This may sound strange to you however you are just where you need to be to get to where you want to go. Part of the difficulty in realizing this is the tendency to only see the forest. In your post you have identified all the area you want to work on but when looking at them all together its not wonder your overwhelmed.

The trick to moving forward from where you are (which is the only place you can move from and will move from regardless of the direction you go) is by taking one step and then the next. I don’t mean for that to sound trite but that is a truth most people overlook because we want to leap forward to some imagined future where all is as we desire. Yet even a leap requires taking a step.

A step you could take is taking your post and breaking it down into a list of things you would like to work on. Avoid labelling them with words like impossible, never, difficult. Avoid attaching past memories and stories to the list. You will know your doing that if you tart getting lost in ‘if only’s, or should’s or could of’s. This is only a list of areas in your life you would like to improve. The next step would be to select something simple on the list that you can start to improve on and then start. (don’t start with purpose – you are purpose) Stay focused on the one step and avoid getting paralyzed from looking at too much all at once. If you can a life coach could be a great help to keep you on track. Avoid beating yourself up when you falter, and you will, (if you didn’t you wouldn’t be learning) so insure to celebrate the victories as they will come.

Change happens slowly then all at once. Your post indicates you have it within you to achieve something that you have yet to imagine.

“Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.

When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they will open doors to you.

Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”― Joseph Campbell

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by Peter.

Dear urooz:

You wrote that you don’t know what you want… because you care too much about what other people want you to do. You listen to what other people want you to do, their voices are so loud, that you can’t hear your own voice.

One topic you mentioned is having  kids being  married five years. Having kids, or not, is a huge decision, a big item to decide on. I have a question regarding small items, because the answer may be in them. When you go about your day as is, for example, folding laundry: do you fold the laundry and put away clothes the way you were taught or is there a better way to consider, your own way of folding laundry?

If you can’t answer the laundry question, think of something else you do during a normal day in your life, something you do the way others do that particular thing, but there is a better way (once you consider it), your own way. Tell me, if you will, about it?

anita