is this it?

on wanting to want something

it’s hard to answer the question, what do you want, when no one ever asked you before. when it was already too late. by the time i had space to wonder, i’d already become someone who answered to everything else but me. it’s not that i didn’t want anything. it’s that my wants never made it past the checkpoint of usefulness. they were reframed in ways that made them easier to explain and easier to abandon. the question wasn’t, what do i want? it was, what would make sense to everyone else? what would make me proud enough to stay quiet about how unsure i really felt inside? i got so good at becoming the person who could do anything, that i forgot to listen for those things that made me feel real.

i was praised for how well i moved forward, no one asked however, if i ever chose that direction. i didn’t even realise i hadn’t. i just kept moving, like if i slowed down i would lose the illusion that i was okay. the deepest form of self-abandonment is over-performing in a life you didn’t choose, crafting an identity out of expectations and then clinging to it like a lifeboat. it’s crossing off every item on the to-do list and still going to bed hungry. hungry for something unnameable. it’s the sense that something’s missing even when everything looks fine. and when you finally slow down long enough to ask yourself, what do i want? the silence is unbearable. there’s nothing there. or maybe there is. maybe it doesn’t have a form yet. or you just don’t have the language for it.

you can spend years chasing a version of success that never really belongs to you, wearing other people’s timelines like hand-me-down clothes, ticking off boxes that were never yours to start with. the life you’re building might look fine from the outside, but it doesn’t feel like home. it feels like standing in a showroom. spotless, sterile, full of perfect surfaces no one has touched. nothing out of place but nothing alive either. a space built to be looked at and not lived in. and when you stop to ask how much of this is mine, the question bounces off the walls and comes back unanswered.

happiness in theory is desire fulfilled. but that theory assumes you had the chance to form a desire in the first place. it tells you to dream big, reach further, manifest your ideal future. as if all desire is equally accessible. what if you don’t have a template? what if your desires are soft, formless, flickering things? and every time you try to name one it feels indulgent and wrong. somewhere along the line you internalised that needing was not a good thing. so you trained yourself to be efficient. and here you are now, submerged, the terrain distorted, the signals murky, every direction both possible and wrong.

being a child in an environment where survival was the word you related to, deeply changes everything. it teaches you to predict and adapt. and from years of living like this, you become emotionally invisible. you are edited. becoming the one who doesn’t need much, the one who always bounces back, the one who lightens up the mood, the one who makes it easier for everyone else. and the cost is a constant one. you’ve learnt to be grateful and abandon your own questions in favour of answers that keep the peace. eventually the part of you that once longed for more learns to stop longing altogether because it no longer expects to be answered.

this is where the idea of reparenting comes in. in psychology, reparenting refers to the process of giving yourself the emotional conditions you didn’t receive in childhood. things like protection, validation, comfort, consistency and permission to be imperfect. the term originated in transactional analysis in the 1960s but it’s now widely used in inner child work, attachment theory, and trauma-informed therapy. the science behind it is simple. early experiences shape how your nervous system responds to threat, connection and need. your brain forms internal models called schemas, based on what you repeatedly experience in childhood. if you weren’t taught how to self-soothe, how to trust your emotions, how to feel safe inside your own body, adulthood becomes a long disoriented attempt to find those things in other people. reparenting works because it interrupts this loop by giving the brain new, reliable data. reparenting isn’t about pretending the past didn’t happen. it’s recognising that even now, you’re still waiting for safety. and the most powerful thing you can do is begin to offer it to yourself, slowly, again and again. it can start as simply as asking yourself, what would comfort have looked like back then, and how can i offer a small version of that now?

neurologically, your brain learns to prioritise otherness over authenticity. the prefrontal cortex, a part of your brain responsible for planning and decision-making, doesn’t operate in a vacuum. it takes input from memory and past permissions. it scans your history and decides what to want based on what’s been accepted before. and if your wants and desires were never mirrored back to you as valid, your brain will not store them as reliable data. it will hesitate, reroute and shut down before you even try. it’s not just, i don’t know what i want. it’s, i’ve never been taught what i want is okay to know. one day you wake up and realise your whole life has been built out of caution. it’s functional, maybe even impressive, but it’s not yours. and you’re not unhappy exactly, but you’re not inside the life either. you’re watching it, performing it, narrating it. and the question keeps circling behind your eyes. is this it?

sometimes not knowing what you want isn’t really confusion, it’s fear. the fear that if you choose something, you might lose everything else. that naming a desire makes it real, and real things can be taken away. it can feel safer to stay suspended in the maybe, in the vague shape of the longing, than to risk the pain of wanting and not getting. the pain of choosing wrong. the fear that what you want won’t want you back. so you hover and wait and build a life out of neutrality, because it feels more manageable than disappointment. a lot of us believe we first must have clarity before we can move. that we should have the vision, the plan, the certainty, and then take the leap. but most of the time, the clarity doesn’t come until later. you have to take a few steps in the dark just to remember what your own feet feel like. not every path will show up. and sometimes you have to begin with no evidence that it’s right, just the deep knowing that staying still is no longer an option. that’s the thing. you only learn who you are by watching yourself move.

wanting is a muscle. it can atrophy, but it can also return. it’s an image that stays longer than it should, a thought you don’t quite understand but can’t let go of. happiness doesn’t require certainty, but it does need honesty. it needs willingness to hear yourself even when you don’t make sense. you don’t need a five-year plan, a passion project, or some sort of ‘spiritual awakening’. it starts with letting yourself not know and noticing those micro-desires slip in. i want to sit in the sun. i want to delete that app. i want to be alone right now. you just need a place to begin. and beginning, most of the time, will sound like this, i want to feel more alive than i do right now. and that’s enough. truly, that’s enough.

you don’t need to figure it all out. you just need to be a person who can sit within the wanting. to be the adult who listens gently to the part of you that still flinches when asked what you need. somewhere along the line, you learned that needing is a weakness and wanting makes you difficult. so now you hesitate and minimise. your character trait is being apologetic. healing from this means becoming someone who doesn’t punish themselves for not knowing yet. someone who can say, i don’t have the answer but that’s okay. i’m listening. and mean it.

someone who is building a life around self-trust. one kind choice at a time.