Part of a series about the secret questions we ask ourselves, often without saying them out loud.
When do I get to just live my life?
Perhaps you’ve wondered this.
Maybe not out loud. Maybe it’s appeared as a fleeting thought while you’re driving, in the shower, lying awake at night or somewhere in the middle of an ordinary day.
When do I get to just live my life?
It can feel like a dangerous question.
Because what does it mean if you ask it?
Does it mean you’re ungrateful for what you have? That you don’t appreciate the people in your life? That you’re selfish? That you should be doing something differently? That you’ve somehow got life wrong?
Perhaps you quickly push the question away because you don’t want to go there.
But what if you were allowed to ask it?
Not because something has to be wrong. Not because you need to make a decision. Not because you’re secretly longing to walk away from everything you’ve built.
Just because, sometimes, it is a real question.
You can love people and still wonder when you get to just live your life. You can be grateful for what you have and still wonder if this is how you want to spend your days. You can care deeply about the responsibilities you carry and still feel tired of carrying them.
None of that has to be a judgement about anyone or anything.
Perhaps that’s where we get ourselves into trouble. We hear a question like this and immediately assume it must be pointing towards an answer. We start looking for the thing that needs changing, the person who’s holding us back, the choice we should have made, the life we should be living instead.
But maybe you don’t have to know what the question means yet.
Maybe you don’t have to turn it into a complaint. Maybe you don’t even have to do anything with it.
You are allowed to wonder. You are allowed to notice that somewhere underneath all the doing, managing, organising and being there for everyone else, there is a part of you asking:
When do I get to just live my life?
And perhaps, for now, letting yourself hear the question without immediately judging it is enough.
Because asking doesn’t mean you’re disloyal. It doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful. It doesn’t mean you’re broken. It doesn’t mean you’re doing life wrong.
It might simply mean you’ve noticed something.
And you don’t have to rush to decide what that something is.
