The Things That Make You Feel Alive Are Not Extra

You know how to make room for what needs to be done. The things that bring you alive deserve room too.

You are very good at knowing what needs to happen.

You know what work requires, what the family needs, what appointment needs to be made, what deadline is coming, what needs your attention, and what needs to happen next.

You know how to be responsible.

You know how to be useful.

You know how to get things done.

What you may be less practiced at is asking:

What makes me feel alive?

Not what is productive. Not what is good for you. Not what helps you regulate your nervous system. Not what you can turn into a goal, a habit, or another area of personal development.

Just:

What do I love?

I think that question matters more than we sometimes realize.

When what you love becomes the extra

You have spent years making room for what matters.

The problem is that somewhere along the way, what matters may have become almost synonymous with what needs to be done.

There is always something more pressing. Work to finish. Someone who needs something. A house that needs attention. An email you forgot to answer. A person you should call. Something that would be irresponsible to ignore.

So the other things get moved to later.

The painting.

The book you want to read rather than the one you think you should read.

The garden.

The music.

The trip you keep thinking about.

The long dinner with people who make you laugh.

The thing you have always wanted to learn.

The afternoon when absolutely nothing useful happens.

You’ll get to those things when there is time.

Except there is rarely time left over.

Responsibility matters. There are seasons when life genuinely requires us to narrow our attention to what is necessary. There are times when getting everyone fed, showing up for work, caring for someone we love, or simply getting through the day really is enough.

But sometimes the crisis ends and necessity remains the organizing principle of our lives.

We keep asking What needs to be done?

We just don’t ask very often what makes us glad to be here.

You don’t have to make everything therapeutic

One of the strange things about becoming more psychologically informed is that we can get very good at explaining why everything is good for us.

Creativity supports regulation. Nature reduces stress. Movement helps mood. Connection is important for the nervous system. Play increases flexibility. Rest helps prevent burnout.

All useful information.

But I don’t want you to have to justify everything you love by proving that it is good for you.

You don’t need to paint because creativity is good for your nervous system.

You don’t need to walk outside because research says nature reduces stress.

You don’t need to laugh with your friends because connection supports regulation.

Those things may all be true.

You are also allowed to love something without turning it into medicine.

You are allowed to do something because it is beautiful.

Because it makes you laugh.

Because you lose track of time.

Because you have always been curious about it.

Because something in you feels more awake when you do it.

Because you want to.

That is enough.

Aliveness can be easy to dismiss

The things that make us feel alive are often surprisingly ordinary.

They may not look important from the outside.

A particular kind of music. Sitting near water. Making something with your hands. A conversation that goes somewhere unexpected. Traveling somewhere new. Cooking when you don’t have to rush. Being outside. Dancing. Reading fiction. Rearranging a room. Learning something simply because you’re interested in it. Being with people around whom you don’t have to work quite so hard.

You may already know some of yours.

You may also notice how quickly you dismiss them.

That would be nice.

Maybe someday.

I don’t really have time for that.

There are more important things.

And sometimes there really are.

But when nearly everything that makes you feel alive repeatedly loses to everything that makes you useful, it may be worth noticing.

Not so you can criticize yourself for one more thing you aren’t doing well.

Just so you can see the life you’ve built clearly.

You have become very good at making sure the important things happen.

You are one of the important things.

Desire is information

For women who have spent a long time orienting around responsibility, desire can feel surprisingly unfamiliar.

What do I want?

It sounds like such a simple question.

It isn’t always.

You may be much quicker at telling me what makes sense. What is practical. What everyone else would prefer. What you can afford. What fits the schedule. What would cause the least disruption.

Those are useful considerations.

They just aren’t the same question.

Wanting something doesn’t mean you have to do it. Desire doesn’t get the final vote on every decision. We have responsibilities, commitments, limitations, other people we love, and lives that require compromise.

But desire gets to have a voice.

It tells us something.

I miss this.

I love this.

I want more of this.

I don’t want to keep spending so much of my life this way.

Something in me comes alive here.

You don’t have to obey every desire for it to be worth listening to.

And you don’t have to defend it before you’re allowed to hear it.

Healing creates room for more than healing

Earlier in this series, I wrote about play as one of the things that can become more available when our nervous systems aren’t using so much capacity to anticipate, protect, manage, perform, or simply get through.

I keep coming back to that idea.

As healing creates more capacity, there is a temptation to immediately fill that capacity with more healing.

Another book. Another insight. Another practice. Another thing to work on.

You could spend years becoming extraordinarily good at healing yourself.

But the point was never to become a full-time student of your own nervous system.

The point is to have more of your life available to you.

More room for curiosity.

More room for beauty.

More room for pleasure and friendship and creativity and faith.

More room to discover what you enjoy now—not what you used to enjoy, not what someone like you is supposed to enjoy, and not what would be the healthiest use of your free time.

What actually brings you alive?

You may not know yet.

That’s okay.

You don’t need to make a list and develop an implementation strategy. You are entirely capable of turning “be more alive” into a measurable goal with quarterly benchmarks, and I would rather not give you the opportunity.

Pay attention instead.

Notice where you come alive

Notice the moments when you become more present without trying.

When you laugh harder than you expected.

When you feel curious.

When something is beautiful enough that you stop thinking for a moment.

When you forget to check the time.

When you have an idea and want to follow it somewhere.

When you feel playful.

When you feel more like yourself.

You don’t have to analyze those moments.

You don’t have to ask what childhood wound they are healing or which part of your nervous system they are regulating.

You can simply notice: I like who I am here. I want more room for this.

That is information too.

The things that make your life yours

You have spent a lot of time becoming someone other people can depend on.

There is something beautiful about that.

Your competence matters. Your commitments matter. The people you love matter. The work you have chosen matters.

And so does the life happening underneath all of those responsibilities.

The part where you laugh.

The part where you make things.

The part where you notice beauty.

The part where you want something for no particularly impressive reason.

The part where you are curious, playful, moved, delighted, surprised.

These things are not what you get after you have finished the important parts of your life.

They are part of the important parts of your life.

Healing can give us greater capacity to carry what is difficult.

I hope it also gives us greater capacity to receive what is good.

Not because joy is therapeutic.

Not because pleasure is productive.

Not because play is another way to become healthier.

Because this is your life.

And the things that make you feel alive are not extra.

Therapy doesn’t have to be only about reducing symptoms or understanding what happened to you. It can also create room to become more present to your own preferences, desires, relationships, creativity, faith, and the life you want to be living.

I work with women in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado using EMDR, Brainspotting, and somatic, body-based approaches to trauma therapy. You can learn more about how I work or schedule a consultation.