This week’s post:
Healing the Inner Child (Part 8): Why Is It So Hard to Know What We Really Want?
At a certain point in my childhood, and throughout my entire adolescence, I stopped thinking about what I wanted. My activities were decided by others, and my choices were no longer my own.
Disclaimer
These reflections are intended for self-observation and personal exploration. They are not a substitute for professional mental health support. If a reflection brings up overwhelming emotions, consider pausing and seeking support from a qualified professional.
The Mirror
As children, we naturally depend on others. They choose where we live, what we learn, and many of the opportunities we receive. Little by little, however, something is meant to change. We begin making small decisions for ourselves. We discover what we enjoy, what we dislike, what feels right to us. Choosing gradually becomes part of how we discover who we are.
Looking back, I realized that this process quietly stopped for me.
Many of my activities had already been decided. My classes, my hobbies, and often the direction I was expected to follow. At the time, I did not see it as a problem. In many ways, it made life easier. I did not have to worry about making decisions because someone else had already made them for me.
Years later, adulthood expected me to know what I wanted.
Instead, I often found myself unable to answer a simple question.
“What do you want?”
Not because I lacked ambition or intelligence, but because I had spent so many years following that I had stopped practicing one of the most important skills of adulthood: choosing.
This week’s practice is an invitation to explore a simple possibility.
What if the difficulty is not that you don’t know yourself?
What if you simply haven’t had enough opportunities to practice choosing for yourself?
This Week’s Clarity
This practice will help you:
recognize where your ability to choose may have been shaped by your environment;
distinguish between following others and discovering your own preferences;
begin rebuilding confidence through small, intentional choices.
More importantly, it will help you begin relearning that ability through small choices instead of waiting for certainty.
You do not need to decide the rest of your life this week. You only need to begin exercising a skill that may have been left behind.
The Structural Lens
Others Chose → I Followed → My Preferences Became Quiet → I Practice Choosing → I Build My Own Direction
We often think clarity comes first and choices come second.
Sometimes the opposite is true.
Sometimes we only discover what we want because we were willing to choose, reflect, adjust, and choose again.
Like any other skill, the ability to choose develops through practice.
Before You Look
This practice is not about blaming the people who made decisions for you.
Parents, siblings, teachers, and communities often choose with good intentions and very often, out of love. They want to protect us, prepare us, or give us opportunities they never had themselves.
The purpose of this practice is different.
It is simply to notice whether, somewhere along the way, your opportunities to choose became smaller than your opportunities to follow.
If they did, perhaps the answer is not to judge yourself for feeling uncertain.
The answer is to begin practicing again.
🪞 Mirror One — Following or Choosing?
Think about your childhood and adolescence.
Who usually made the important decisions?
More importantly, how often were you invited to make your own?
Do not focus on whether those decisions were good or bad. Instead, notice whether you had enough opportunities to develop your own judgment.
Sometimes the habit of following becomes so familiar that we mistake it for our personality.
🪞 Mirror Two — Listening for Your Own Voice
Think of one decision you have been avoiding or postponing.
Before you ask what other people think, pause for a moment and ask yourself:
What is my first honest answer?
It may feel uncertain.
It may even feel incomplete.
That is not necessarily a sign that your answer is wrong. It may simply be the sound of a voice you have not listened to very often.
