The Question After the Answer

For most of my life, I thought I knew what I wanted.

I wanted to find a partner. I wanted a family. I wanted to be chosen. Almost every decision I made until about two years ago was made for someone else.

Looking back, it makes sense that I thought about things this way. We are surrounded by stories that teach us what a successful life should look like. Find a man. Settle down. That will provide you with safety and a family.

The strange thing about inherited goals is that they often feel like our own. We carry them for so long that we stop asking where they came from. The sitcoms of the ’90s highlighted how insufferable marriage was and how much most women hated their husbands. So I accepted that as my fate. To love someone romantically was to be fundamentally unhappy and trapped, but also safe.

Over the last few years, I have been slowly dismantling parts of my life that were built around society’s expectations rather than my own desires. Some of those expectations came from family. Some came from culture. Some came from fear. Some came from not knowing myself as well as I thought I did.

At first, the process was filled with grief.

I grieved the years I spent moving in the wrong direction. I grieved opportunities I imagined I had missed. I grieved versions of myself that were trying desperately to follow a map that was never meant for them.

After all this grief, the question stopped being, “What did I lose?” and transformed into, “What do I want now?”

It turns out that question is just as hard to answer.

When you spend years orienting your life around a destination, you learn how to measure progress. Every choice either moves you closer to or farther away from the goal. There is comfort in that certainty, even when the goal itself doesn’t belong to you.

Without the destination, there is only direction.

Lately, I have had to put a lot of trust in the breadcrumbs. Not a grand revelation. Not a five-year plan. Just a series of small clues leading me back to the person I have always been and the desires I never allowed myself to have.

A topic that keeps pulling at your attention.

A question you cannot stop asking.

A hobby that refuses to leave.

A pattern you notice everywhere.

The things that persist are the clues.

For me, it’s the books stacked beside my bed. The mythology podcasts. The hours spent talking about culture when I should be doing something else. The questions that follow me from work to the garden and back again.

Maybe the goal was never to find a single answer.

Maybe the goal was to become curious enough to keep following the questions.