The Life You’re Allowed to Want
If you’ve ever felt a quiet, persistent sense that your life doesn’t quite fit — like you’re following a script written for someone else — you’re not alone. And you’re not broken. As a therapist, one of the most common things I witness is people moving through their lives on autopilot, chasing milestones they never consciously chose, wondering why they don’t feel more fulfilled when they’ve done everything “right.” This post is for you.
The Script We Inherit
The script usually goes something like this: school, then achievement, then a relationship that follows a recognizable trajectory, then marriage, then children, then the accumulation of things that signal a life well-lived. And somewhere inside all of that forward motion, the actual person — with their particular longings, strange joys, and quiet needs — gets quietly set aside.
This isn’t a personal failing. It’s what happens when we’re handed a map before we’ve ever been asked where we want to go.
What Your Nervous System Already Knows
A lot of what I do as a therapist is help people distinguish between what they truly want and what they’ve been conditioned to want. These are not always the same thing, and the difference matters enormously.
Conditioning is loud. It sounds like: you should be further along by now. You should want a partner. You should be grateful for what you have. You should stop being so particular.
Your actual self is often quieter. It speaks in the body more than the mind — as a persistent low-grade dissatisfaction you can’t quite name, or as the life you imagine on your best, most honest days. The one that feels true and a little scary to say out loud.
Healing, in part, is helping your nervous system understand that it’s safe to want what you actually want. That choosing a different path isn’t the same as danger. That you can disappoint a cultural expectation and still be okay.
What “Living Differently” Actually Looks Like
When I talk about decentering romance, centering joy, or building a life around chosen family, I’m not prescribing a particular lifestyle. I’m saying something much simpler: the life worth building is the one that fits you — your nervous system, your values, your actual sources of meaning — rather than one inherited by default.
That might look like investing in friendships with the same intention you were taught to reserve for romantic pursuit. It might look like opting out of timelines — deciding that this decade isn’t your decade for certain milestones, and letting that be okay. It might look like a career that funds a life rather than consuming it. Or a chosen family that is the plan, not the backup plan.
None of these choices are radical in themselves. What’s radical is making them consciously — on your own terms, with your eyes open, without waiting for permission.
You Don’t Need Permission. But You Might Need Support.
Here’s the part that’s hard to hear and also the most freeing thing I know: no one is coming to tell you it’s okay to live differently. What therapy can do is help you clear enough of the old noise that you can hear yourself again — and get sturdy enough to make choices that are true for you, even when they don’t fit the expected frame.
The body knows when you’re living authentically. It knows when you’re not.
Ready to start designing a life that actually fits?
I work with women navigating identity, relationships, and healing — using EMDR and a nervous-system-informed approach to help you get clear on what you want and build toward it. If this resonated, I’d love to connect.
