The Story We Tell Ourselves

There is a story many of us carry without ever consciously choosing it.

It tells us that one day, if we pay enough attention, ask ourselves the right questions and gather enough courage, we will discover what we are here to do. The story promises a moment of recognition. A moment when life suddenly makes sense because we finally understand our purpose.

I don't know where this story comes from. Perhaps it is cultural. Perhaps it is religious. Perhaps it is simply human. Whatever its origin, I realise now that it has quietly shaped the way I have looked at my own life for years.

I never expected purpose to be easy. But I did expect it to feel unmistakable. That expectation stayed with me when I spent a week at a Presencing Programme with the Presencing Institute. The invitation was beautifully simple: sit with two questions. Who am I? and What is mine to do?

Looking back, I find it almost amusing that I thought those questions were asking me to look ahead.

As though the answer was still waiting for me somewhere in the future.

As though purpose was something that had not yet begun.

When I returned home, I opened the notebook I had kept during the week. It wasn't particularly impressive. A few drawings. Fragments of conversations. Sentences that only made sense because I remembered the moment in which they had been written.

One sentence caught my attention.

"I don't need to invent new prototypes. I'm already living them."

It was such an ordinary observation that I almost skipped over it. Yet the more I thought about it, the more unsettling it became. If that sentence was true, then it challenged an assumption I hadn't realised I was making.

Perhaps I had never really been searching for my purpose.

Perhaps I had been searching for the feeling that I imagined purpose would bring.

Those are not the same thing. One asks whether I am doing the work I am called to do. The other asks whether that work feels sufficiently meaningful, sufficiently exceptional, sufficiently important.

Somewhere along the way, I had unconsciously merged the two.

I had assumed that if I was truly living my purpose, I would know. Not intellectually, but emotionally. I imagined a persistent sense of certainty. A feeling of alignment. Maybe even the quiet confidence that I was making a meaningful difference.

Instead, I found something that felt surprisingly familiar.

Purpose, if I dare call it that, feels remarkably similar to every other meaningful commitment in life.

It is repetitive.

It asks for patience.

It involves uncertainty.

Some days it is deeply energising.

Other days it is simply work.

Sometimes it feels profoundly significant.

Sometimes it feels almost invisible.

That realisation brought me an unexpected sense of peace.

If I am already walking the path, I no longer need to keep looking over the horizon for a more important one. There is something deeply liberating about that.

But there was another emotion too. One I had not anticipated.

I felt grief.

Not because I had discovered that my life lacked purpose. Quite the opposite. I felt grief because I realised I had to let go of the fantasy that purpose would feel extraordinary.

I wonder whether many of us are carrying that same fantasy.

Perhaps that is why we keep searching.

Not because our lives lack meaning, but because they do not resemble the stories we have been told about meaning.

We confuse purpose with intensity.

With visibility.

With impact.

With certainty.

We imagine that living our purpose should feel different from living an ordinary life.

What if that expectation is precisely what prevents us from recognising it?

What if purpose is not the extraordinary life waiting for us somewhere in the future?

What if it is simply the pattern that has quietly revealed itself through the choices we keep making, the people we keep finding, the conversations we keep returning to and the work that continues to ask for our attention?

I don't know whether that is true.

I only know that, for the first time in years, I no longer feel the same urgency to find my purpose.

Instead, I find myself becoming curious about a different question.

What if the real work is not to discover who we are, but to trust who we have been becoming all along?