Feeling Stuck in Your Life? You Actually Have More Choice Than You Think

Hi darling,

How's your list of wants going? The one from last week? 

(And if life got too busy and you haven’t started yet, no worries - start today! Even a day or two of tracking your wants will still help.)

The point of that exercise is less about the specifics of whatever you want, and more about the practice of noticing. 

Noticing matters more than you might think, because you can't make informed choices about your life without being informed (from you to you) about what YOU want. 

Your brain/body send you that information constantly (like a group chat). But if you can’t hear it (because you muted your notifications while the group chat was blowing up), you don’t know yet that there’s new information to factor into your decision-making.

And speaking of decision-making… let’s talk about my grandma.

A few years before she died, Grandma survived a stroke and became cranky. Not just “a little pissed off every now and again,” but suddenly, permanently, in a bad mood. And vocal about it. 

Everything seemed to annoy her, from the hardwood floors being too hard, to all the water in Ohio tasting terrible (she was a Michigan girlie). The stroke seemingly disabled the filter/dam in her brain that kept her from sharing her most raw, honest, pointed opinions. And now nothing was off limits, and she was spittin’ fire in every direction. 

Being the oh so mature young adult I was at the time, I shrugged, briefly acknowledged that the old Grandma from my childhood memories was replaced by this new, mean one, and kept my distance. 

What I didn’t do was stop to question why this shift had happened and where all this anger was coming from.

After she died, I got my answers. 

Grandma was parentified from childhood onward. She never really got to just be a kid, nor did she ever get to enjoy much of a free life as an adult. 

She became a wife and mother immediately after high school, having four young kids that she had to basically solo-parent by the time she hit her mid-twenties. And even after the kids were grown, she still did all the household labor for my grandfather, who I never once saw make his own lunch.

Her only true freedom came after my grandpa died, leaving their house and money all to her, where she could finally do whatever she wanted, wherever she wanted, for however long she wanted, without needing to cater to him or anyone else.

How sad is it that she only got to experience true freedom for a couple of years at the tail end of her life? Better than never, but still…. yuck.

So now when I think back to her fire-spittin’ final days, expressing how fed up she was with everyone’s BS… I don’t blame her. Not one bit. Because if I’d been forced to live the life she did, I’d probably be the subject of a True Crime documentary by now. (“No, really, Officer! He loves a sprinkle of arsenic, I mean turmeric, in his soup!”) 

Grandma was a fabulous artist in the little time that she was able to make for herself. She quilted, sculpted, made pottery, drew, painted, sewed, baked, and probably a dozen other things, maybe more. Who knows what other mediums she would have explored if she’d had the time, energy, and access to fully invest in her creative potential. 

“Well, Caity, that’s just what life was like for women back then.” Okay, but that doesn’t mean it was ever right.

So when I heard about how Grandma told someone in the family (probably after her stroke) that she regretted ever starting the family, that actually made perfect sense to me.

She wasn’t saying she hated us. She was saying that being forced into caretaking so young meant she never got to live for herself. She was forced to compromise by always making the best of labor-intensive situations (life, marriage, kids) in which she had no real* choice.

(*as in… achievable, practical, and emotionally/physically/financially safe to go against what society and her family demanded of her.)

Her story breaks my heart as much as it pisses me off.

My family and I exist because of choices she didn’t get to make.

Your family probably exists because of the same.

We all come from lineages where women didn’t have much choice in their own lives.

There’s a lot about that that hasn’t changed… but also a lot that has.

Yes, the world still treats women badly, especially Black and Brown women.

And yes, the world still restricts (insecurely, frustratingly, strategically, fucked-uppedly) women’s freedoms, especially those of Black and Brown women. 

And YET… all women alive today have infinitely more freedom than our grandmothers did. (And their grandmothers, and their grandmothers, and their grandmothers.)

My grandma did the best she could with the choices and resources she had available in her life. It’s important we do the same. 

Having the ability to make real choices is freedom. 

It’s power. It’s safety. It’s exactly what we need more women stepping into as we evolve as a civilization toward a reality that has space for us all to thrive in whichever ways delight us most. Because empowered women make the world a better place for everyone.

Women nowadays have far more access to upper education. To build careers and businesses we love. To leave relationships that aren’t working. To live alone if we want. To not have kids unless we truly want to be parents. To move across the world. To buy real estate. To build portfolios. To do just about anything we want.

But those things usually aren’t handed to us. We have to realize we want them, and then choose to actually do them. 

I keep hearing stories of women who feel stuck where they are in their lives currently, failing to realize they’re probably not as stuck as they’ve convinced themselves they are. They’re just afraid to choose the bolder path, to do something different than they’ve been doing, to try something new and risky.

But I think the greater threat is doing nothing and staying exactly where you are, after you’ve realized it’s not where you want to be anymore.

Because when you let yourself stay stuck, you become more and more miserable. You burn out. You become a shell of yourself. You grow resentful of the people around you and start lashing out at them. It can be a death sentence to your relationships.

Speaking of relationships… active choice is vital to maintaining a healthy partnership. 

Because if you don’t feel like you can change your life in the ways you need to, including leaving the partnership if you need to, that’s dangerous. At best, your partnership becomes incredibly unfulfilling and unsatisfying. At worst, it becomes a breeding ground for abuse. Because a partnership can’t truly be a partnership unless both partners are freely, happily, choosing each other every day. It’s not a one-time choice; it’s ongoing. And you are allowed to change your mind anytime.

And just like with your partnership and relationships in general - it’s normal for your wants to evolve over time, as you get more experience in life trying new things, and as you get to know yourself and your preferences better. 

Which brings us back to your list of wants.

Everything you put on this list is a clue, a little degree on a compass pointing you toward the even-cooler woman you’re growing into, and the next chapter of her life.

Next week, we start putting those clues together. Because once you can hear what you want, and once you stop pretending you don't have a say in it, you can actually build that life (the one where you’re the main character and loving it).

This is Part 3 of a four-part series on realizing when you’ve lost your sense of self, making room for your ability to feel your desires, reclaiming your responsibility to make intentional choices in your own life, and learning to trust what you want as your guide for what needs changing in your life.

Choosing you, Caity

P.S. - If you missed Part 2, you can read that here.

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