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# what you give yourself to (the house & the garden)
- URL: https://tofua.org/read/what-you-give-yourself-to-the-house-the-garden/
- Published: 2026-10-25T09:48:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-25T22:22:26.000Z
- Description: And in-between, your life. Years spent floating, disguised as productivity. Committing to things—programs, people, paths—because they were...
- Author: Pedro Tofua

> "And in-between, your life. Years spent floating, disguised as productivity. Committing to things—programs, people, paths—because they were the smart thing to commit to. Not because they were the right thing to commit to."

You start your 20s in a lurch. Shifting and reaching, wondering what you should be doing or chasing or achieving. Every path is hopeful. Every person a character in your story. Watched by anxiety and the feeling of things moving slowly. Thinking you know a lot, and just need external things to line up.  
  
You end your 20s in upheaval. Wondering about the choices you made. Feeling like things moved too quickly. Riddled with regret and acceptance and the outcomes of decisions you made out of a responsibility you felt you had to be responsible. Feeling you know little, and wishing you’d done things differently.  
  
And in-between, your life. Years spent floating, disguised as productivity. Committing to things—programs, people, paths—because they were the smart thing to commit to. Not because they were the right thing to commit to.  
  
Whether you’re at the start, the end, or right there in-between, hear this:  
  
The truth is—who and what you give yourself to are almost everything in a life.  
  
The more work you put into finishing a graduate degree that doesn’t fit, entertaining people that don’t go deep, settling for what validates but doesn’t scare you—the more you’ll find you’ve prepared for a life that was never real.  
  
And then the world turns. Upheaval in the streets, on the feeds, in the air. And suddenly, all the work seems meaningless. Because all it ever was, was survival. All it ever did, was continue.  
  
You were tending the pillars of the same house that’s crushing the garden—rather than nurturing the garden and letting the house crumble.  
  
And it makes sense. Letting something crumble—a life, a world, a comfort—is scary. But things always do. Change always comes. The question is whether you’re in the garden, tending, or in the house, crumbling with it, when it does.