Wanting What You Actually Want
The hard thing isn’t really getting what you want. It’s figuring out what you actually want.
Most of us carry around a mental list of goals we’ve been telling ourselves we want for years, sometimes decades. A certain job. A certain lifestyle. A certain kind of relationship. But when you scratch beneath the surface, a lot of those wants come from old programming: family expectations, cultural scripts, younger versions of ourselves who didn’t know what they know now.
I’ve started asking myself: If I got this tomorrow, would it actually make me feel the way I think it will? Sometimes the answer is a surprising no.
The work, then, is stripping away the noise and getting honest. Not with the version of me from ten years ago. Not with the version I perform for other people. But with the one sitting here now, wondering why the old “dreams” don’t hit the same anymore.