Sonia Jhas on Advocate Now

Despite building a successful career and keeping strong relationships, Jhas shares that she never experienced what felt like meaningful happiness. Though she pursued more life milestones to fill the void, she says she didn't find them satisfactory.

"I had achieved all the ticking marks," Jhas says, explaining, "[The] things that you're supposed to accomplish to be considered successful, and then you're going to be 'happy.' And I was sitting there ... waking up every morning with this emptiness."

Jhas only began feeling fulfillment when she looked inward and determined what she really wanted for her life. It was a realization that taught her identity also comes from within.

"When that illusion sort of was vastly and harshly broken for me, it became so clear that the feeling that I was cultivating — that the real Sonia was finally coming to life — was only going to come through my journey within," Jhas says.

In the age of social media, people can feel especially pressured to conform to certain life paths, or to achieve certain milestones at set times, as Jhas did. The key is to find the voice that matters most — one's own.

"We've got the voices of our families. We've got the voices of the hashtag World. We've got the voices of everybody around the globe now," she continues. "It's not even the tender little world that we were living in before. It's just this giant vortex that we're living in and it's still living in our head."

Jhas believes all of the noise can be tuned out but tuning into oneself, as it "really allows you to start to feel the intricacies of the spiderweb, and really start to figure out which threads are yours, which threads are others, what needs to be untangled, what needs to be pulled on a little bit tighter."

For more interviews like this, watch Advocate Now on The Advocate Channel.