did show up, I'd find an empty bathroom, lock myself in a stall, and wait.
Sometimes I'd nap.
Mostly I just sat there, reading books and ignoring the world outside.
I didn't speak to a single person.
The only good parts of my day were leaving campus to meet friends who were at actual colleges nearby.
For a few hours, I could slip into the life I had outside school.
Playing in metal bands, hanging out with friends.
Then I'd go back to hiding.
When exam time came, I couldn't sit them.
Not wouldn't.
Couldn't.
My body refused to walk into that room.
I skipped the exams entirely.
The 40-Degree Reality Check
What follows a spectacular collapse?
For me, it was a printing factory.
I stood above shrink-wrapping machines that ran at 40 degrees Celsius.
Every 20 minutes, I'd have to come down or risk passing out.
The rest of the time, I filed dusty old documents in a back room that smelled like decomposing paper and broken dreams.
No direction.
No plan.
No fucking clue what to do with my life.
This is the part where most self-help gurus would tell you I had an epiphany.
A moment of clarity where I discovered my passion and everything clicked into place.
That didn't happen.
What happened was way less romantic and way more useful.
What Nobody Tells You About Being Lost
When you're directionless, everyone has advice.
"Find your passion."
"Follow your heart."
"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life."
All of it is spectacularly useless when you're standing in a 40-degree room wondering if passing out might be preferable to another hour of filing.
You know what doesn't help when you're lost?
More thinking.
More reflection.
More journal prompts about your purpose.
You can't think your way to clarity.
I tried.
I spent months in my own head, and all it gave me was depression and a really intimate knowledge of bathroom architecture.
Studies on career development consistently show that interests and direction emerge through action, not introspection.
People who wait to feel certain before they move tend to stay stuck.
Those who take small steps, even uncertain ones, build momentum.
Two-thirds of people who drop out or derail eventually recover.
But not through meditation retreats or vision boards.
Through structure.
Through trying adjacent things.
Through showing the hell up.
Volume Over Vision
I didn't figure out what I wanted to do.
I just did the next thing in front of me.
Applied to courses.
Not because I was excited about them.
Because applications were something I could fill out.
Showed up to things.
Not because I was passionate.
Because showing up was better than hiding.
Eventually, I got interested in journalism.
Not through some soul-searching revelation.
Through sheer repetition and exposure.
I started replying to every single tweet from a UK tech journalist.
Every. Single. One.
Most people would call this annoying.
He thought it was funny.
That became an internship.
The internship became writing 5 articles a day for 6 months straight.
Some days I wanted to quit.
Most days, actually.
But I kept showing up because I'd built a habit of showing up.
By 21, I was covering Silicon Valley and the White House as a tech journalist.
Not because I found my passion in a bathroom stall.
Because I generated enough volume that direction emerged from the data.
Your Life Is Already Full of Evidence
Here's what actually works when you're lost.
Stop looking for feelings.
Start looking for evidence.
What have you already been paid for?
Even if it was small.
Even if it felt insignificant.
What do people already ask you for help with?
Not what you think you should be good at.
What do they actually come to you for?
What have you done for free that others charge for?
Where have you naturally invested time without external pressure?
What were you willing to grind at even when it sucked?
Not what you enjoyed every second of.
What could you tolerate on the bad days?
Your direction isn't hiding in some deep, undiscovered part of yourself.
It's sitting in the mundane data of what you've already done.
I didn't discover I liked writing through meditation.
I discovered it because I kept doing it.
Even when it was 5 articles a day of tech news that nobody would remember a week later.
The evidence was always there.
I just had to look at what I was actually doing.
Not what I thought I should be doing.
The Action-First Framework
When you're stuck, reflection feels productive.
It's not.
It's procrastination dressed up as self-improvement.
Action feels scary because you might choose wrong.
But here's the thing - you're already choosing.
Staying stuck is a choice.
Hiding is a choice.
Waiting for certainty is a choice.
The people who break out of being lost don't suddenly discover their purpose.
They take enough small steps that patterns start to show up.
Apply to things you're even mildly curious about. Not passionate. Curious.
Show up to opportunities even when you're not sure. Especially when you're not sure.
Do the boring work consistently. The evidence emerges in what you're willing to repeat.
Say yes to adjacent experiments. Try the thing next to the thing you think you want.
Then pay attention.
Not to how you feel in the moment, but to what you keep coming back to.
What you voluntarily do more of.
What you defend time for.
That's your data.
That's your evidence.
Stop Waiting for the Feeling
I wasted months waiting to feel certain.
Waiting for passion to strike like lightning.
Waiting for some internal signal that I'd found the right path.
That feeling never came.
What came instead was momentum.
Small actions that built into patterns.
Patterns that built into skills.
Skills that built into opportunities.
You don't need to know where you're going.
You just need to move in a direction and adjust based on what you learn.
The bathroom stalls taught me something useful.
When you're hiding, the problem isn't that you don't know what to do.
The problem is you're not doing anything.
The printing factory taught me something too.
Any action beats perfect stillness.
Even a shit job gives you data about what you don't want, which narrows the field.
By the time I was covering Silicon Valley, I'd learned the real secret.
Direction doesn't come from looking inward.
It comes from looking at the trail you've already left behind.
What are you already doing that you're ignoring?
What evidence exists in your life right now that you're dismissing because it doesn't feel important enough?
That's where your answer is.
Not in reflection.
In the receipts.
So stop thinking about what you should do.
Look at what you've already done.
Find the pattern.
Do more of that.
The evidence is already there.
You just have to stop hiding from it.