Sometimes life feels like a flat line. Nothing is terrible. But nothing is really great, either. You live your days. You fight for the weekends. Time passes. And then it’s back to the beginning again, to a monotonous blue Monday when you return to your numbness, to your flaky job, to daydreaming for hours about all the things you wish you could change. You think about what you should be doing instead of all of this, because whatever this is isn’t working. And as the days crawl along, draining all the lush creativity you thought had once defined your character, the more stuck and uninspired you get.

You want to shake free from this terrible web. You want to rediscover that part of yourself that once was so steadfast and full of ideas, when everything you ever wanted to do in life seemed so possible. These days it just feels whatever now. It’s like the color in your mind has disappeared. And you miss it, that lust for life and how it felt when your mind was challenged. This is when you miss college the most, when you were surrounded by intellectual energy and writing and books and conversations that made you think and see the world differently. But college was so long ago. That passion didn’t stay alive. The rut had won. And now everything is the same.

This is also when you miss having great conversations with people who have done crazy beautiful things in life who can teach you things and make you discover things about yourself that you never saw before. Now you sit in a room full of people having the same flat conversation that you’ve heard a million times and you’ve never felt more alone or misunderstood.

So you dive into books and music and wine, trying to immerse yourself in new light and big thoughts so you can reimagine your place in the world, your truth, your purpose. But it isn’t that easy to make those kinds of changes sometimes. It’s actually really hard to overcome feeling irrelevant. When your place in the world feels like a void, it feels as though at any second you’ll just disappear and nobody will know and it won’t make any bit of difference.

I wanted to matter in this world.

I wanted my mind and my creativity to make a difference. And I knew I was important but I wanted to feel important. And nothing I was doing was granting that. It was my own fault. I was a broken record. I needed to break free from the drudgery. I needed to find my spark again. And I needed to stop feeling like a victim because I had lost myself, because I wasn’t challenged, because I had become stagnant and continued to surround myself by people who I had zero connection with, and because I kept working a job that numbed me. But I refused to feel irrelevant anymore.

It wouldn’t all change overnight. But you have to believe in it. That’s how the first step goes. And as impossible as it might seem, whatever is it for you in terms of your greatest happiness or achievement, just know that it is possible.

But you have to wholly immerse yourself in this new world. You have to surround yourself with people who are passionate about things–people you can have deep conversations with and those you can learn something from. And if this means rethinking the people in your life because they don’t make you feel good, because they make you feel empty, because nobody has anything positive to say, then it is what it is. You have to do things that will challenge you, make you think, make you ask questions, and will help you embrace your talents again (or might even help you discover new ones). Because when you do all of this, when you refuse to feel stagnant and unimportant by doing everything differently than how it’s been, you will find yourself again.

Something in you will reignite. And you will rediscover the magic of possibility in this illuminated new world that reminds you just how important you and your talents really are.