What you stopped letting yourself want

Somewhere along the way, you became very good at editing.

Not the kind of editing you do at work, though you are good at that too. The other kind. The quiet, almost invisible kind. The half-second between a question and your answer when someone asks what you want to do this weekend. The way you read the room before you speak, calibrating your response to what will land easily for everyone else. The way "I don't mind" became the most honest sentence in your vocabulary, because by the time anyone asked, you no longer knew.

You did not decide to become this. It happened in increments. A preference set aside here, a want softened there. A weekend reshaped around what would be easiest for everyone. None of it dramatic. None of it traceable to a single choice you could now point to and say: there, that is where I lost the thread.

But you did lose it.

You can feel it most clearly in the small moments. Standing in front of the closet, putting on what is appropriate. Sitting in a meeting, saying what is useful. Lying in bed at the end of the day, scrolling something you do not really want to be reading, because the part of you that knows what you would actually want is so far underground you cannot reach without digging.

This is what happens after years, sometimes decades, of being competent for other people. You become the manager of everyone's preferences except your own. You become fluent in the language of "what works." And the longer you do it, the harder it is to remember that you ever had an opinion that was not in service of someone else's comfort.

Responsiveness is part of why you are loved. Repeated long enough without anything coming back, it becomes self-erasure. You stopped asking what you wanted because no one else was asking. And eventually, you stopped knowing.

What you have now is a life that fits everyone but you.

I attended an event with Esther Perel where she said there are two kinds of people: the ones who are alive, and the ones who are not dead. The line stayed with me, because it names something you have not let yourself say out loud. Nothing is technically wrong. You are functioning. You are competent. You are not in crisis. You are also not alive, not in the way you used to be, and you have stopped expecting to be.

The work, for now, is not to figure out what you want. The work is to stop the editing long enough to notice that something underneath is still alive. To ask, in a quiet hour before the day begins: what do I actually want, right now, that has nothing to do with what anyone needs from me?

The answer might not arrive immediately. That is fine. You have been gone a long time, and you are allowed to take your time coming back.

For now, it is enough to stop editing yourself out.