Since I can remember, I’ve never had energy for much. I have always had lots of fleeting interests; gardening, designing, yoga, travel, all of which have ebbed and flowed with current desire to focus and/or maintain care. I’ve also felt free to dream, to start businesses that felt inspiring, to write a book or two, to discover a passion that fueled me. And then there are those that we more like lifelong pleas, to experience what life feels like with more life force running through my veins, to get up in the morning and know what to do, and want to do it.

I particularly liked the structure of childhood because at least I could hide within the expectations of school days and assignments. Even though getting up early didn’t suit my particular biorhythms, remembering information and regurgitating it on request did me perfectly fine. And I enjoyed learning, so my educational years didn’t just keep me from getting lost, they helped awaken small pockets of interest that only new knowledge can. During my initial college years, it became very clear that having the opportunity to make my own schedule was a curse, not a gift that it should be for someone of my age. While I love the experience of timelessness, and always have, I have no idea what to do with unstructured unlimited time. Beyond the rudimentary basics of self-care, then what?

Nothingness was a black hole that I was fascinated by yet just as often succumbed to. Ironically, the experience of nothingness is something that I’ve striven for since I was a little girl and also is the very experience that knocks me down and disorients me into a near catatonic state almost every time. What I used to assume was mild depression, I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older isn’t so as much as it is a tetherlessness that isn’t sad or hopeless, it just isn’t tethered.

To make matter worse, I’m adverse to self-imposed structure aside from the comfort I felt during my scheduled school years. I don’t like being told, by myself or others, to go to a particular exercise class, to perform a morning ritual, to write for a certain number of hours per day, or to eat in a way I don’t want to eat. I’m equal parts stubborn and smart, I can poke wise holes in most regular human activity all while adamantly avoiding even trying to dig myself out of my self-made hole. Although I still tried, sometimes.

For all of my 20s, I used whatever life force I had to create a sense of normalcy where there wasn’t. I worked in jobs that I liked for a little while yet didn’t have the energy to turn into something more inspiring. I forced myself out socially with my friends in an attempt to enjoy socializing like 20-somethings do only to mostly go home early, and usually hungry, while everyone else whirled around me stomachs filled with vodka soda and hopes of going home with a cute stranger. I humored my creative desires with brainstorms on large rolls of white paper and colored markers, making outlines and flow charts with big dreams and little follow through. Even when I did, whole projects thrown into the fire months or years later, dead in the waters of nothingness before they ever really began.

Now, in my last few years of my 30s, I have different expectations of myself and my dreams, which have transformed more into hopeful friends than slave-driving dictators. I don’t expect more of myself than I know I’m willing to give; what is left is a quiet tug for more rather than roaring disappointment. Yet, I avoid the former just the same. Even with now over two decades of personal development work, and in many ways more contentment than ever, the origins of this quiet tug remain intact, having more years for more root. I thought rather naively that if I cleared out my life of certain desires, those roots would die off in a natural dissolution of man-made aspiration, but they haven’t. Thankfully, I no longer believe that accomplishment equals contentment; a rather sticky societal belief that is laden with ego and self-importance. But, I’d be wrong, and rather stupid, to believe that the desire for something-ness is fueled by ego alone. I just haven’t yet experienced it in its purer form.

But I want to, deeply. And I don’t know what will help get me there. A changed diet of nutrient rich food, a short walk every morning in the sun, a ritual cup of tea, not rising from bed until after the hours of fog lift, writing first thing, listening to my intuitive impulses? They all sound nice and they all seem useless just the same. What is my impetus for passion? What can light a fire within me that my own sense of knowing won’t distinguish with its clarity of skepticism and truth? The truth is, I’m afraid to really open myself to this inquiry after almost four decades of thinking I was in question when in reality I’ve never been willing to hear the answer. Maybe now that I know this I’m more primed to listen, or maybe the next years and decades will be more of the same in different dress.