I Thought I Knew What Made Me Happy
I didn’t mean for it to take this long to write again.
At the beginning of the year, I told myself I was going to write every week. I was excited about it, actually.
Writing had become one of the few things that helps me sort through everything that has happened over the last couple of years. It helps me make sense of my thoughts. It helps me get out of my own head. Every time I write, I feel better afterward.
And then I stopped.
Not completely. I would jot down notes in my phone. Start drafts and never finish them. Think about writing. Plan to write.
But sit down and actually publish something?
I didn’t.
I couldn’t.
What’s strange is that writing wasn’t the only thing.
The same thing was happening with text messages from friends. Ideas I wanted to pursue. Decisions that should have taken ten minutes and somehow took ten days.
I kept thinking I would snap out of it.
Then I remembered I already wrote an entire post about waiting to snap back.
So maybe that’s not the story.
Maybe the more interesting question is why I’ve been questioning so many things lately that I thought I had already figured out.
One of them is happiness.
That sounds ridiculous to admit at forty-four years old.
I genuinely thought I knew what made me happy.
And I think I was happy.
That’s what makes this so confusing.
When I look at my life, there is so much to be grateful for.
I have a family that loves and supports me.
I’ve had opportunities many people only dream about.
I’ve built a business alongside incredible partners and teammates. I’ve created something I’m genuinely proud of.
I’ve made lifelong friends in different corners of the world. I’ve worked remotely from places I never imagined I’d get to experience. I’ve walked through cities and countries that younger versions of me didn’t even know existed.
When I sit down and really think about my life, there are moments where I still can’t believe it’s mine.
So this isn’t one of those stories where I suddenly realized I was miserable.
I wasn’t.
At least I don’t think I was.
What I’m realizing is that I never spent much time questioning what happiness actually meant to me.
I think I assumed I knew.
Or maybe I assumed it would take care of itself.
I moved to the United States when I was seventeen. I started working almost immediately. Since then, there has almost always been a next thing.
Community college.
University.
Graduate school.
The next job.
The next promotion.
The company.
The growth of the company.
The next challenge.
The next goal.
For more than twenty-five years, I’ve been moving toward something.
I wasn’t drifting.
I was building.
And maybe that’s why I never stopped long enough to ask certain questions.
Not because I was avoiding them. They just didn’t seem necessary.
If you had asked me five years ago what made me happy, I probably would have given you an answer immediately.
Achievement.
Growth.
Impact.
Building something meaningful.
Creating opportunities for others.
Financial security.
Freedom.
And to be clear, I still value all of those things.
This isn’t one of those posts where I pretend success doesn’t matter.
It does.
The business matters.
The work matters.
The impact matters.
The people matter.
The life I’ve built matters.
What has changed is that I’m no longer convinced those things fully answer the question.
The last couple of years forced me to slow down in ways I never would have chosen for myself.
The business changed.
My health changed.
My energy changed.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I found myself asking questions that felt surprisingly basic.
Is this what I actually want?
Is this still what I want?
How do I want to spend my time?
What do I want the next chapter of my life to look like?
What matters to me now?
Not five years ago.
Not twenty years ago.
Now.
The truth is, I didn’t have good answers.
I still don’t.
That’s probably the part that has surprised me the most.
Not that my answers changed.
That I wasn’t sure I had ever really examined them.
I had spent so much of my life becoming someone that I rarely stopped to ask whether the life I was building was aligned with who I was becoming.
That’s uncomfortable to admit. Especially because I don’t regret the life I’ve built.
On the contrary.
I’m deeply proud of it.
I don’t regret my career.
I don’t regret building the business.
I don’t regret the sacrifices.
I don’t regret moving across the world at seventeen and taking a chance on a life I couldn’t yet imagine.
But I’ve started noticing things that occupied very little space in my thinking ten years ago.
Connection.
Companionship.
Having people around me that I don’t need to perform for.
Feeling fully seen.
Feeling present in my own life instead of constantly focused on what’s next.
Even writing.
The irony isn’t lost on me that one of the things that makes me feel most connected to myself is also one of the things I’ve struggled to do consistently.
Maybe that’s why this post took so long.
Maybe I wasn’t avoiding writing.
Maybe I was avoiding some of the questions that writing forces me to sit with.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that I’ve become a lot less certain lately.
And strangely, that doesn’t feel entirely bad.
For most of my life, I thought self-awareness meant having answers.
Knowing who you are.
Knowing what you want.
Knowing where you’re headed.
These days it feels more like paying attention.
Paying attention to what energizes me.
What drains me.
What I miss.
What I crave.
What I keep doing out of habit.
What I keep doing because I genuinely want to.
I thought I knew what made me happy.
Now I’m not so sure.
And maybe that’s not a problem to solve.
Maybe it’s an invitation to ask better questions.
For someone who has spent most of her life chasing answers, that feels unfamiliar.
And if I’m being honest, a little scary.
But it also feels alive in a way I haven’t felt in a long time.
xoxo 💋
Paola