there's no such thing as a "waste of time"
wise words by my gen-z sister that have irrevocably altered my perspective on a life well spent
“I don’t believe that time can be wasted,” a mind-boggling revelation delivered as a passive statement by my younger sister, P, in the middle of our weekly facetime.
A remarkable bit of wisdom dropped casually by my 21-year-old college dropout sister as she’s wandering around her room, chatting about life. 8 little words that have fundamentally altered my worldview.
P has always been the Type B to my Type A, and the ying to my yang.
If you spotted us walking down the street together, you’d never suspect we were related - even distantly. We look nothing alike, dress nothing alike, talk nothing alike, and live nothing alike.
Granted, P is my half-sister and 6 years my junior, but we essentially harbour the same core wounds stemming from our shared upbringing. So it’s always been a wonder to me how we’ve navigated those wounds so disprately.
P has been a bright spot in our sometimes bleak familial reality since the day she was born. She has always been unabashedly P.
For every part of my personality I concealed in an effort to “fit in”, she let hers sing louder. She’s passionate about her interests, her room is filled with Hello Kitty, colorful art, and dozens of Squishmallows.
In contrast, my room growing up and my apartments as an adult have always looked like a Pinterest post, lovely but impersonal. Curated for someone else’s benefit, despite the few people I’ve ever invited inside.
P doesn’t dress for anyone but herself, sometimes that takes her to job interviews in Hello Kitty pajamas, and sometimes she looks like a 21-year-old TikTok model baddie. But regardless of how she shows up on a particular day, she’s unbothered by who or what may perceive her.
My closet harbors 30 of the same blank t-shirts in various muted colors. And 5 pairs of the same jeans. I do have a section of my closet for clothing bought for my inner self, but they seldom see the world beyond it.
While I was polishing my perfect mask, P was making a mess literally – her car is a terrifying place – and emotionally. She was experimenting with her identity, getting in trouble with boys, trying on friends like hats. She suffers deeply from depression and adhd, but she never lets either hold her back. Her wild and warm heart cannot be held down for long by her congruent suffering.
She calls me crying. Sends me nonsensical TikToks that make her giggle. She says what she’s feeling candidly to whoever made her feel that way. She loves fiercely, though sometimes to her detriment when the receivers can’t handle or don’t deserve the potent, earnest love she bestows.
Mostly, P just doesn’t toe any lines; she barrels across them with beautiful and reckless abandon.
“I don’t believe time can be wasted.”
I’ve always envied P's ability to just be. She can nap for hours in the middle of the day, lie in bed with her friends, gossiping and watching TikToks, accomplishing nothing.
And yet, she doesn’t believe time can be wasted.
Plenty of moments feel like a waste of time to me. On a basic level, even the time it takes to walk from my desk to my fridge to feed myself in the middle of the day feels wasteful.
On an extreme level, cultivating a personal identity never felt like it really achieved anything, ergo, a waste of time.
For most of my upbringing, there was a path. Go to school, perform, achieve. Get into another school, perform, achieve. Get a job, perform, achieve.
Cycle, rinse, repeat.
But the thing about well-worn clothes is that they shrink and fade with time.
And if those clothes were lackluster to begin with…
As I’ve faced my own reckoning with “who the actual F am I?”, how I spend my time, precious currency that it is, has come under new scrutiny.
I was raised by a workaholic father; he’d sooner drop money into my bank account than spend any real time with me (or P). We were blessed with the financial rewards of his workaholism and cursed by the emotional pitfalls of his alcoholism.
It was modeled for us that feelings funnel into: work (my adopted affliction) or addiction (P’s).
I graduated from college, like many, with no real path or calling. I cared deeply about mental health advocacy and majored in Psychology, but I didn’t feel prepared to continue school. After 21 years, it was safe to say I was burnt out on academic success.
So I got a job. And for a while, that seemed like it was well worth it. Where academic work paid off only in abstract letter grades, at least money could buy things that felt like happiness.
Until life showed me how disproportionately easy it is to spend money vs making any, and a new fear – or a new manifestation of my core wound – unlocked.
How could I ever make enough money to feel comfortable? (Especially as I have since realized that money can only buy material comforts, which isn’t the same thing as I was hoping it might do for me.)
I worked one random, purposeless job after another, along the way making strategic moves to increase my income, in the hopes that more money would unlock that ever elusive enoughness I so desperately craved.
And ya, I made money. But what I didn’t make were any of the far more valuable things, like connections with new people or those little in-between moments that show you who you really are.
Like my father, I sat at my desk and worked so I wouldn’t have to feel.
Until, unsurprisingly, I started to experience what some might label as a quarter-life crisis.
I no longer knew who I was, what I liked, or what I disliked. I felt detached from my intelligence, as if my brain were eating itself alive from a lack of diverse stimuli. I found myself fundamentally incapable of talking to other people, because I couldn’t connect to myself.
So much time wasted.
Or was it?
I lived in a beautiful place during those years. My camera roll is filled with videos of my husband, R, chasing our happy dogs at the beach or the park. Every 10th photo is an unbelievable sunset, or a delicious meal shared with loved ones.
We spent the pandemic playing board games and watching movies; we even hung string lights and plugged in an air purifier in our garage for social hangouts. We gamed with P every day so she wouldn’t feel alone and unseen, trapped in a house where her parents couldn’t bring themselves to give her the time of day.
I got two insane dogs who are undeniably our children.
I got engaged.
I killed plants.
I celebrated milestones.
I experienced loss.
I basked in the sunshine.
I lived.
Would I take it all back now that I’m discovering more of myself? Or did I need to go through it all to be ready for where I am going?
And if I wouldn’t take it back, not for anything, how could it have possibly been a waste?
The true meaning of a life well spent is to fill it with moments you’ll someday be nostalgic for.
To my high-achievers out there, to the gifted children, the older siblings, I see you. When achievement and perfection garnered you more attention and favor than your individual gifts and interests ever could, you adapted.
It takes immense effort to carry the burden of expectation. Of course, you were too tired and too busy for curiosity and exploration.
And to the overlooked younger siblings, like my sweet P, who were expected to compete with us but said “fuck it” instead because who was really paying attention to you anyway, I see you.
Of course, you were left wandering and wondering what of this world is really just for you.
Time is the one currency we can never earn more of and can never know how much we have left. 8 billion people are all experiencing this moment differently. So how could there ever be a right way, or a wrong way, to spend our one ephemeral life?
Be present in the now, and savor every glorious and unique second of it.
-June
I invite you to stay and be seen here.
for words with nowhere else to go
unspoken thoughts, unfinished feelings, & everything in between
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Oldest daughter and fellow recovering perfectionist here. Wow. I have tears. 💜
Your sister’s line about time not being wasteable lands even harder against the backdrop of your own “perform, achieve, repeat” conditioning; it feels like a quiet revolution in one sentence.
I love how you let the camera roll testify against the “wasted years,” revealing a life dense with dogs, sunsets, Paris, garage game nights, and the kind of small, ordinary devotion that actually makes nostalgia possible.
That closing reframing of a life well spent as one you’ll someday be glad to remember feels like a gentler metric high‑achievers and overlooked siblings alike can finally breathe inside.