What If Your Story Isn’t Over Yet? The Unexpected Path Out of Anxiety You Haven’t Tried
- Jake Paul
- Nov 29
- 4 min read
~Jake Paul
Lately I’ve been kind of silently observing how many people around me are having a difficult time with what they are seeing and experiencing in life. I know that sounds pretty damn vague and like a no shit, really? sort of thought response, especially if you’re going through hard times. What I’m really trying to say is that so often many of us simply cannot let up on the idea that life is supposed to be turning out a different way than what we're seeing & feeling, and we end of blocking any chance of real relief from entering our lives.
On the one hand, we have a fairy tail ending engrained in our heads that everything is supposed to play out perfectly like a Disney movie with a happy ending. We think if only we can set the stage perfectly and get people to act the way I expect them to, then I'll be content.
And on the other hand, we’re holding on by a thread on the verge of complete crash out at the very thought of where our lives (or our loved one’s lives) are heading right now at this very moment!
Getting dealt a bad hand might be the reason for your anger, but I bet there is more to the story.
Who determines what your cards mean anyhow?
So which one is it? Which ending will prevail? Which reality (what I see or what I think I see) is creating this unhappiness?
A lot of us walk through life like we’re wandering in circles in the woods—thinking we’re making progress, only to come face-to-face with the same damn tree we marked yesterday. Anxiety will do that to you. It’s sneaky like that. It convinces you that no matter what you try, you’re stuck. But here’s the truth: you’re not stuck. You’re just in the middle of your story.
And yes—before you roll your eyes—you can move forward. Things can get better. Your life can shift in ways you never saw coming. But you’re the one who has to pick up the tools that actually help you climb out of the loop. For me, that tool was music. Guitar. Songwriting. Not because it magically solved anything, but because it gave me somewhere to put the weight I was carrying.
Please don’t ever for a second mistake me for bragging or boasting - that is a fear of mine that keeps me from providing the hope I have set out to share with you.
The fact is that I was deep in meditation one morning when it occurred to me that Life could in fact have a happy ending. An inner voice or thought form surfaced and said “Every story has a happy ending - if you think otherwise then your story hasn’t ended yet.”
Let that settle in for a second…is your story over? How can it be? Says who?
When I hit that point of “enough is enough,” I started writing. Not to sound poetic. Not to impress anyone. Just to get the truth out of my head and onto paper so it would stop eating me alive. Sometimes I wrote twice a day. Sometimes I wrote things I didn’t want to admit. But that’s where real change starts—in the stuff you’d rather avoid.
If you’re stuck in anxiety, write yourself a letter. No filter. No holding back. Lay out the reasons you can’t keep living the way you’ve been living. That letter becomes a lifeline on the days when your old habits come calling.
Then—this part is hard—you’ve got to change something. Anything. Your routine. Your morning. Your patterns. Anxiety thrives in sameness. When you shake up the rhythm of your day, even a little, you give yourself a fighting chance.
And yeah, a lot of us hide. We hide who we are. We hide what we feel. We hide behind some “acceptable” version of ourselves because life didn’t deal us a fair hand, and somewhere along the line we decided that meant our real selves weren’t allowed to exist.
But here’s the truth: the hiding is what’s suffocating you.
That’s why music matters. It lets you say the things your mouth refuses to say. It lets you bleed without breaking. It lets the truth out in a way that doesn’t destroy you—it frees you.
Before I ever hit record on anything, before I ever wrote a chorus, I learned how to sit still. Just breathe. Just be. And yeah—it feels ridiculous at first. Anxiety will try to convince you that stillness is dangerous. But those few quiet seconds? That’s where you actually hear yourself. That’s where the real stuff comes up.
And once it does, you write. Whatever comes out. Whatever hurts. Whatever scares you. It doesn’t need to rhyme. It doesn’t need to make sense. One of my songs literally started with the line, “I didn’t know where we wanted to go, just had enough of here.” That was it. That was the spark. And that spark became a song that helped me heal a part of my life I’d been avoiding for years.
After you write, you play. You pick up the guitar—shaky hands, messy chords, whatever. You hit an A. Then step down to a G. You just let something move through you instead of trapping it inside you. Because that’s what anxiety is: trapped energy, begging for a way out.
And you don’t do this once. You don’t “fix it.” You repeat it. Day after day. Breath after breath. Note after note. That’s how healing works. Quietly. Slowly. Repeatedly.
If you keep living the way you always have, you will stay exactly where you are. But if you choose—even once—to put your truth into words and your emotions into music, you’ll notice the shift. Small at first. But real.
You are not meant to feel pinned down by anxiety. You’re meant to feel alive. So breathe. Write. Play. Move forward one honest moment at a time.
This is your story. And it’s not finished.
~Jake Paul
*INCLUDES A SONGWRITING TEMPLATE!
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