You Need To Change How You Set Goals
If you want to transform your life, alter your process
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been at war with goals. I grew up holding fast to the ones my parents provided for me (working a 9–5, getting married, having kids) to the point that I didn’t even realize there were other ways to do things. Each one of the goals I followed came with a subset of exhausting smaller goals and modest, yet painful, sacrifices. By my college graduation, I was exhausted. I was meeting the goals I’d adopted from my parents, but I wasn’t happy.
To make things harder, by senior year, I’d realized that I was a lesbian. In 2009, this meant that not only could I not get married, but I also had to keep my sexuality hidden or risk losing my apartment and my job. I struggled under the weight of my secret and wondered how I could possibly achieve a goal when the law rendered it nearly impossible. Eventually, I realized that I couldn’t. And that realization freed me.
Living in Virginia, the truth was I couldn’t legally marry and I might struggle to adopt children. Those goals crumbled and, though I grieved them, losing them opened space for me to define new goals completely outside of the framework of what I’d been taught to aim for. I wanted to find love, security, and a queer community. So I took out a credit card, quit…
