Is something missing in your life?

A few years ago, someone asked me a question that should have been simple.

"What do you want?"

I remember immediately feeling uncomfortable. Not because I didn't want anything, but because I genuinely didn't know how to answer the question.

I could have told you what I didn't want.

I didn't want to feel exhausted all the time. I didn't want to feel disconnected from my body, from joy, or from myself. I didn't want to keep believing that life was something I simply had to get through.

But when it came to what I actually wanted, there was just... silence.

At the time, I didn't think much of it. I figured I just needed more time to think about it. But the truth was, I had spent so much of my life focused on surviving, achieving, healing, fixing, and doing that I had never really practiced wanting.

I had become an expert at being responsible and practical. I was great at figuring things out and taking care of what needed to be done. But somewhere along the way, I had stopped asking myself a very important question: What do I actually desire?

As I began sitting with that question, I found myself making lists in my head.

Did I want more rest?

More adventure?

More pleasure?

More creativity?

More freedom?

More play?

And honestly, I still didn't know.

But then I realized there was another question hiding underneath all of those questions:

How do I want to feel?

For some reason, that question felt different. Easier, somehow.

I knew I wanted to feel alive.

I wanted to feel free and more at ease.

I wanted to feel playful and creative...

I wanted to feel rested.

And that's when I realized that maybe our deepest desires aren't always about the thing itself. Maybe they're about the experience we're hoping that thing will give us.

Maybe we don't actually want the vacation. We want spaciousness.

Maybe we don't actually want the career change. We want purpose.

Maybe we don't actually want to have it all figured out. Maybe we just want to feel at peace.

I think many women experience this, especially those of us who have spent years in survival mode. We become experts at knowing what isn't working. We know what we're tired of. We know what we can no longer tolerate. But desire is different. Desire requires curiosity. It requires slowing down long enough to ask ourselves what feels good, what lights us up, and what makes us feel expansive and alive.

And for many of us, that can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

Because somewhere along the way, many of us learned that wanting too much was selfish. That pleasure had to be earned. That rest had to be justified. That our dreams needed to be practical. That our needs should come after everyone else's.

So we stopped asking.

Or maybe we never learned how to ask in the first place.

What I've come to believe is that desire isn't selfish, frivolous, or indulgent.

It's information. It's the part of us that's trying to guide us toward a life that feels more aligned, more alive, and more true.

The work isn't figuring out what we should want.

It's simply giving ourselves permission to become curious.

Curious about what we want and how we want to feel.

I'd love for you to sit with this:

If nobody else's expectations existed, what would you want and how would you want to feel?