Unlikely life lessons from Runaway Bride

Hello gorgeous. You're looking glossy and beautiful as always. Grab a warm drink and a blanket, it's time for our weekly catchup. Before we get into the trash fire that is our democracy, I want to talk to you a little bit about finding your eggs.

In our early 20s the conversation was WHAT SHOULD I DO?! WHO WILL HIRE ME?! HOW DO I COOK A CHICKEN?! Our early 20s are all exclamation points and salmonella.

Now the conversation has shifted. Now we’re at a stage where we can either cook a chicken or we keep sweaters in our stove— and we good with it. We have jobs and careers, but we’re in a stage of questioning them.

The conversation has shifted from shouty panic to urgent searching. I’ve started calling this phase of life learning what eggs you like. Not the lady bits kind, the breakfast kind. Let me explain.

I think about the movie Runaway Bride a lot. Not because it’s good. It is not good.

I think about it a lot because of the eggs. There is this scene where Richard Gere is yelling at Julia Roberts because she orders the eggs style of whatever man she is with. She doesn’t know how she likes her eggs, she just adopts the preferences of the men in her life.

We do that too. We work for companies and bosses who tell us how to direct our careers. We take on the goals they set for us, and we work our asses off to achieve them. We adopt a passion for other people’s products and ideas. We work hard to make the dreams of the people we work for reality. We’re damn good at it, and sometimes it works out.

But so often, those aren’t our eggs.

So we wake up one day and realize we don’t know how we like our eggs. We beat ourselves up about it because we feel like we should know how we like our eggs by now. But here’s the thing: we’ve been eating other people's eggs for 10+ years, so of course we don’t know.

If you’re on the egg journey, I’m with you, and I have some ideas.

Whenever you feel challenged, lit up, energized, valued, excited, inspired, or hopeful— write it down. Write down what you’re doing in that moment, who you’re with, and where you are. Start a process of excavating your soul for clues. Find patterns of what lifts you, and bend the direction of your life to make more of those moments.

The movie ends with Julia Roberts at a diner with every kind of egg on the menu in front of her. Instead of being daunted by uncovering herself, she’s excited. She feels a sense of abundance with all the world (diner) has to offer her.

I wish that for you. The infinite curiosity of discovering yourself. The wonder and excitement at the boundless possibilities your future holds for you. You're not too late, my darling. You're just getting started.