Does Your Life Feel Like Your Own?

You can feel it before you can name it.

I was eight years old, sitting in my bedroom, and something felt wrong. Not wrong like a bad day. Wrong like a life that didn’t fit. I felt boxed in. I struggled to adapt. I wanted out. I didn’t have words for any of it. I only had the feeling.

Thirty years later, I finally had the words.

What I felt that day was the weight of unspoken expectations. The culture around me had a script for girls, and I wasn’t following it. The women around me had chosen that script. For many of them, it fit. It was genuine, and it was theirs. But when I held it up against myself, it didn’t match. I couldn’t find anyone around me who looked like what I wanted to become. Not because something was wrong with them. Because something was different about me.

I wanted to run a business. I wanted to earn money doing something I was good at. I wanted to matter in ways that went beyond the walls of a home. I wanted to be a mother, too. But I wanted both. And nobody around me demonstrated that.

So I went outside. Literally. I helped my dad in the fields. I raised sheep. I played basketball. I stepped outside of their script and started writing my own, even if I was too young to know that’s what I was doing.

The feeling came back in my late twenties.

I was in the corporate world by then. Good job. Stable income. A career path that made sense on paper. And there it was again. That same tightness. That same restlessness. I felt boxed in. Stymied. I wanted more responsibility, more autonomy, more room to actually shape something. Changing a few lines of code contributed to the business. I knew that. But it wasn’t enough.

I was living the corporation’s life, not my own.

I didn’t have a question to ask back then. I had a pull. Something inside kept pushing toward more, toward something that felt like mine. I followed it without fully understanding it.

Looking back now, I can name what I was chasing.

Does this life feel like my own?

That pull kept showing up. In job changes. In volunteer requests. In favors from friends. Not selfishness. Clarity. There’s a real place for putting others first. Generosity matters. Showing up for people matters. But there’s a difference between choosing to give and being quietly cornered into someone else’s idea of who you should be.

You can put others first and still live your own life. You help people best through what’s already inside you, not through performing the version of yourself someone else designed.

That eight-year-old sitting in her bedroom knew something was off. She didn’t have the language, but she had the instinct. That instinct was worth listening to.

It still is.

The next time something feels wrong, not bad-day wrong but life-that-doesn’t-fit wrong, ask the question.

Does this life feel like my own? Ask it about your job. Ask it about the obligation you keep saying yes to. Ask it about the path you’re on.

No means you're paying attention. That's where the compass points.

The question “Does this life feel like my own?” comes from a Justin Welsh newsletter. Turns out I’d been asking it my whole life.

If this resonated, I made something for you. How to Stop Living Someone Else's Life is a free guide — four questions and four practices for anyone who followed the rules and still ended up somewhere that doesn't feel like theirs. And if you're ready to go deeper, Your Values, Your Season is a $7 workbook for identifying what matters most in the season you're actually in.