Whose Goals Are These Anyway?

I’m going to tell you something I haven’t talked about much. For about a year, maybe longer if I’m really being honest, I seriously considered applying to law school.

I took a practice LSAT. I sat down with that test and I didn’t understand the questions. Not some of them. Most of them. It became very clear, very quickly, that this was not my skillset. And on some level, I think I knew that going in.

So why did I do it?

Because I wanted to prove something. To everyone around me, yes, but mostly to myself. I wanted a title. I wanted the kind of credential that makes people at a dinner table nod and say “Oh, that’s impressive.”

I used to imagine it: someone asking me what I do and being able to say, “I’m a lawyer.” Just those three words. The way they would land. The way people’s faces would shift. I’d been doing therapy work, sitting with people in some of the most real moments of their lives, and somewhere inside me there was a voice saying that wasn’t enough. That I wasn’t enough. That without letters after my name, without something more legible to the outside world, I didn’t quite count.

I never applied. But I spent a long time circling that decision, and what I’ve come to understand is that it had almost nothing to do with law and almost everything to do with my self-worth.

That’s the thing about borrowed goals. They don’t feel borrowed. They feel urgent. They feel like yours.

And here’s what makes this so complicated: it’s not just your career. It’s everything. It’s the relationships we stay in because leaving them would mean disappointing people. It’s the version of daughter, mother, or wife we perform because that’s what society and our community expects of us.

We absorb all of it. From the time we are small, we are learning not just what to do, but who to become. We learn which versions of ourselves get applause and which are ignored or silenced. Which choices make the people we love proud and which ones make the room go uncomfortable. And we are smart, adaptive creatures, so we adjust. We become the version that works. We get very, very good at it.

Then one day, sometimes decades later, we look up and realize we are exhausted from a performance we don’t remember auditioning for.

I see this constantly in my work. Someone finally lands the thing: the career, the relationship, the milestones they’ve been chasing. And instead of the deep relief they expected, there’s just flatness. Perhaps a little relief, but not fullness. And they can’t figure out why because they did everything right. They worked so hard. They wanted this.

But did they really? Or did they want the version of themselves that having this would create in other people’s eyes?

There is a difference between what we genuinely want and what we’ve been conditioned to want. And we are extraordinarily good at confusing the two.

But here is the question that keeps me up at night, and I think it might be the most honest question in this whole conversation: after years, sometimes a lifetime, of being conditioned to want what we’ve been told to want, how do we even know what’s actually ours? How do we find our real goals when they’ve been buried under so many layers of expectation, approval, fear, and belonging? What does your own voice even sound like when you’ve been listening to everyone else’s for so long?

I don’t think there’s a clean answer. But I do think there are clues.

The first clue is in your body. Not your mind. Your mind is very good at rationalizing borrowed goals and making them feel like yours. But the body keeps score. There’s a particular kind of tiredness that comes from living out of alignment, not the tiredness of working hard toward something real, but a flat, low-grade exhaustion that doesn’t lift even when things are going well. That tiredness is telling you something. So is your restlessness. So is the feeling of performing your own life rather than living it.

The second clue is envy. We don’t talk about this enough, but envy is one of the most useful emotions we have when we’re willing to be honest about it. When you feel that particular sting of watching someone else’s life and happiness, pay attention. You’re usually not envying their circumstances. You’re envying their freedom. The freedom to want what they want without apologizing for it. The freedom to build a life that looks like them.

The third clue is what you keep coming back to in the quiet. Not the goals you announce, not the plans you make out loud, but the things you think about when no one is watching. The version of your life you imagine in the small, private moments before you talk yourself out of it. That thing. That’s closer to the truth than almost anything else.

Here’s what it took me a long time to understand about my own law school spiral: I wasn’t actually chasing a goal. I was chasing relief. Relief from the feeling that what I was already doing wasn’t enough. And relief and fulfillment are not the same thing. Relief is the release of pressure. Fulfillment is something quieter and more solid. It’s the feeling of being in the right place, doing the right thing and for reasons that are genuinely yours.

It wasn’t until I fully leaned into being a therapist, not as a consolation prize, not as the thing I was doing while I figured out something better, but as the actual thing, the real thing, the work I was genuinely built for, that everything started to shift. My business started to grow. Not because I had figured out some strategy, but because I had finally stopped apologizing for what I do and started believing in it.

You cannot build something real on a foundation of someone else’s definition of success. It will look fine on the outside and feel unstable underneath, always.

Coming back to yourself after years of conditioning is not a dramatic moment. It doesn’t happen in one conversation or one realization. It’s slower and quieter than that. It’s pausing before you agree to do something to ask yourself if you really want to do it or if it’s just to avoid the discomfort of saying no. It’s noticing which choices fill you up and which ones leave you feeling drained and hollow even when they look impressive. It’s being willing to sit with not knowing for a while, because when you’ve been navigating by someone else’s compass for a long time, there is always a feeling of disorientation before your own sense of direction starts to kick in.

That disorientation is not a sign that you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign that something real is happening.

So I want to ask you, and I want you to actually sit with this: Whose goals are you chasing right now? Not the ones you say out loud, but the ones underneath. Where did they come from? Are they yours because you chose them, examined them, held them up to the light and said yes, this is mine? Or are they yours because you inherited them and never thought to question it?

What would you want if no one was watching? What would you build if it didn’t need to impress anyone? What would your life look like if the only person whose approval you were working toward was your own?

I almost went to law school. I would have been miserable. I would have been someone else’s idea of accomplished and my own idea of lost.

Instead, I became a therapist who actually believes in the work. And the moment I stopped needing it to look like something else to count, that’s when it finally did. n

Tamara Gestetner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and certified mediator based in Cedarhurst who helps individuals and couples navigate relationships, career questions, and the challenges people face in everyday life. She is also the host of the podcast Talk2Tamara. Readers are welcome to submit questions or topics they would like addressed in future columns. Tamara can be reached at TamaraGestetner.com, [email protected], or 646-239-5686.