At 71, I Finally Understand Why I Never Knew What I Wanted

I spent 20 years trying to imagine my future without questioning who had shaped my desires.

There she sits at the kitchen table, surrounded by magazines, scissors, a glue stick, and a big piece of poster board.

She’s going to make a vision board.

She’s read the books. She’s listened to the experts. She’s heard all about the extraordinary things that can happen when you get clear about what you want, visualize it, and begin believing it’s possible. She’s excited and ready, and there’s just one little problem: she doesn’t know what she wants.

Oh, she can find pictures of beautiful houses, lovely gardens, happy couples, exotic vacations, and women strolling along beaches wearing flowing white linen.

Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that happiness looks like a thin woman walking barefoot on a beach in a $400 linen outfit.

But are those her dreams? Or are they pictures of what she’s been taught a happy, successful life is supposed to look like?

There’s a difference, and it’s a world of difference.

And here’s what breaks my heart about that woman sitting at the kitchen table.

There was a time when she knew exactly what she wanted. Maybe she wanted to paint, to travel, to write a book, to live somewhere exciting, or to do something nobody in her family had ever done.

She could get downright giddy imagining her future.

Then life happened. She learned what everybody else needed, what everybody else expected, and what everybody else thought was sensible.

And somewhere in all that living, the girl who once had dreams of her own went quiet.

Now she’s sitting at a kitchen table, surrounded by pictures of beautiful lives, trying to remember what a beautiful life would look like for HER.

And I wonder how many of us have sat at that same table without ever realizing what we’d lost.

I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life reading books about personal growth, spirituality, and creating the life I wanted. I kept journals for 20 years. 20 damn years! I practiced visualization, made vision boards, meditated, and listened to gurus, teachers, preachers, and life coaches explain how to change my life.

And I believed them. I followed their instructions because I genuinely wanted to experience the possibilities they described.

But the changes I experienced were often painfully slow, and I kept saying the same thing, out loud, over and over, to anyone who was trying to help me.

“I do not know what I want.”

I knew what I was supposed to want, what a successful life was supposed to look like, and what other people considered happiness, security, fulfillment, and achievement. But ask me what I wanted for myself and I couldn’t tell you, and for years I didn’t understand why.

Now I do.

Nobody told me to question the conditioning

Think about how we grow up.

Our parents teach us what they believe is right and wrong. Our teachers reinforce what society considers acceptable. Our churches tell us what a good woman should be. Our communities establish expectations about marriage, motherhood, money, appearance, and behavior.

Most of the people teaching us these things aren’t deliberately trying to rob us of our dreams. They’re passing along what they were taught. And we accept it because we’re children. We trust the adults around us, and we assume they know how life goes.

Eventually, we become adults who carry those same beliefs into our marriages, careers, relationships, and decisions, and we don’t necessarily stop to question them.

Why would we?

When something has been presented as normal your entire life, it doesn’t occur to you that it might be optional.

And that’s where it gets tricky, because conditioning doesn’t simply influence our behavior. It influences our imagination. It shapes what we believe is possible, what we believe is acceptable, and, most importantly, what we believe we’re allowed to want.

And here’s what I think is the most heartbreaking part of all. After enough years of being told what we should want, what we shouldn’t want, and what we’re allowed to want, we can lose touch with the very feeling of wanting something for ourselves. A genuine desire comes along, and we dismiss it so quickly we don’t even recognize it for what it is.

We don’t just stop chasing our dreams. We stop recognizing them when they show up.

And then, 40 or 50 years later, somebody hands us a vision board and tells us to fill it with pictures of everything our hearts desire.

Good Lord, woman, that’s the problem! We don’t know what our hearts desire anymore!

And the conditioning can become so deeply ingrained that we don’t even notice what it’s doing.

I caught myself doing it

Recently, I learned that the building where I live could eventually be converted into condominiums. I love my apartment and I love my life here, so the possibility of having to leave wasn’t particularly appealing.

But here’s what happened inside my head. I immediately assumed I couldn’t afford to buy my apartment. I never investigated, never asked about prices, never explored financing or what arrangements might be possible. I simply accepted that buying it was beyond my reach.

Then somebody asked me a question.

“What makes you think you couldn’t buy it?”

Well, now, there’s a question that can really derail a perfectly good assumption.

As we began discussing the possibilities, I realized I had already decided what was impossible without knowing whether it actually was. I began recognizing the old messages behind that assumption, the beliefs women of my generation absorbed about money, homeownership, financial independence, and what we could realistically expect from life. Somewhere along the way, those messages had become part of my own thinking.

Nobody had to stand in front of me and say, “You can’t buy that apartment.”

I’d already said it to myself.

And that’s the frightening thing about conditioning. Eventually, you don’t need anybody else to limit you. You do the job for them.

Whether I ever buy that apartment is another matter entirely. The point is that I nearly eliminated a possibility before I had even examined it.

And I’m 71 years old, for God’s sake. I’ve lived a rather extraordinary life, done things other people thought were impossible, and started over more times than I can count. Yet there I was, still carrying an old belief that had quietly decided what I could and couldn’t have.

Imagine how many possibilities I’ve dismissed over the years without even realizing it. And imagine how many you’ve dismissed.

You have a “condo story” somewhere in your own life, a possibility you ruled out before anyone asked what made you think it was impossible.

The little nugget of gold at the bottom of the dump

I want you to picture something.

Somewhere at the bottom of the local city dump lies a tiny nugget of gold. It’s beautiful, it’s valuable, and it’s been there for decades.

But over the years, thousands upon thousands of garbage bags have been piled on top of it. Every bag contains another expectation, another rule, another judgment, another belief about who you should be and how you should live.

Be a good girl, they said, and don’t be selfish. Be realistic, don’t make trouble, and for heaven’s sake think about what other people will say. And whatever you’re tempted to try, remember that it isn’t appropriate for a woman your age.

One bag after another, until that little nugget of gold is buried so deeply you wouldn’t even know it existed.

That nugget is the genuine desire you once had for your own life.

So when somebody comes along 50 years later and says, “Go reclaim your dreams!” you stare at them like they’ve lost their mind.

What dreams?

You can’t see them, feel them, or even remember what they were. Not because you’ve lost the ability to dream, but because you’ve spent a lifetime accumulating beliefs that have covered them up.

I’ve also been thinking about how deeply some of those beliefs are embedded. Some are so deep that we mistake them for our own personalities. We say, “Oh, I’m just not adventurous,” or “I’ve never been good with money,” or “I’m not the kind of woman who does things like that.”

Really? Or were you taught not to be?

And here’s what really gets me. How many things have we denied ourselves, how many adventures have we passed up, how many perfectly wonderful possibilities have we dismissed because somebody, somewhere, decided what a woman like us was supposed to want? And who the hell appointed them the authority over the rest of our lives?

There’s a question worth sitting with over a cup of coffee.

But conditioning isn’t always a bad thing

Here’s a discovery I made quite by accident. I bought a soft little sleep mask filled with flaxseeds, with just enough weight to settle comfortably over my eyes, and I started wearing it every night. Before long, the moment it touched my face, my whole system seemed to understand it was time to shut down. My mind quieted, my body relaxed, and I fell asleep more easily.

I’d created an association without deliberately setting out to do it.

Then one day, I wondered what would happen if I wore the mask while meditating. Well, I’ll be damned. The same thing happened. My mind, which can ordinarily produce enough thoughts to populate 3 counties, began settling down. The mask had become a signal, and I had conditioned myself to do something beneficial.

That got me thinking. If repetition can teach me to relax, what else have I been taught through repetition? And more importantly, what can I begin changing deliberately?

Because if old conditioning can teach me to dismiss a dream before I investigate it, I can teach myself to investigate before I dismiss it. That’s the difference between letting a lifetime of inherited beliefs run your life and deciding which ones deserve to stay.

And then somebody hands you a vision board

This is the part that fascinates me.

We’re told to imagine our ideal future, write down our desires, visualize our success, and believe in the possibilities. But how in the world are we supposed to visualize a life that truly reflects who we are when we haven’t yet recognized how much of what we want has been conditioned into us?

We can fill beautiful vision boards with pictures of things we think would make us happy, write affirmations about achieving them, and meditate on those images every morning, but none of that answers the most important question.

Is this what I want, or is this what I’ve been taught to want?

That’s the question I wish somebody had asked me decades ago. Not because journaling, meditation, and visualization are worthless, since I still value them, but because I spent years trying to create a new life without understanding the beliefs influencing my choices. I was trying to imagine possibilities while carrying around an invisible rulebook telling me which possibilities were acceptable.

And I didn’t even know I had the rulebook.

A lot has changed in the last 2 years

I’ve begun recognizing the conditioning that shaped so many of my decisions, and I haven’t always liked what I’ve discovered. There have been beliefs I accepted without question, expectations I fulfilled without examining them, and desires I pursued because they seemed like the things a woman was supposed to want.

But as I’ve begun questioning those beliefs, I’m discovering what I truly enjoy, what excites me, what feels natural to me, and what I want my days to look like, regardless of whether anybody else understands or approves.

And now, when I imagine possibilities for my future, the experience is different. Visualization brings me joy. I’m no longer sitting there desperately trying to manufacture a picture of a life I think I should want. I’m beginning to recognize a life that actually feels like mine.

At 71, I’m not trying to become the woman I was supposed to be. I’m becoming the woman I actually am.

And there’s a tremendous amount of freedom in that.

Before you create another vision board...

I’m not asking you to throw away your journals, stop meditating, or abandon your spiritual practices. I’m inviting you to bring one more thing to them: curiosity.

Before you ask yourself what you want your future to look like, begin noticing the beliefs that have influenced what you think you’re allowed to want. When something exciting crosses your mind and your immediate response is, “Oh, I could never do that,” stop right there.

Who said? Where did that belief come from, and is it actually true? And how would you know, if you’ve never questioned it?

You don’t have to reconstruct your entire life this afternoon. You’ve got decades of conditioning rattling around in there. Some of it is useful, some of it is beautiful, and some of it belongs in the same garbage dump as those old rules about what a woman should and shouldn’t do.

But you can begin noticing the difference. You can catch yourself dismissing a possibility before you’ve explored it, recognize when a desire arrives with guilt because somebody once taught you that wanting something for yourself was selfish, and ask whether a particular dream actually excites you or simply looks impressive to everybody else.

And gradually, you begin hearing yourself again: your own voice, not your mother’s or your husband’s or your preacher’s, and not society’s endless chorus of opinions about what women our age should be doing.

Remember that woman sitting at her kitchen table with her magazines, scissors, and poster board?

I don’t want her to give up on her vision board. I want her to put down those scissors long enough to ask herself whose dreams she’s been cutting out of those magazines.

And then I want her to imagine something else. What if she didn’t have to find her dreams in a magazine at all? What if she could begin discovering them by questioning everything she’s been told about the kind of life she’s allowed to live?

Look at her closely. She might be you.

Because somewhere beneath all those years of conditioning, there’s still a little nugget of gold.

And I’ll tell you something about gold. It doesn’t lose its value just because somebody buried it.

And there’s something else I’ve come to understand.

How the hell are we supposed to know what we want when we’ve spent most of our lives trusting everybody else’s judgment instead of our own?

Think about it. We trusted our parents to know what was best for us. We trusted our husbands, our preachers, our teachers, and just about anybody who had an opinion about how we should live.

And somewhere along the way, we stopped trusting ourselves.

So when something inside us whispers, “I’d really love to do that,” what’s the first thing we do? We start questioning it. Is it practical? Is it selfish? What will people think? Am I too old?

Good Lord! We haven’t even given ourselves time to enjoy wanting something before we’ve talked ourselves out of it.

And that’s what makes learning to trust ourselves so damn important.

Because questioning our conditioning means we’re going to come face-to-face with beliefs we’ve accepted as truth for 40, 50, even 60 years.

And when we begin questioning those beliefs, whose judgment are we going to trust?

Theirs? Again?

**Or are we finally going to trust our own?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent enough years allowing other people’s ideas about life to influence mine.

I’m interested in finding out what happens when I trust myself enough to listen to what I want.

And I’ll tell you something. At 71, that’s one hell of an exciting possibility.

Before you go, I have a little something I recorded just for you. If you’re thinking about what you’ve just read and wondering where to go from here, I’d love for you to hear this invitation directly from me.