Do You Actually Know What You Want?

It sounds like a simple question, but for a lot of women in midlife it can be surprisingly hard to answer.

What do you want?

Not what your children need. Not what would make your partner happy. Not what makes sense financially, what is practical, what you have already committed to, or what everyone expects from you. What do you actually want?

If you have spent years making decisions around other people, you may find that the answer does not come easily. You might know what needs to happen next week, what everyone is having for dinner, which appointment needs to be booked and what problem needs solving, but ask what would make your own life feel better, richer or more alive and suddenly things become less clear.

That does not necessarily mean you have lost yourself. It may simply mean you have become very practised at listening outward and a little rusty at listening inward.

Start smaller than "What do I want from my life?"

One reason this question can feel overwhelming is that we tend to make it enormous. What do I want from the next ten years? Do I still want this relationship? Should I change careers? Where should I live? What is my purpose?

Those questions matter, but they are difficult to answer when you have not been paying attention to your own preferences for a while. It can be more useful to start with much smaller questions.

- What do I feel like doing this weekend?
- Who do I actually enjoy spending time with?
- What do I miss?
- What am I curious about lately?
- What leaves me feeling energised, rather than depleted?
- What have I been saying yes to when I really want to say no?

These smaller choices begin to rebuild your ability to recognise your own preferences. And once you start noticing them, bigger desires often become clearer too.

Pay attention to what gives you energy

We tend to think of knowing what we want as something we figure out intellectually. We sit down, think harder, make lists and try to arrive at the correct answer.

But your life is already giving you information.

Notice what happens to your energy around different people, activities and environments. There are things you do that leave you tired in a satisfying way, and other things that leave you feeling strangely flat. There are conversations where you become animated and lose track of time. There are ideas you keep returning to for no obvious reason.

You do not have to immediately turn those signals into decisions. Just notice them. Your attention naturally moves towards some things and away from others, and that is useful information.

Notice what you envy

Envy has a bad reputation, but used carefully, it can tell you a lot.

Sometimes when we feel jealous of someone, what we are really reacting to is something they have given themselves permission to do.

Maybe someone travels alone and you feel a little pang when you see it. Maybe a friend starts a completely different career at 50. Maybe someone is deeply creative, physically strong, sexually confident, financially independent, surrounded by friends, or simply seems to have more freedom in her life.

Rather than judging yourself for the reaction, ask what exactly you are responding to. You may not want her life at all. You might want one small quality within it: freedom, adventure, confidence, creativity, closeness, recognition, rest.

That can be a much more useful clue than trying to answer "What do I want?" in the abstract.

Separate desire from consequence

Sometimes we cannot hear what we want because the consequences arrive before the desire has even had a chance to speak.

You think, "I'd love to live somewhere else for a while," and immediately your mind replies: What about the children? What about work? What would my partner say? How would we afford it?

Or you think, "I would love to study something completely different," and within seconds you are calculating the time, money and practicality of doing it.

Those considerations are real, and eventually they matter. But they belong to a different question.

First ask: What do I want?

Then ask: What would it take?

If you combine those questions too early, practicality will often silence desire before you even know what it was.

Ask yourself what you would choose if nobody was disappointed

This can be an uncomfortable question, but it is a revealing one.

If nobody would be hurt, offended, inconvenienced or disappointed by your choice, what would you do differently?

You may discover that there are things you genuinely want to keep exactly as they are. You may also realise how many of your decisions are shaped by avoiding someone else's discomfort.

That does not mean you should suddenly stop considering the people you love. Relationships require compromise. But compromise is much healthier when you know what you are compromising, rather than automatically arranging your life around everyone else and calling it choice.

Look at the things you keep postponing

Most of us have a mental list of things we will get to "one day."

When the kids are older. When work calms down. When there is more money. When we have more time. When life becomes easier.

Some of those things are passing ideas. Others keep coming back year after year.

Pay attention to the ones that refuse to disappear.

Perhaps you have wanted to write, learn a language, travel somewhere, change the way you work, reconnect with an old friend, take dancing lessons, spend more time in nature, start a business, be alone for a while, become fitter, make art, explore spirituality or bring more intimacy back into your relationship.

The fact that you have not done something yet does not necessarily mean you do not really want it. Sometimes it means there has simply never been enough room for it.

Try things before making them mean something

There is another trap in midlife: believing that every new desire has to become a major life decision.

You can be curious about something without committing to it. You can take a class without turning it into a career. You can travel alone for a weekend without deciding you want an entirely independent life. You can explore what is missing in a relationship without immediately deciding whether to stay or leave.

Sometimes we learn what we want by thinking about it, but often we learn by experiencing something and noticing how it feels.

Experimenting gives you information that thinking alone cannot.

Give yourself some quiet

If your life is constantly full, it is very difficult to hear your own thoughts clearly.

Quiet does not have to mean a meditation retreat or an hour of journalling every morning. It might be a walk without a podcast, driving without calling someone, sitting outside with a coffee, or having half an hour where nobody needs anything from you.

At first, nothing profound may happen. Your brain may simply run through errands and unfinished tasks. But if you create enough space, other thoughts tend to surface.

- The things you miss.
- The things you are tired of.
- The things you secretly hope might happen.
- The things you have known for a while but have not wanted to acknowledge.

You may already know more than you think

Sometimes the problem is not that we do not know what we want. It is that we do know, and the answer feels inconvenient.

- It may require a difficult conversation.
- It may disappoint someone.
- It may cost money.
- It may challenge the version of you that other people are comfortable with.
- Or it may simply feel selfish because you are not used to considering yourself in the equation.

So rather than asking only, "What do I want?", another useful question is: What do I already know that I keep talking myself out of?

You do not have to act on every answer immediately. Knowing what you want does not mean blowing up your life or putting yourself above everyone else.

It means allowing your own voice to be part of the conversation again.

And if you have spent a long time listening to everyone else, that may be where finding your way back to yourself begins.

Sometimes the answer is already there. You just need space to hear it.

When you have spent years responding to everyone else’s needs, your own wants can become harder to hear clearly.

An Orykl Session gives you space to talk through what is coming up, notice the patterns underneath it, and get clearer on what you actually want next.

Tell us what you are going through, and we will match you with vetted spiritual practitioners who can support you.

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