Today’s Question For Your Uncommon Evolution: What is something you want more of lately?
There is a very specific kind of panic that comes with realizing you may not actually want the life you worked incredibly hard to build, especially as a woman of color.
Because let’s be honest: it was hard enough to build it in the first place.
It would be easier if life were obviously bad. If you hated your job, your relationship was clearly wrong, your city made you miserable, or everything had fallen apart, then at least wanting something different would make sense. You could point to the problem. You could explain yourself. Other people would understand.
But sometimes (often) nothing is really objectively wrong.
You have the career. The degree. The money, or at least enough of it. Maybe the house, the partner, the reputation, the life that an earlier version of you was absolutely convinced would make her feel safe and happy.
Other people may even look at your life and think you have it all, whatever that overused phrase actually even means.
And meanwhile, in the quiet moments you have alone with yourself, you’re constantly thinking: is this really it?
And that is an excruciatingly uncomfortable thought, especially when you know how hard you worked to build this life.
But as was true for me, and as I’ve seen in my practice, for many women of color, the lives we build are not based entirely on what we want. They are also built around safety, survival, responsibility, family expectations, respectability, and the very real belief that if we work hard enough and become successful enough, we will eventually reach a point where we can finally relax.
In other words, we learn, first and foremost, to be practical. We learn to choose the path that makes sense. We choose the stable career, the impressive degree, the job with benefits, the option that will make our families proud, the life that no one can criticize us for choosing.
And to be clear, those choices are not necessarily fake or wrong. A lot of them are smart. Some of them are necessary. Some of them change the trajectory of our entire families. Some of them give us freedom, money, credibility, and options that the women before us never had.
But something can be the right choice for you at twenty-two and feel completely wrong at forty.
That does not mean you made a mistake. It may simply mean you changed.
Unfortunately, that is usually where the guilt comes in. It certainly did for me.
You may feel ungrateful for wanting something else. You may think about all the people who would love to have your job, your home, your education, your relationship, or your level of security. You may remind yourself that you asked for this. You may even feel ridiculous because, technically, your life is fine.
But “fine” can become a very strange prison.
We are taught to think of success as something permanent. Once you achieve it, you are supposed to keep wanting it. Once you become good at something, you are supposed to keep doing it. Once people begin to know you as the lawyer, the executive, the business owner, the wife, the dependable daughter, the person who always has it together, it becomes much harder to imagine stepping outside of that identity.
Changing your mind can feel like betraying the version of yourself who worked so hard to get there. It can also feel like betraying everyone who is proud of you.
High-achieving women of color are often expected to be very clear about what we are doing. We are supposed to have a plan, execute it well, and keep moving forward. Changing direction makes people nervous. It disrupts the story.
People are comfortable when the successful woman is grateful, productive, and predictable.
They are less comfortable when she says, “I know this looks good on paper, but I don’t think I want it anymore.”
Sometimes that realization does not arrive dramatically. You do not wake up one morning and decide to blow up your entire life. Usually, it starts more quietly than that.
You become bored by things that used to excite you. Work feels heavier. You start fantasizing about a different city, a different career, a slower pace, more freedom, more creativity, or simply having fewer people constantly needing something from you.
You may not even know exactly what you want. You just know that you do not want this exact version of your life forever.
That feeling is easy to dismiss because it does not always look like a crisis. Sometimes it looks like exhaustion. Sometimes it looks like procrastination, irritability, or numbness. Sometimes it just feels like an internal sense you are performing your life instead of actually living it.
But because you are capable, you keep going. You answer the emails. You finish the work. You meet the deadlines. You show up for everyone. You maintain the entire structure while quietly wondering how much longer you are going to be able to live inside it.
In my experience, the hardest part is not always changing your life. Sometimes, the hardest part is just admitting that you want to.
Wanting can feel irresponsible when you have spent most of your life being responsible. Especially when what you want is more passion, more feeling, more joy – less practicality.
Besides that, there is the figuring out of what exactly do you want when you are not trying to make anyone proud? What would you choose if you did not have to explain the choice to your family, your friends, your colleagues, or people on LinkedIn? What would your life look like if it did not have to prove that you are smart, capable, respectable, successful, or safe?
Those questions can feel incredibly indulgent.
But there is nothing frivolous about wanting your own life to actually feel like yours.
You are allowed to want something that feels good from the inside, even if the life you already have looks excellent from the outside.
That does not necessarily mean you need to quit your job tomorrow, end your relationship, sell your house, and move to another country, although many of us may not be opposed to a dramatic gesture.
Sometimes the fantasy of starting over completely is really a desire for movement. You may need more space, more rest, more fun, more creativity, more honesty, or simply one part of your life where you are not constantly performing competence.
You may need a huge change.
You may also need one small corner of your life that belongs only to you.
Starting over does not mean starting from nothing.
You are not throwing away your experience. You are bringing your skills, your judgment, your resilience, your money, your relationships, your mistakes, and everything else you learned with you.
The life you built may no longer fit, but it still gave you information. It taught you what you can do. It taught you what you value. It taught you what you are no longer willing to tolerate. It may have also taught you that getting everything you thought you wanted does not necessarily mean you will want it forever.
Your next life does not need to prove that the last one was wrong.
You do not need to declare your entire career a mistake in order to leave it. You do not need to hate your marriage to want more independence. You do not need to despise your city to wonder whether you belong somewhere else.
You do not need a dramatic justification.
You may simply be a different person now.
Your values may have changed. Your ambition may have changed. Your body may want a slower pace. The things that used to make you feel powerful may now make you tired. The life that once felt like freedom may have slowly become another set of obligations.
That is not failure.
It is information.
The real work is learning how to hear yourself again after spending years being rewarded for ignoring what you wanted. You may have to grieve the person you thought you would be. You may have to disappoint people. You may have to make choices before you have a perfect plan, which is obviously horrifying for those of us who prefer to have approximately seventeen backup plans.
You may also have to accept that the next version of your life will not immediately look as impressive as the current one. There may be a period where you are no longer fully who you were, but you are also not yet established in who you are becoming.
That part can be brutal.
There is no title for it. No degree. No neat announcement. You cannot necessarily explain it in one sentence at a dinner party. You may feel uncertain, unproductive, and slightly unhinged.
But you may also feel relieved.
You may realize that changing your life does not erase what you already accomplished. It does not make you spoiled, reckless, or ungrateful. It just means you are willing to tell the truth before the life you built becomes unbearable.
A successful life is not necessarily the one that looks the best or makes the most sense to other people.
It is the one you can actually stand to live in.
And sometimes the bravest thing a successful woman of color can do is stop asking whether she has a good enough reason to want something different and finally admit that wanting it may be reason enough.
I love working with millennial women of color as they reconnect with themselves and build lives that feel authentic, intentional, and fully their own. I also genuinely love connecting with people and hearing their stories. If you want to share what this essay brought up for you, or if you’re a millennial woman of color who would like to work with me, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out through my Contact Page or email me directly at anjali@uncommonevolution.com.
