The Ache of Not-This: When Life Looks Fine But Feels Wrong

You’re weary in a way rest doesn’t touch.
Not the kind of tired a weekend away, a bubble bath, or even a sabbatical can lift.
This is deeper. It’s the ache of living a life that looks fine, but life feels wrong in your bones.
It’s the ache of living a life that isn’t yours — a life that might look fine, even beautiful, from the outside, but feels wrong in your soul.

The Story

Where the ache began, long before I had words for it.

I’ve known the ache of not-this in every decade of my life.
Perhaps you have too.

It first arrives quietly, in the spaces between joy.

Well, that’s how it arrived for me, when I was a child in Namibia.
Those early years were, in many ways, an idyll — jacaranda trees in bloom, the thick, sweet smell of rain, hot tar, long drives through the desert to the sea.

My mother could conjure feasts from the bottomless bag at her feet.
My father waltzed her around the lounge as easily as he guided our car along clay roads slick with summer storms.

I learned early that joy and ache can sit at the same table.

But even then, the air in our home often felt heavy. My much older siblings were thousands of kilometres away, and while I didn’t yet know the shape of their absence, I could feel the shadow it cast.

When we moved south, the promise was togetherness. All of us under one roof.
It was, in theory, perfect.

But life rarely unfolds as planned.
Siblings moved into digs, flats or residences, grandparents came and went, and my father — once retired and building beautiful furniture — turned his skill and determination into a chain of five toy shops, a shift that meant both he and my mother were working full-time, side by side again.

And then, in October 1978, he died, only 54 years old, of a massive heart attack.
I was ten years old.
In an instant, the world I knew ended.

I lost my father and, in a way, my mother too.

She survived physically, but grief consumed her.
The house became a cavern of absence, and loss settled into me, uninvited but unmovable.

The years that followed were marked by loss.
My grandmother.
My grandfather.
Cancer.

Our home became a place of caretaking, hospital trips, and quiet despair.
I learned to live with a pit in my stomach, to play the game of life.

“Life is full of suffering and loss. Accept that, and you can bear it.”

She taught me so much more than that — strength, loyalty, love, grace — but at the time, it was the pain that seemed truest.

I chose “happy” like it was a profession.
I learned from magazines how to smile, how to dress, how to be beautiful.

But beneath the surface, I was still just a girl who had learned to live with an emptiness at her core.
I hadn’t yet realised that some pain never leaves — you just learn how to carry it.

I chased safety in relationships, escaped pain through ambition, built a life that looked perfect from the outside — the home, the garden, the car, the clothes — all while crying in the dark, asking myself what the meaning of life, loss and heartache could possibly be.

Even when I found love, even when we built a lifestyle most would envy, the ache remained.

We worked impossible hours, earned and spent in equal measure, upgraded everything we owned, but lived for rare weekends away.

I walked the beaches, drank my tea, tended my garden, yet I was still feeling empty inside.

Reflections

Why “more” or “better” was never the answer — and what I learned instead.

That’s the thing about the ache of not-this — it isn’t about surviving, but not living.
It doesn’t care how much you’ve achieved.
It doesn’t vanish when you tick the next box or upgrade to the next version of your life.
Because the ache is not about more.
It’s about different.
It’s about alignment — about living in a way that doesn’t betray the deepest parts of who you are.
Once you’ve recognised the Ache of Not-This, it becomes impossible to unknow it.
And once you’ve seen it in yourself, you start to notice it in others too — in the quiet sighs, the restless eyes, the way they pause before answering “How are you?”

Feel it?

How this same quiet ache might already be whispering to you.

Maybe you’re lying awake at night, feeling a heaviness you can’t name.
Maybe you’ve been living a life that looks fine, even enviable, but something in you whispers, not this.
The trouble is, we often dismiss that whisper. We tell ourselves we’re ungrateful. We say we just need more rest. Or we swallow the oldest lie — this is how life is.
But I’ve learned that when the ache won’t go away, it’s not a sign of failure.
It’s an invitation.

You’re Invited . . .

A gentle space to explore what your own “yes” could look like.

If you’re in your own season of not-this, you don’t have to walk through it alone. That ache isn’t a flaw — it’s a compass pointing you toward finding alignment in life.
In my coaching, I hold space for the messy middle — the grief, the questions, the quiet realisations that something has to change. Together, we untangle what’s keeping you here, the ache of living a life that looks fine, but feels wrong in your bones, and help you find the first small steps toward your own yes.