The Work That Fits: Returning to the Aptitudes We Lost Along the Way

On aptitude, adaptation, and the long road back to ourselves.

Yesterday I watched Angel with one of the stallions at a nearby stud again.

There was something in the way she stood with him — not instructing, not managing, not asserting herself — simply present. He responded before she asked. Not out of training, but out of recognition. As though both of them already knew the shape of the relationship before anything had been formalised.

It reminded me of something I forget too easily:
real aptitude cannot be taught.
It can only be recognised.

The Aptitudes We Lose

For most of my life, I believed aptitude was something you proved. You worked hard enough, performed reliably enough, made yourself acceptable enough — and that was what made you “good at something.”

Much later — far later than I would have liked — I discovered that what looks like aptitude is often just survival wearing a respectable outfit.

We behave well, so we’re told we’re suited to helping roles.
We cope well, so we become the dependable one.
We perform well, so we start to believe performance is the point.

And quietly, almost without noticing, we lose track of the person we were before we learned how to earn our place.

The Lessons We Mistake for Ourselves

Most of us are shaped long before we are conscious of being shaped. By praise and punishment. By what makes life easier for the adults around us. By which parts of us are welcomed, and which parts create tension.

None of this is usually malicious.
Most of it is inherited, unconscious, often well-intended.
Adults doing the best they can with what was handed to them.

By the time we are old enough to ask What am I good at?
the answers have already been suggested — sometimes rewarded, sometimes enforced.

John Dewey once wrote:
“The genuine discovery of personal aptitudes becomes the foundation of a life’s work.”

What he did not say — but what life eventually teaches — is how many of us spend decades mistaking adaptation for aptitude.

The Work We Carry Without Knowing

Years ago, I asked my mother what I had been like as a very young child — before expectations settled, before responsibility arrived, before the world grew loud.

She didn’t hesitate.

I heard it at the time as temperament, almost incidental.
Only later did I understand she was naming my first aptitude:
the instinct to observe, to make sense of things, to understand before acting.

The earliest signal of the work I would one day return to.

And now I understand what my father meant when he said, “It doesn’t matter if you’re a street sweeper — just be the best street sweeper, and you’ll always have a job.”
I heard it then as instruction about effort — a lesson in work ethic or respectability.

Only much later did I hear the quieter truth inside it: that there is dignity in doing the thing that fits your hands and your nature — and that excellence follows alignment, not ambition.

It no longer sounds like a warning about survival, but like an early naming of what Dewey was pointing to all along: the kind of work that steadies you from the inside out.

Still, even with those early seeds, I absorbed a different curriculum:

Work hard.
Cope.
Be useful.
Create ease for others.
Make yourself acceptable first; discover yourself later.

Like many people, I carried that blueprint straight into adulthood, mistaking responsibility for maturity and compliance for character.

For a long time, I believed becoming who the world needed me to be was the same as becoming myself.

I did not yet understand that responsibility is not the same as self-erasure.
I did not yet know the difference between excellence and compliance.

The things I thought were strengths were often just roles — strategies that had once worked, so I kept repeating them. Not because they were true, but because they were familiar.

If you miss your own aptitude long enough, you begin to think you never had one.

But aptitude does not disappear.

It waits in the things that felt natural before the world complicated you.
It waits in the work that makes you feel both steady and alive.
It waits in the questions you keep circling back to, decade after decade.
It waits in the moments you are most yourself, even if they make no sense on a CV.
We don’t choose our true work.
We recognise it — often long after it first began calling.

Finding Our Way Back

Watching my daughter yesterday humbled me in a way I can’t fully articulate without softening my whole voice.

It reminded me that the work that fits has a texture — an honesty you can feel even before you have language for it.

Aptitude is not the same as ambition.
It is not grand.
It does not require applause.
It does not argue its case.

Aptitude is a quiet alignment between who we are and what we give ourselves to.

Dewey gave me the language years ago.
Life gave me the meaning slowly.
And watching my child live hers gives me the reminder daily.

We don’t choose our true work.
We recognise it.

A Small Invitation for This Week

Consider the life you are living now — not the one you planned, not the one you perform, not the one you inherited, but the one you actually inhabit.

And ask quietly:

Where did I glimpse the person I was meant to become — and when did I lose sight of them?
What small aptitude has followed me through the years, waiting to be recognised?
What would one honest step back toward it look like now?

No grand reinventions.
No dramatic declarations.

Just one gentle movement toward the life that fits.

Aptitude is the beginning.
Becoming is the return.