A LIFE WORTH

We currently live in a world where almost every single person is willing to tell you how you should live. They will tell you how you should look and what you should want. They will tell you what to prioritise, how much ambition is admirable and how much is just too much. Whether you need to change your body or love it exactly as it is. You need to put yourself first, but you must also be more selfless. You need to want more, but you should also be grateful for what you have. Settle down. Leave. Stay. Heal. Reinvent yourself. Find yourself. Become your highest self. Discover your authentic self. There always seems to be another answer.

I have zero interest in giving you another one. I have zero interest in handing you another set of rules for how you should live your life, because I think most of us have collected quite enough of those already. I am much more interested in whether you understand yourself well enough to decide how you actually want to live on your own. Because none of us arrive here completely untouched. By the time you find yourself wanting something different, you have already accumulated an entire life of ideas about who you are and who you are supposed to be. You will have inherited ideas about what makes a good woman, a successful woman, a desirable woman, a worthy woman. You are shaped by your family, your relationships, your relationship with your body, the work you do, your culture and the things you have experienced both directly and indirectly. You are shaped by what you were rewarded for, what you were praised for and what you learned very quickly was better kept to yourself. Some of those things will genuinely belong to you. Some of them won't. Most of us probably have a fairly complicated mixture of both.

For a long time, I thought the answer was to strip all of that away and discover who we really were underneath it. Find the authentic self. Dig deep enough and surely eventually we would hit some pristine little version of ourselves who had somehow escaped being influenced by absolutely anything that had ever happened to us. I don't think she's there. You can keep digging, but I suspect you could spend the rest of your life doing it. I think it is far more useful to pay attention to the woman who is actually here. Not the imaginary woman in your head that you're going to reinvent yourself into six months from now. The one standing here today, with all of her history, contradictions, habits, opinions, desires, mistakes, adaptations and questionable decisions intact. How did she get here? What has she inherited? What does she believe and why does she believe it? What does she edit before she even allows herself to think it? What does she want? What does she envy? What does she fantasise about? What does she keep coming back to even though she insists it doesn't matter? What does she say matters enormously, and does the life she is currently living provide any evidence of it? Not because everything you discover is secretly your truth. Not because every thought you have is right or every desire deserves to become reality. I don't think finding something inside yourself automatically makes it sacred. But it is very difficult to choose your life deliberately when you don't understand the person who is choosing it.

And then, of course, I think we manage to get ourselves stuck there too.

We understand. And understand. And then understand ourselves a little bit more. We need to know exactly why we do what we do before we can possibly do anything differently. We trace the pattern backwards. We find its origin. We analyse the origin. We understand why the origin affected us. We understand why we responded the way we did. And sometimes all of that understanding is incredibly useful. But at some point you probably know enough to make a decision. You don't need to understand every single thing that has ever happened to you before you're allowed to decide that you can move forward. You don't need to completely understand why you keep abandoning yourself before you can choose not to do it this time. You don't need to trace every belief back to its origin before you're allowed to question whether you still actually believe it. And you don't need to heal, resolve or perfectly understand every part of yourself before you start participating in your own life.

Because explanation is not transformation.

Understanding yourself gives you information. It gives you context and, hopefully, some compassion for the woman who got you here. But eventually you have to do something with what you know. Eventually, you have to choose. And I think this is where choice gets interesting, because choosing for yourself doesn't mean blindly obeying every thought, feeling or desire you uncover. Desire is information. It isn't necessarily instruction. A feeling can be completely real without automatically being right. Something can make perfect sense given everything you have experienced and still be something you no longer want to continue. The point of paying attention isn't to turn everything you discover into another identity. It is to give yourself better information from which to choose.

So what do you actually want now? How do you want to spend your time? What do you want to do for work? How do you want your relationships to feel? How do you want to feel in your body, and how do you want it to look? What do you want your home to feel like? How much money do you want to make? What clothes do you want to wear? What gives you pleasure? What do you want more of? What do you want considerably less of? What do you want an entirely unremarkable Wednesday afternoon to feel like when nobody is watching and there is absolutely nothing impressive about it? What would make this life feel more like one you actually want to be living? You are allowed to care about all of it. You can love yourself and still want to change. You can appreciate the life you have and still want more from it. You can love your body and want it to be different. You can be grateful and ambitious. You can decide that something you desperately wanted five years ago is completely uninteresting to you now. You can keep parts of yourself because you genuinely love them and leave other parts behind because they no longer make sense for the life you're choosing.

We are continuing bodies of work. We are not stagnant, permanent versions of ourselves required to remain consistent simply because we once announced that this is who we are. We experience things. We learn. We meet people. Our bodies change. Our circumstances change. We discover things we didn't know existed. We change our minds. And sometimes the thing we were absolutely convinced would make us happy turns out to be rather disappointing once we actually get there. Which is why I don't think choosing once is enough. Everything you decide you want eventually requires your participation. Your choices have to find their way out of your head and into your actual life. Into your daily routines and your calendar. Into the way you participate in your relationships. Into the work you choose to do. Into the way you care for your body and live in your home. Into the boundaries you have with other people, the way you spend your time, the things you practise, the things you're willing to tolerate and the things you're willing to work for. Not because you're trying to become some perfect future version of yourself. She doesn't exist either.

But you are allowed to have goals. You are allowed to want things. You are allowed to pursue something simply because you believe your life might be better, richer, more interesting, more pleasurable, more beautiful or more deeply yours with it in there. And you don't have to wait until you've perfectly understood yourself before you begin. You can start here, as the woman who actually exists, with what you know now, and find out what happens. Maybe you'll get exactly what you wanted. Maybe you'll discover that you don't want it nearly as much as you thought you did. Maybe your circumstances will change. Maybe you'll learn something that changes your mind. Maybe you'll meet someone, go somewhere, read something, experience something or simply wake up one morning and realise the life you were building no longer fits quite as beautifully as it once did.

So you pay attention again.

You understand what is here. You question it. You decide what matters now. You choose. You participate. And eventually, because you are alive and therefore inconveniently susceptible to change, you do the whole thing again. I don't think the point of any of this is to finally discover exactly who you are and freeze her in time. I don't think we're supposed to arrive at some final version of ourselves and spend the rest of our lives proving we were right about her. I think the point is to understand yourself well enough to make your own choices, to take responsibility for what you choose, and to participate in creating more of what you actually want while remaining curious enough to notice when the answer changes.

And maybe that's all a life worth wanting really is.