My goal was always in my head. That was the problem.

I spent years knowing what I wanted in a vague, shapeless way. Had no clue beyond that.

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For most of my adult life, I carried a version of what I wanted somewhere in the back of my head. Always lurking, never the main character. So typical of many of us.

Ambitious, but not in a way I could have described to anyone who asked. More like a feeling. The sense that there was something I was supposed to be doing that I wasn’t quite doing yet.

I assumed this was enough. My priorities, my circumstances, all added to the vagueness of that ambition. That wanting something is not the same as working toward it. Without the specificity, it is just a pleasant form of waiting for circumstances to present themselves rather than going all out to create something.

The hustle was missing. Both at the mental and physical levels.

The thinking is comfortable. It can stay as flexible and hopeful as you need it to be. It never has to face the friction of being tested against reality. Defining it is different. It means committing. Means saying — this is what I am going toward. This specific thing, not a feeling or a direction or a someday. A step on terra-firma.

I was a thinker for a long time. A very committed, consistent thinker about what I might want someday. What I was not was a definer. I hated specificity because what I truly wanted was so beyond my reality that it scared the hell out of me, even in my imagination.

The moment that changed it all was not dramatic.

It was 2023. Back at work, still finding my footing, still carrying grief in one hand and a laptop in the other. I sat down one evening, not with any particular intention, just because the house was very quiet and I needed to do something with my hands, and I wrote down what I actually wanted.

Not what felt realistic. Not what made sense given my age, my circumstances, my career gaps. Just what my heart aspired to, not rooted but emerging from a delusional haze.

I wanted to write. Publicly. In a way that reached people who were in the middle of something hard and felt completely alone in it. I wrote that down. Specific enough to be real.

Something shifted.

Not immediately. Not with any fanfare. But the direction began to emerge. I could now look at what I wanted every single day. I made two versions of it, one for the desktop, to stare at me every time I logged in, and one handwritten for my work desk.

The decisions that followed had something to be measured against.

I now had the direction but getting there was still eluding me. I wanted to write, yet hide from all. Wanted to share pain, yet not be specific. I was all knotted within.

My first step was accepting that no one is waiting for my opinion. It is my perspective that someone somewhere might align with, and for once, I didn’t want to hold back on that.

So I started with the most polished version of myself. The LinkedIn ghostwriter. Sharing just enough, revealing nothing too raw. I now had a question I could ask, does this move me toward the thing I wrote down, or away from it?

That question changed everything.

Then I started to split myself into two.

A mentee and a mentor. One wanted no nonsense, a task master. The other a struggler who stumbled often. The role playing would become exhausting. But when all you have is yourself for company, that is probably the best you can do for yourself.

The mentor version wanted speed and action. The mentee version had a list of reasons why that scale-up cannot happen. Most days, the mentee version won.

But the days the mentor version took over were panic-filled — taking the mentee to task about all that was unfulfilled and staring at her. What I know now, two years into this, is that both versions are necessary.

The mentee keeps me honest about how hard it actually is. The mentor keeps me moving when the mentee would have sat down permanently.

Neither of them is fully right. Neither is fully wrong.

What changed everything was not choosing one over the other. It was writing down the goal clearly enough that both of them had something to argue about. The goal was always the anchor. I just had to stop keeping it in my head where it could stay comfortable and vague and safe.

I put it down in writing. Now it stares back at me every single day.

That is exactly what it is supposed to do.

PS. The handwritten version is still on my desk. Creased now, faded. I have not moved it. Some things you write down and they earn the right to stay exactly where they are.