It was my last day at the last job I would ever have as an employee. I was leaving my stable job with great benefits to start my own therapy business. For the first time in my adult life, I was making a career move based solely on what I wanted.
Sure, I had chosen to go to college. But that’s not uncommon. I chose that path. I chose to take the job I left— it was a great position, one I genuinely enjoyed. But this was different. I was going to be the owner and operator of something I was building from the ground up. And like anything I’ve ever taken a risk on, I thought it would finally answer that lingering question we all come to at some point:
“What do I want?”
But what I’ve learned — not just from launching that business, but over the past twelve years — is that the question of what do I want never really goes away. And it shouldn’t. Not for me, and not for you.
I’ve been caught up plenty of times focusing on what I thought I wanted. I’d chase strategies, systems, or ideas that had brought success to others. It’s easy to get into that mode — trying to reverse-engineer someone else’s formula. I fell in love with the idea of owning a business. But the reality of running one every day? That’s a completely different thing than the fantasy.
So many of our decisions are dressed up as “choices,” but they’re really just conditioned responses. Behave. Get good grades. Go to college. Land a respectable job. Get married. Have kids. Work hard. Retire. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these steps — but when they’re followed unconsciously, we drift into lives we never consciously chose.
Once I started to go after what I truly desired, more questions arose.
Is the way I’m building my work life giving me what I want at home?
Is this actually what I want personally — for me?
The thing is, this question — “What do I want?” — is not something you ask once and move on. It’s a living inquiry. One that shifts and deepens as you do. It’s how you stay connected to yourself in a world that constantly tries to pull you into roles, responsibilities, and expectations.
Without desire and emotional clarity, we drift. I did it for years — looking outward, comparing myself to others, checking boxes, hoping it would eventually lead to fulfillment.
But when we know what we want, we stop measuring ourselves against others. We stop living life on someone else’s timeline. We begin moving from a deeper place — one that isn’t based on how we’re perceived or what we’re “supposed” to be doing.
For many of us, this realization hits during midlife. Our lives stabilize — job, house, family, routines — and yet something feels… off. We’ve done everything we were told would make us happy, but the inner spark feels dull. The striving is over. And what we’re left with is a haunting question: Now what?
So if you’re in that space where you don’t know what’s next or what to do, don’t ignore it. That quiet tension isn’t failure. It’s not confusion. It’s the beginning of alignment. You’re not lost — you’re just being invited to stop living by default. You don’t have to have all the answers. But you do have to be willing to ask a different question. One that starts with you.
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