What Do You Want? The Question Midlife Keeps Asking

Written by Seema Sharma, Menopause Guide & Founder of The Hormone Harmony Network

On losing your sense of self somewhere between other people's needs, and why being easy to live with can quietly cost you your own identity. This piece first appeared on my Substack, adapted here for THHN.

Someone close to me asked me a question I couldn't stop thinking about. Not because it was complicated. Because I felt stupid for not knowing the answer.

It wasn't about menopause. Not about ageing, or motherhood, or my plans for the summer, or work. Those questions I can handle. I've got answers for those, or at least the performance of those answers.

This one was simple.

What do you want?

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

I don't mean I was being modest, or deflecting. I mean I genuinely did not know. I stood there, exposed, in the middle of a life I had built, organised and held together with real competence for decades, and I could not answer the most basic question about myself.

Sheeesh. That's a problem.

When did you stop asking yourself?

Nobody accidentally forgets themselves. It gets trained out of us slowly, drop by drop, coated in a lot of positive reinforcement. We're praised for being helpful, accommodating, low-maintenance. Rewarded for anticipating needs before anyone has to ask. Called strong when we don't complain, difficult when we do.

The details change depending on where you're from and how you were raised. The pattern doesn't. Most women I know were taught to need very little and give everything. To get on with it and be grateful. I was taught to appreciate what I had before I was ever taught to explore what I wanted.

So I learned gratitude long before I learned to want.

There's a name for this, and it isn't a character flaw. Psychologist Dana Jack coined "self-silencing" in the 1990s to describe the pattern of suppressing your own needs and opinions to preserve relationships and keep the peace, and three decades of research since have linked it consistently to women's stress and low mood. It isn't that we're bad at knowing ourselves. It's that many of us were rewarded, early and often, for not asking.

Fluent in everyone else

You can read a room before you've taken your coat off. You can anticipate what your children need before they've said a word. You can manage, remember, plan and fix, often without being asked, often without anyone noticing. You have spent years becoming extraordinarily good at other people.

Your own inner life, meanwhile, has gone very quiet.

Here's the uncomfortable part. The people closest to us often benefit from this. If you're the person who anticipates everything and asks for nothing, the people around you don't have to think as hard for themselves. Why would they, when you'll give them the answer, find the thing, or do the thing, no list required?

The system works perfectly for everyone except you.

And if I'm honest, I've kept that system running too. It's often easier to just do the thing myself than explain it. Easier in the short term, at least. We tell ourselves our partner is tired too. Our boss has enough on. Our children need us front and centre. Other women have it harder. We get so fluent in minimising ourselves that we do it automatically.

Why usefulness stops being enough

Eventually life starts asking questions that being useful can't answer. We arrive in midlife restless, after years of prioritising responsibility over curiosity, having forgotten to check in with ourselves at all. The roles are still there. The responsibilities are still there. But you're no longer satisfied, and no amount of being useful can answer the question that sits on your chest and keeps you up at night.

Surely there's more to this?

You can ignore that feeling for a while. Not forever.

Where you can start

I'm not going to hand you a list of things that will magically give your life meaning. That list looks different for everyone, and it can be anything from moving your furniture to moving countries. But if you don't know where to start, here's the honest, practical version:

• Ask the question on purpose, before life asks it for you. 

  Set a timer for two minutes and write down whatever comes when you ask yourself "what do I want?" Don't edit it. The first honest, unglamorous answer (a full night's sleep, an unscheduled Saturday, a friendship with less performing in it) is data, not a disappointment.

  
  

• Notice where you say "I don't mind" on autopilot. 

  For one week, catch yourself before you default to the low-maintenance answer, and ask whether you actually don't mind, or whether it's just faster to say so.

  
  

• Separate what you've been taught to want from what you actually want. 

  Gratitude and desire aren't opposites, but if you were taught one long before the other, it's worth checking which one is doing the talking.

  
  

Forget, for now, the hormones, the sleep hygiene, the supplements, the whole "is it perimenopause" conversation. Start with the unexamined belief that everyone else's wants are more urgent than your own.

What do you want?

If you don't know, that's exactly where to start. And if you do know, but haven't said it out loud yet, that might be the real work of this season. Nobody can read your mind. Not even you, until you ask.