Lately I’ve been noticing a question appearing again and again in my counselling practice. It sounds different depending on who’s sitting across from me, but underneath it is often the same longing. “I can’t keep living like this.” or “something has to give.”

Sometimes it comes in the form of a different type of question: What am I allowed to put down now?

The people that are asking these questions are people rarely people whose lives have fallen apart. Rather they speak of having good lives, lives that look full from the outside. They speak of having careers they’ve worked hard to build, or families they’ve even worked hard to have. Responsibilities. Friends they care deeply about. But somewhere along the way, that fullness has become a heaviness. And the heaviness has begun to feel like too much.

They don’t necessarily want a new life. But somehow along the way, they no longer recognize themselves inside the life they are living.

Imagine this, A woman comes to therapy in her early fifties. From the outside, her life looks exactly as she imagined it would. She and her partner built successful careers. They raised children she adores. She spent years driving to soccer practices, packing lunches, organizing holidays, remembering birthdays, supporting her partner through career changes, and making sure everyone else was okay.

Somewhere along the way, she stopped asking herself what she wanted. Because in theory this was what she had wanted. But now she is wondering, if she wants more.

She tells me she married someone who looks wonderful on paper. Kind. Reliable. A good partner. They built a good life together. But quietly, over the years, she realizes she has been lonely for a very long time. She isn’t angry. She isn’t even sure she wants anything to be different. She is simply struck by the realization that she cannot remember the last time she felt widely and deeply alive.

Then she says something that stays with me:

“I don’t know what I want anymore.”

I‘ve learned that people rarely come to therapy because they want to learn one specific thing. More often, they come because they haven’t had the space to hear themselves clearly, and they have a growing sense that something isn’t right.

Something changes when our words are spoken aloud. We begin to recognize what we’ve been carrying. We notice where we’ve been living out of alignment, with what matters to us. We begin to recognize what no longer fits.

Something unexpected happens when people slow down enough to carve out the space and the time to hear themselves speak.

They begin to develop a relationship with themselves again. They begin be in tune with themselves in way that allows them to imagine asking what it is that they do want.

Lately I’ve been spending more time writing, and I’ve been lighting a candle before I write. I’ve noticed that this has now become a ritual of sorts. The ritual reminds me to arrive.

To stop rushing long enough to hear what has been quietly waiting for me.

I’ve also stopped jumping out of bed in the morning. Now before I am fully awake I just lie there. I notice the changes in the light from when I closed my eyes, and I notice the lazy dreamlike thoughts that are clearer and ring truer than the ones I have when my mind fully wakes up. More creative, wiser, gentler.

I’m beginning to wonder if what many of us need isn’t another productivity system, another to do list, another app.

Maybe we need permission. Permission to put something down. Permission to move more slowly.

Permission to become the kind of person who can hear themselves again.

As I have been writing this I’ve found myself

beginning to wonder,

In order for you dear reader to begin to hear yourself again what might you need to put down?

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If someone came to mind while reading this, feel free to share it with them. Sometimes the right words arrive at the right time.