THE SUIT

August 11, 2026

I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to confuse being capable of something with actually wanting it, and I’m not sure I ever really separated those two things before. If I was good at something, if I could do it and especially if other people recognized that I could do it, then continuing seemed like the obvious thing to do.

The strange part is I knew I wasn’t completely satisfied. I wasn’t walking around blissfully unaware that something felt off. I knew. I just kept explaining it to myself with another promise. It’ll feel better after the next AGM, once that person moves on, once things stabilize, once I get through this particular problem. There was always some point just ahead where everything was apparently going to settle and I would finally feel the way I thought I should feel about the life I had built.

Years ago a colleague told me I was a fixer. He said I was only engaged until I fixed something and then I moved on, which I remember because it was both irritating and probably completely accurate.

I do like fixing things. I like walking into something complicated and figuring out what’s actually going on underneath it. I like the part where nobody quite knows what to do yet, where there are pieces everywhere and I can see connections and start pulling them together. That part absolutely does engage me.

But then I would fix it and eventually become restless again.

I think I interpreted that restlessness as needing a bigger challenge, which is interesting to me now because maybe I was asking the wrong question entirely. Maybe I didn’t need a bigger version of the same thing. Maybe fixing was simply the part that interested me and I kept building entire lives around the fact that I happened to be very good at it.

Capability kept opening doors, so I kept walking through them.

More responsibility, more complexity, bigger problems, another goal. There was always somewhere else to go and another version of success available if I wanted to reach for it, and I usually did. It’s very easy to keep going when the world is confirming that you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

Maybe that’s where the suit comes in.

It feels like owning one really good suit and putting it on every day because you know it’s the uniform. It fits properly, you know exactly how to wear it and everyone keeps telling you how good you look in it, so when something doesn’t feel quite right you don’t question the suit. Why would you? The suit clearly isn’t the problem.

So maybe you decide you need better shoes, another accomplishment or a bigger problem to solve. Maybe you just need to get through this year and then you’ll finally enjoy wearing the fucking suit.

I keep wondering how far I would have taken that.

Did I need to conquer the world before I realized conquering the world wasn’t going to give me whatever feeling I thought was waiting there?

Because I’m proud of my achievements. That part hasn’t changed and I don’t want to rewrite my own history into some story where none of it mattered because I’ve changed. It mattered. I worked incredibly hard for things I wanted and I did things I’m proud of.

But my achievements aren’t what make me Arbe.

I don’t know why that sentence feels so different to me now.

Maybe because for most of my life there was always another achievement sitting somewhere in front of me, and pursuing it gave everything a direction. You don’t have to think too deeply about whether the road is yours when you’re very busy being excellent at driving on it.

Then everything blew up.

And now I keep wondering whether it actually had to.

Did I need a full nuclear explosion before I was willing to see something I already knew?

Because that’s the uncomfortable part. I knew about the dissatisfaction. I had been having conversations with it for years. I just kept negotiating with it. After this. Once that changes. When this settles.

There was always another reason why now wasn’t quite the right time to question the whole thing.

Maybe I would have eventually figured it out anyway. I genuinely don’t know. Maybe I would have kept moving the finish line because moving it was easier than asking why reaching it never seemed to give me what I expected.

What I didn’t anticipate was that once I started questioning one part of my life, the question wouldn’t stay there.

Once I understood that I could be exceptionally good at something and still have it not fully align with who I am, I started noticing the same thing elsewhere. Choices I’d made, things I thought I was supposed to want, different versions of myself I had kept in these neat little compartments because somehow I thought life worked that way.

This belongs here, that belongs there, this version of me makes sense in this part of my life and another version belongs somewhere else. Every once in a while something would cross one of those imaginary boundaries and even I would look at it and wonder, does this belong?

I think about that question differently now.

Does it belong where? And who decided?

Maybe I don’t want a life made up of separate sections that each make sense on their own anymore. Maybe I want to look across the whole messy thing and recognize the same person in all of it, even when the pieces don’t make obvious sense together.

And that brings me back to the suit, because maybe I’ve been giving myself too much credit for choosing it.

Did I ever even ask if I liked the colour? Did I wonder whether I could alter it, cut it apart, change the shape or make it into something that actually felt like me? Did I ever stop and ask myself if I even wanted to own a suit?

I don’t think I did.

I simply put it on because I had been trained to put it on, then I learned how to wear it properly, became very good at wearing it and collected achievements that proved just how well I could wear the thing.

And now, as I sit here writing this, I want to know who even put that suit in my closet.