It’s been six months since my last post. Six months. I noticed it today, and honestly, that realization is part of why this post exists. Life has been full — but “full” and “moving forward” aren’t always the same thing. More on that in a moment.
There’s a word worth knowing: limerence.
Most people associate it with romantic obsession — that consuming, involuntary state of longing for someone who may or may not feel the same way. But limerence isn’t just about people. It’s about places. Dreams. Versions of a life you’ve been chasing so long you forgot to ask whether you actually chose it.
Limerence is the ache for something that was never quite real. It’s the mental movie you keep playing — the one where everything is finally settled, finally stable, finally enough. It’s pining for a place you’ve never actually lived, a life that exists mostly in your imagination. And it will keep you stuck for as long as you let it.
For a lot of us, that place is home. Not any specific address — the idea of home. Stability. Safety. Arrival. We tell ourselves that once the living situation is right, everything else will follow. The work. The relationships. The version of ourselves we keep promising is just around the corner. And so we pour our energy, our money, our mental bandwidth into the pursuit — never quite arriving, always almost there.
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable: at some point, many of us stop making conscious choices and start simply reacting.
We end up living on autopilot.
Autopilot is seductive because it feels like momentum. You’re moving. You’re handling things. You’re surviving. But survival and intention are not the same thing. When we’re consumed by the logistics of our external lives, we quietly abdicate the steering wheel of our internal ones. We’re not building — we’re maintaining a dream someone else handed us, or one we constructed in a season of fear, and calling it a goal.
That’s the turning point most of us miss. Not a dramatic rock bottom. Just a slow, almost invisible drift away from our own lives.
That’s the thing about limerence — whether it’s for a person, a place, or a version of your life — it keeps you measuring your reality against a fantasy. And the fantasy always wins. Real life can’t compete with the perfect, frictionless version of itself that lives in your mind.
The result is a kind of self-sabotage that’s incredibly difficult to name because it hides inside legitimate problems. Real obstacles. Real exhaustion. Real circumstances that absolutely deserve your attention. But underneath it all, a pattern quietly running in the background — deferring, waiting, preparing to live rather than actually living.
The good news is that recognition is its own kind of turning point.
Not because your circumstances change the moment you see the pattern — they may not, not right away. But because you stop waiting for them to. You stop letting the external be the prerequisite for the internal. You stop letting limerence for a life you imagined keep you from tending to the life you actually have.
So here’s the question worth sitting with:
What dream are you pining for that’s keeping you from building something real?
What place, what person, what version of your life has quietly become the distraction disguised as a destination? You don’t have to have it figured out. But you do have to show up — intentionally, and with your eyes open.
Sometimes that’s where everything starts.
For Reflection
“The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.” — Matthew 7:25
Whatever season you’re in — rebuilding, unsettling, starting over — may it be the one where you stop waiting for calm waters and start laying the foundation that no storm can move.
