You’ve been looking forward to it all week. A few hours with nothing particularly urgent happening. Nobody needs taking anywhere, there isn’t an appointment wedged awkwardly into the middle of the day and, for once, you have some time that could genuinely be yours.
So naturally, you put a wash on.
Then you notice something in the kitchen that needs sorting. You reply to a message you’ve been meaning to answer. You consider going out but can’t decide where, make a cup of tea instead and somehow find yourself twenty minutes later looking at your phone.
Eventually, a surprisingly difficult question occurs to you: What do I actually want to do?
Not what would be useful. Not what you could get ahead with. Not what everybody else would enjoy if they were there. Just what you fancy doing with a few hours that belong to you.
And rather annoyingly, you haven’t got a clue.
When being useful becomes your default setting
There’s a particular kind of competence that develops when you spend a lot of your life responding to what needs doing. You become excellent at spotting the next thing. The dishwasher needs emptying, that form needs completing, somebody needs a lift, the dog needs walking and there’s something for work you could quickly get ahead with. And while you’re upstairs, you might as well change the bedding.
There is always something.
Being capable and responsible isn’t a problem. Neither is getting satisfaction from getting things done. But when much of your attention has been organised around what needs me next?, a completely open stretch of time can feel oddly unfamiliar.
There is no instruction. Nobody is waiting. Nothing is particularly urgent. Suddenly, instead of responding to what life requires from you, you have to consult yourself.
For some women, that is when they notice how rarely they actually do.
You may know exactly which cereal everybody prefers, which evening somebody needs collecting, what needs replacing in the fridge and which colleague is likely to need reminding about something on Monday. Ask what you would like to do with three free hours and apparently we’ve moved into advanced questioning.
We often talk about needing more time for ourselves, and sometimes more time is exactly what is needed. But I think there is another part of this conversation that gets missed: you can create the time and still feel disconnected from what you want to do with it.
Having space and knowing yourself within that space are not quite the same thing.
If your own preferences have repeatedly come behind practicality, responsibility and other people’s needs, they can become quieter. Not gone, but less familiar and less likely to be the first thing you consider.
You might notice it in very ordinary situations. Someone asks where you’d like to go and you say, “I don’t mind.” What would you like for dinner? “Anything.” What shall we do this weekend? “I’m easy.”
Sometimes, of course, you genuinely don’t mind. I have no desire to turn choosing a sandwich into an exercise in personal development.
But if I don’t mind has become your answer to almost everything, it can be worth noticing. Constantly adapting to what works for everybody else is not necessarily the same as genuinely having no preference.
Over time, being very easy-going can quietly become being rather difficult to locate.
You probably don’t need another project
When you realise you’ve lost touch with what you enjoy, the temptation can be to immediately do something about it.
I need a hobby.
Perhaps you do. But this isn’t a recruitment drive for wild swimming, pottery or buying a journal you feel vaguely guilty about not writing in.
I’m more interested in what happens before that.
What holds your attention when you’re not trying to be productive? What gives you energy rather than simply occupying you? What do you miss doing? What do you occasionally catch yourself thinking, I’d quite like to…, before immediately producing several sensible reasons why now isn’t the time?
You don’t need to turn the answers into a self-improvement plan. In fact, the last thing somebody already feeling overwhelmed needs is rediscover myself added to the list between booking the dentist and buying dishwasher tablets.
The useful part is simply beginning to notice yourself again.
That matters because losing touch with your own preferences rarely happens through one enormous decision. It is more often the accumulation of hundreds of small moments in which something else understandably came first.
Work was busy. Somebody needed you. There wasn’t enough time. It was easier to go along with everybody else. You were tired. You would do it another week.
None of those moments looks particularly significant on its own. But repeat them for long enough and you can end up with a life that is very full while feeling strangely absent from it.
And that can show up in different ways. Sometimes it feels like overwhelm or irritability. Sometimes your confidence becomes quieter because you have become less accustomed to consulting your own judgement. Sometimes you feel flat or restless despite not being able to identify anything obviously wrong.
Sometimes the only description you have is, I don’t really feel like me anymore.
Your life should contain some evidence of you
I think this is the part we can miss when we talk about wellbeing.
It isn’t simply about coping better with everything already on your plate. Sometimes it is worth looking at the plate.
There can be people you love, work that matters, responsibilities you willingly chose and plenty in your life to be grateful for, while still recognising that you have become very practised at accommodating everything around you.
Wanting to feel more present in your own life doesn’t mean rejecting those responsibilities or suddenly putting yourself first in every situation. Real life doesn’t work like that.
It might simply mean allowing your own preferences, needs and interests to have a little more influence than they have had recently.
So the next time an unexpected couple of hours opens up, you don’t need to make brilliant use of them. You don’t need to have a meaningful experience or emerge with a newly discovered passion.
But before automatically asking what you could get done, you might pause long enough to ask, What would I actually like?
If you’ve been putting yourself somewhere towards the bottom of the agenda for a long time, the answer may not arrive immediately.
That’s not a reason to stop asking.
And if you’ve reached a point where you genuinely don’t know what you want anymore, what matters to you or where you fit amongst everything you’ve been carrying, that is something we can explore together. You don’t need a crisis or a neat explanation before getting in touch.
Sometimes, “I’ve realised I don’t really know what I want anymore” is more than enough for us to arrange a conversation.
Jx