The Secret to Feeling Alive — All of Your Life

How to flick the lights on again

Karen Nimmo
Published in
4 min readOct 3, 2024

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Image by Gerd Altmann, Pixabay

Do you feel hemmed in by life?

Not quite trapped, but restricted. It’s fine, but it’s a bit ho-hum.

You secretly wish that you could bust out of the cage — do something more meaningful, more fulfilling, really make your mark.

Perhaps you feel that you missed that one big opportunity, and it’s too hard to pivot now?

Perhaps you knew what you wanted but didn’t have the confidence to step off the well-trodden path earlier?

And no matter how much you read that “it’s never too late” you can’t help but feel that it is.

That the moment — your moment — may have passed.

When the lights have dimmed

Plenty of people show up in therapy at this point.

They’re doing okay — often they’re quite successful in their field, some have plenty of money in the bank — but they’re flat, disengaged.

They tell you this but, even if they didn’t, you know just by looking at them. The light hasn’t gone out, but it has dimmed.

They’ve tried a whole lot of things to wake themselves up, to feel like they used to, to feel invested, engaged, excited…

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Karen Nimmo

Clinical psychologist, author of 4 books. Editor of On the Couch: Practical psychology for health and happiness. karen@onthecouch.co.nz