How Do You Know This is the Life That You Want?
The question haunted me for years, though I didn’t know it at the time. It was a quiet, insistent hum beneath my frantic search for answers, for solutions, for something—anything—that would fill the void infertility left behind. I never asked myself if the life I was chasing was truly mine. I assumed it was. Isn’t it what everyone wants? To love, to build a family, to nurture something bigger than yourself? It seemed obvious, automatic. But infertility unraveled that assumption thread by thread, until I stood face to face with the most uncomfortable truth I’ve ever known: I had no idea what I truly wanted because I had never been taught to ask.
Infertility taught me many things—most of which I didn’t want to learn. It showed me how much of my identity was wrapped in an idea I never really examined. Growing up, the path was laid out: work hard, find love, have children, grow old with a full table and fuller heart. But no one prepares you for what happens when that path disappears beneath your feet. No one tells you what to do when the dream you’ve nurtured turns into a kind of grief you carry every day. And no one talks about how much the life you think you want can betray you when it’s based on someone else’s definition of happiness.
It took me years to ask the real questions. What if I stopped measuring my life by the milestones I thought I was supposed to achieve? What if I stopped chasing what everyone else seems to have and asked instead: What makes me feel alive? What truly matters to me—not in the future, but now? The answers didn’t come easily. They came in fragments, in moments I almost missed because I was too busy mourning the life I thought I lost.
They came while walking my dog on a quiet morning, feeling the sun warm my face. They came in the deep belly laugh of a friend who understood my pain without needing me to explain it. They came in the first time I said “no” to something that didn’t serve me and “yes” to something that scared me. The answers weren’t grand or dramatic. They weren’t tied to motherhood or success or even happiness in the way I thought they would be. They were quieter, simpler, but no less profound: a life worth living is one where you stop waiting for joy to arrive and start noticing the tiny pieces of it already scattered around you.
Sometimes the life you think you want isn’t actually yours. It’s a reflection of what you’ve been told to want, what society glorifies, what your friends and family celebrate. But when you strip all of that away—when you let go of the “shoulds” and the “somedays”—you might find something raw and unexpected: the life that wants you. A life that is messy, imperfect, and yet entirely yours.
So how do you know this is the life you want? Maybe you don’t, not yet. Maybe you never “know” in the way we’re taught to believe. Maybe it’s not about knowing at all, but about surrendering to what is. To the life that’s here, right now, asking to be seen, loved, and shaped. It won’t look like anyone else’s, and it might not make sense to the people around you. But it doesn’t have to. It just has to feel like yours. And when it does, you won’t need to ask anymore. You’ll know.