Live Outside Your Own Head
On agency, overthinking, and finally getting out of your own way
The same questions, over and over.
What happens next? How long do we have? Will he know me tomorrow? Am I doing enough? Am I doing too little? I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m failing. I can’t fix this. I can’t save him.
For four years as the primary caregiver for my husband with dementia, these thoughts invaded my head every single day. The self-doubt. The feeling of failing. The constant sense of not being good enough — not doing enough, not knowing enough, not being enough.
Negative. Unproductive. Relentless.
Looking back now, from the other side of caregiving, I can see what I couldn’t see then: I was completely stuck inside my own head. Trapped in a version of life I couldn’t manage anymore, questioning and criticizing every decision — for being too late, too little, incomplete. I had no idea how to bring objectivity to bear on any of it. No idea how to focus on what I could actually influence and let go of the rest.
And I have to ask myself: was I also seeking external approval for my decisions? Was I following someone else’s playbook — one made for compliance, not for the particular, unrepeatable reality of loving Lee through this disease? There is no shortage of advice doled out to caregivers. How to practice self-care. When to transition a loved one into memory care. What the research says, what the experts recommend, what other families have done. At some point, the weight of all that outside opinion can quietly crowd out the one voice that matters most — your own.
It was a truly unhappy time in my life. And some of that unhappiness, I now understand, was self-inflicted.
Russell: The Prison We Build Inside Our Own Heads
Bertrand Russell, writing in The Conquest of Happiness in 1930, argued that most unhappy people feel that way not because of what has happened to them, but because of what they do with it inside their own minds. He described the process of circling back on oneself — criticizing, judging against invisible standards, always coming up short — as a kind of mental prison. While he acknowledged that real suffering exists — poverty, illness, loss — he was clear that a vast amount of human misery is self-inflicted. Our own negative thoughts. Our own relentless interior interrogation.
His prescription was simple: let your interests be as wide as possible. Let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
He called this zest — an eagerness to be productive, purposeful, and curious. An aliveness that comes from pursuing what genuinely interests and moves you, rather than circling endlessly in your own mind.
Caregiving compressed my life — not just outside my head, but inside it too. By necessity, not by design. What I have come to understand is that happiness requires the opposite: expansion. Curiosity that goes beyond your own four walls. The willingness to reach toward other people, other ideas, other experiences, with something approaching wonder.
As Steve Jobs is often quoted saying: everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you — and you can change it. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
Nietzsche: The Camel, the Lion, and the Child
Friedrich Nietzsche described the journey from living a life shaped by outside forces to living one from the inside out through three metaphors — a metamorphosis in three stages.
The camel absorbs everything: the expectations, opinions, standards, and traditions imposed upon us from birth. It kneels down and takes on the load. This is where most of us spend much of our lives — carrying what others have placed on us, without questioning whether it belongs to us at all.
The lion rebels. It roars and fights and refuses what it knows, in its bones, isn’t right. It clears the ground.
And the child — released from all of it — is born anew. Free to build a life from the ground up, on their own terms, from their own truth.
The child is what’s left when the struggle is over.
I was a camel for years — absorbing every piece of advice, every standard, every invisible measure of what a good caregiver should be. I was also a lion, raging quietly against a disease that wouldn’t be reasoned with, fighting every day for Lee’s dignity and comfort and safety. And now, on the other side of it, I am beginning to understand what it means to be the child — to stand in the open, responsible for myself, free to decide what comes next.
Nietzsche wrote: the individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Owning yourself. After years of giving yourself away — to the disease, to the role, to the endless questions with no good answers — that phrase lands differently than it would have before.
Brené Brown: The Wilderness
Brené Brown’s wilderness — that uncomfortable, uncertain space we enter when we stop performing for others and start living from the inside out — is the same territory Nietzsche described, arrived at from a different direction. You are uncomfortable there at first. The ground feels unfamiliar. There is no tribe to validate your decisions, no playbook to follow, no external approval to cushion the uncertainty.
But eventually, you find your footing. And in finding the wilderness, you find freedom.
The will to be responsible for ourselves. That is what Brown, Nietzsche, and Russell are all pointing toward, in their different languages and from their different centuries — the same essential truth.
A Prescription for Happiness
Together, these three thinkers offer something genuinely useful — not as abstract philosophy, but as a practical map for where I am right now.
Russell says: get out of your own head. Widen your interests. Approach the world with zest and friendly curiosity.
Nietzsche says: the struggle forged you. The resistance you moved through every day — the disease, the grief, the exhaustion, the relentless uncertainty — was not wasted. It was the making of you. You are the child now. Build.
Brown says: stay in the wilderness. Be responsible for yourself. The discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that something real is happening.
Caregiving takes your power. Daily. With each decline, each lost memory, each version of your spouse that slipped away and didn’t come back.
And then it’s over. And you are sitting in the quiet, waiting for what comes next.
Here is what I know: the act of rebellion against the disease — the love you gave over and over, the relentless drive to show up for your person — that is your power now. It belongs to you. It always did.
Don’t wait for happiness to arrive.
Be curious. Widen your interests. Own yourself.
Live outside your own head.
What does living outside your own head look like for you right now? I’d love to hear in the comments.