The yearning for a life that feels like my own didn't stop when I found it - it has deepened.
Life-Leadership in action, and what change is asking of me right now.
So, I am on the precipice of great change.
Now this is not the kind of sentence I would normally put into the public space, especially when I have nothing concrete to back it up with.
But it's something I've been writing about a lot in my daily journaling practice - it's been palpable for a few months now, and I've had enough cycles of this circling, changing feeling to know it's so very, very real 😮💨.
I thought sharing the inner workings of this in real time might be helpful - for anyone else building a life that feels like their own, or anyone who can sense change coming.
Also - there's a real privilege in being able to go looking for a life that feels like your own. I know that, and I don't take it lightly. In the last months, it has dawned on me that despite the ups and downs, despite what I do and don't have, I believe that my life does feel like my own - like I belong in it, like the jacket fits, like I'm making decisions that feel like… me. I've worked pretty hard for this, so it's a cool experience. But as the headline suggests, I'm now learning that it's not a 'done and dusted' situation - life never is right - but the deepening, the yearning for a well-lived life, continues in new ways.
That's what I'll talk about today.
A moment for the word yearning.
Yearning is different from wanting.
Wanting is something you can name, plan for, list. I've had plenty of that - jobs, titles, salaries, experiences, places. There are plenty of things that I have wanted and not received. All have their place.
Yearning is the feeling underneath the wanting, a persistent, magnetic pull toward something you can sense but not yet see. There is a German word for it - Sehnsucht. Often translated as longing, it means something deeper. An ache toward something not fully known, a sense of incompleteness that quietly points the way forward.
It is not always a comfortable feeling, but gosh, it certainly is a directional one.
When I reflect back on the moments where the yearning completely overrode everything else, especially anything remotely rational, I recall that at the time it was always fuzzy. Never upfront, like "I yearn for adventure" or "I yearn for love." Just a following of the yearning with insatiable trust, and a series of intense feelings of love for life and humanity, and a knowing that I had to move towards it.
It's only ever been in hindsight that I can piece it together clearly. Always the way, right.
This, to me, is part of what life-leadership looks like in practice. Not a structure or a system, but part of an ongoing practice of following the pull, however unclear it is, and trusting that your life knows the way even when you don't.
It's taken me years to understand that this is part of my own Life-Leadership practice.
That the following is also part of the leading.
It was real when I knew there was a love out there for me that was quite literally calling me. In the months leading up to meeting my now husband Ingo, I had written about him because I could practically feel his presence around me. I missed him before I even knew he existed, and the yearning for him was visceral. When I first saw him and spent time with him, that yearning was met. He simply stepped into the space that had been created for him. The journal entries in the twelve months leading up to meeting him appeared slightly unhinged at the time, but are rather prophetic now.
It was real when I knew there was adventure that called me instead of my corporate job - I yearned for space to be me. It's a lot more common now, but eight years ago it was pretty bold. I pulled the thread, took the year off, and that started the biggest pivot of my life. Walking the Camino, meeting Ingo, solo travel, and eventually moving to Germany.
It was real when I knew I had to offer my self-discovery creation to the world. That it had moved well beyond being a phenomenal support for shaping my own life. The yearning was like an obsession, a pull I couldn't ignore. A power greater than me.
It was real when I knew I had to overcome my fear of honest self-expression. Publicly. That despite really, really, really not wanting to be on social media talking about me, my life, my beliefs and my experiences, I simply had to do it to overcome a set of fears I'd been carrying for too long. Fear of failure, fear of being misunderstood, fear of not being good enough, fear of judgement. I overcame them and it's something I'm very proud of.
Which brings me to now.
The yearning is back. It's here. Again. New, differently.
It's both as clear as day and as cloudy as mud, the same as every other time. But it feels bigger this time around, like the other episodes of yearning have been the practice runs.
And I will be honest - it's really unnerving me. The lived experience of tending to the yearning, and standing on the precipice of change, is asking a lot of me. Layer on being in a foreign country, rebuilding my life at this new post-immigration-debacle chapter, and missing familiarity, family and home. I'm a touch tired.
This time around, this cycle of change and growth is very clearly, very strongly relating to my career. Not just a job or a vocation - it's more about impact, fulfilment, success, and me being the most me I've ever been in my work. That last part is the new part to all this.
So I'm at a crossroads, technically a crossroads of the best kind - not the kind where I don't know which path to take, but the kind where there are several open, and I'm genuinely happy with any of them. I'm not sitting still waiting for an answer either. I'm actively working several threads at once, following what pulls me without needing to know yet which one it's for.
That not-knowing used to unsettle me completely. Now I recognise it as Life-Leadership doing exactly what it's meant to - following the yearning rather than trying to out-plan it.
If you're in a season like this too - standing between a few open doors, sensing more than one pull and no clear answer yet - that discomfort doesn't mean you're doing it wrong.
It might be the most directional sign available to you, that you're actually on the right track.
None of what is swirling around me may be the exact thing the yearning is leading me towards. I see them more as signals. Something might be there, or it might not be, and increasingly, I'm at peace with not needing to control which.
Every cycle of yearning I've navigated has led in the same direction - deeper. Deeper into myself, deeper into my relationships, deeper into a life that feels genuinely connected. To who I am, to the people I love, to something larger than the daily logistics of being alive. That depth is where meaning lives. And meaning, I've found, is what makes everything else make sense.
I trust the yearning completely. I've navigated enough cycles to know it doesn't swing around all that often, and that when it does, you have to know how to recognise it, and take it seriously when you do.
Oprah talks about how life first sends you whispers. Small nudges, quiet signs, a persistent sense that something needs your attention. If you don't listen, the whispers get louder. A pebble, a stone, a brick. And if you're still not paying attention, the wall comes down. I have lived on both sides of this, and the cycles where I caught the whisper early and followed it, and the ones where I needed the brick.
The cost of not listening isn't always dramatic though. Sometimes it's just a long, slow drift away from yourself and that, in many ways, is the hardest version of all.
What is interesting about yearning is how yours presents.
This is the most important part of this essay.
This is your life's path talking to you, guiding you.
Are you listening? Can you listen?
What it feels like, in case you're wondering if you might be in it:
An unease you can't quite locate.
Anticipation with no clear object.
A dissatisfaction you feel vaguely guilty about because nothing is technically wrong.
Fractured energy, like a pinball that keeps bouncing, unable to find its centre.
Wearing a jacket that no longer fits, but you can't get it off.
It is not always a peaceful feeling, it is not supposed to be. Sadly.
What helps, and I say this from experience rather than prescription, is not passivity. The yearning is an active energetic, and it responds to action. Not necessarily the right action, not necessarily action that goes anywhere. Just SOME movement towards different things. And notice, what presents, unfolds, makes you feel something - the signals are very important.
The yearning has its own intelligence. You don't have to understand it to begin moving with it.
It's as though yearning is a learnt behaviour, and once you know it - once you hear, feel, sense how it moves through your life - it's difficult to ignore. A full sensory system that communicates in beautiful ways, powerfully - happening behind the scenes, of course.
Forget my yearnings, yours will look completely different to mine. Perhaps it has led you toward parenthood, or putting down roots, or something seemingly ordinary-looking from the outside and completely extraordinary from the inside.
A life that feels like our own is built by following these moments of yearning, to the best of our ability and within the constructs of our lives at any given moment. My yearnings led me to some pretty extreme measures and drastic changes, but I took every one of them while trembling, without knowing what was on the other side, worrying if they would become moments I would regret. The yearning overrode it all.
I now trust that feeling more than anything. It's never been wrong.
It's as though there is no choice.
And now, here I am. Uncomfortable, shaky, excited, curious. Not knowing what is on the other side of anything, or when this moment of change will arrive and how. Will it knock politely at the door and invite me in, or will it push me off an edge I can't see coming? Will I be brave enough to allow the change to sweep through my life?
Will I listen to the yearning like I have done in the past, or might I not? I would like to hope I would. But I'm also tired of leaps of faith and disrupting my life 😆.
Perhaps this yearning will be completely different to anything before it, and rather than disrupt my life, will complete it somehow.
I spend time wondering if all the decisions I've made to get to this point have been the worst mistakes of my life, or the bravest choices that have only ever been right for me and therefore perfection.
That is for no one else to decide, which is the coolest thing about all of this. I used to need others to understand my choices. After enough cycles through the yearning, I realised that is both impossible and unnecessary.
This time around I know I'm taking it seriously. This yearning is no joke. I've learned that enough times. The cloudiness is part of it. The nerves and anticipation anxiety are probably the biggest signal of all. One needs rest, and to keep their energy and reserves healthy and well.
And to keep taking aligned steps forward, more than ever.
If you're someone whose life has always felt like your own, how wonderful. And if lately you've sensed some yearning for something else and it's quietly freaking you out, my inbox is always open. And if you're someone who knows the yearning well, I'd genuinely love to know what it has led to in your life.
Tell me in the comments.
Wherever you are, I hope you will come with me, I genuinely don't know what is next.
Let's see what unfolds together.
Onwards, Alice
