Are you in the timeline you actually want to be in?
And what to do if you realize you’re not...
Have you ever thought about who you might be in a different timeline in the multiverse? If even just one small thing had gone differently - like you ended up with your high school crush, or never broke your leg in 7th grade? In another timeline, I’m a psychologist with a private practice in Corona del Mar. I have a beach house and a mortgage and three kids with the boy I dated since I was seventeen. I’m living the Orange County dream. I am also, slowly, dying inside.
That version of me is very good at her job. She works hard. She hits the numbers, pays the mortgage, keeps up with the Joneses. From the outside, she has it figured out. On the inside, she is a wombat.
Stay with me on the wombat thing. I promise it goes somewhere.
The wombat problem
My guest this week, Jodie Cook, introduced me to this concept, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Wombats are small, compact Australian animals with one defining characteristic: they dig holes. That’s what they do. And when you put a wombat somewhere it can dig, it will dig and dig and dig, with total commitment, without ever once stopping to ask if it’s digging in the right direction.
High achievers, Jodie says, have the propensity to be wombats. We are extraordinary at executing. At pushing. At putting one foot in front of the other without slowing down or asking questions. The problem isn’t the digging. The problem is we rarely stop to ask: am I even digging the right hole?
I was digging the wrong hole for years. And I was very, very good at it.
The life I was supposed to want
The private practice, the beach house, the OC dream - that was my blueprint for years. The thing that made sense to everyone around me, including the Asian parents who had very specific ideas about what a successful life looked like. Joy wasn’t necessarily one of the top criteria, especially over more important questions like “does this bring money/security, does this bring status, is this what a good Filipino daughter does with her education and her opportunities?”
So I did what I was told to want. I built what I was supposed to build. And I was that flavor of miserable where everything looks fine from the outside and you can’t quite explain why you dread Monday mornings, or why there’s this exhaustion that sleep never fully fixes. The kind of miserable where you feel wrong for talking about it because you should be grateful.
I didn’t stop digging until my brother GJ died by suicide at 25.
Grief does something to your priorities that nothing else can replicate. When GJ died, a lot of the scaffolding I’d built my life around just collapsed. The job that was burning me out, the blueprint I’d never questioned, the measuring stick I’d inherited without choosing — none of it held up to the enormity of the grief. I looked at the hole I’d been digging and thought: I don’t even want what’s at the bottom of this.
So I shook the etch-a-sketch. Moved to LA. Changed careers entirely. And somewhere in that season of rebuilding, I made a decision that went against everything my upbringing had wired into me: I took a job at a food tour company because it sounded fun. Because it sounded like an adventure. Because when I imagined doing it, something in my body said yes instead of the flat, dutiful nothing I’d learned to mistake for contentment.
I cannot overstate how scary and freeing that felt to choose, because joy had never been a legitimate reason to do anything in my mental framework. You chose things because they were smart, because they were safe, because they looked good on paper, because they moved you toward the life you were supposed to want. Choosing something because it lit you up was, by my old measuring stick, basically irresponsible.
But I was done with the old measuring stick. I swapped it for a new one: is it joyful? Not is it impressive, not is it what I’m supposed to want, not will my parents understand. Just — does this feel like mine?
That one question changed the trajectory of my entire life.
What Jodie showed me
What struck me most about Jodie is how deliberate she is. She built deliberate practices to make sure she’s going in the right direction: a distraction spreadsheet, a summer of pure ideation, weekly check-ins with her husband — because she understood something I had to learn the hard way: the wombat instinct doesn’t disappear just because you’re aware of it. You have to keep asking. Am I going in the right direction? And if not — okay, what else?
She calls it running on a new operating system. Old Jodie structured every minute and chased and pushed. New Jodie asks: is this aligned? Is this actually what I want?
Listening to her talk about it made me realize that what she’s built — the intentional life, the one that feels genuinely hers — isn’t a personality trait you either have or you don’t. It’s a skill. It’s something you can actually learn and practice, and this week’s episode is basically a masterclass in how.
I think about the version of me in that Corona del Mar beach house sometimes. I genuinely don’t know if she ever finds her way to the question. Maybe something eventually cracks her open. I hope so. Because that low-grade dying feeling doesn’t stay manageable forever. Your nervous system knows, even when your mind has agreed to keep its head down and keep digging.
The thing I want to leave you with
And I know that for some of you, even asking the question feels like a betrayal. Of your parents, of the sacrifices that got you here, of the version of you that worked so hard to build this.
You don’t have to wait for loss to shake the etch-a-sketch of your life. You just need to pay attention, and pause long enough to ask: is the hole I’m digging actually the one I want to be in? Does this life I’m building feel like mine?
And if the measuring stick you’ve been using isn’t really yours — if someone handed it to you before you were old enough to question it — you are allowed to swap it out. You’re allowed to ask if it’s joyful. You’re allowed to take your version of the food tour job.
What would change for you if joy became a legitimate reason to do something?
If any part of this landed for you, this week’s episode of Checking In is where the conversation goes deeper. Jodie Cook is a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur who sold her first business in a seven-figure exit, competes in powerlifting for Great Britain, and lives out of a single suitcase across 35 cities — and that’s not even close to the most interesting part of our conversation. It’s about how deliberately she has designed every single element of her life, and what she’s learned about the wombat problem, betting on yourself, and what it actually takes to stop running on the old operating system. It’s the conversation I didn’t know I needed.
With care,
Dr. Therese 💜
Need help now?
These resources can help:
Suicide Prevention Lifeline | SAMHSA National Helpline | The Trevor Project