You still have a purpose.

In my Ideal Life, I am a person who…

That is the question.

When I had my first child, I decided to stop working. I was thirty-eight years old. I had been working for all of my adult life. I thought that investing in this little life would be a fulfilling second career.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Once the initial tornado of babyhood and toddlerhood had passed, after my second baby was born exactly seventeen months after the first one was born, I found that I had lost all sense of perspective, purpose or vision for my own life.

For someone who has always been self-motivated, this was a fate worse than death.

The little prompt landed on my heart like a butterfly on a flower: In my Ideal Life, I am a person who…

In my Ideal Life I am a person who doesn’t get irritated with her children
In my Ideal Life, I am a person who is organized
In my Ideal Life, I am a person who makes her bed every single day.

In my Ideal Life, I am a person who…

It was really, really hard to go from being a professional, from being a person who was making progress everyday, helping others make progress every day, who was, visibly making magic every day, because I had a vision and a plan and the determination to make things happen… It was so hard to go from that person, to then finding myself vacuuming up Rice Krispies and doing a never-ending pile of laundry.

Somewhere along the line, I lost my vision. Not necessarily the vision for my family, or the work that needed to be done to keep our family working smoothly. No, I lost my own sense of purpose. I lost my identity. I lost my sense of self.

Although I will not blame all of my post-partum depression on this loss of vision and loss of identity, it certainly didn’t help when hormones kicked in and the constant, numbing urgency of caring for the family kicked in.

Does this sound familiar? Even without suffering from post-partum depression, you can still feel like you have lost your purpose and your sense of self. It can happen when we change professions. When we move from one place to another. When we retire. When a relationship ends. When we change schools.

These changes require adaptation. Adaptation takes time the time it takes. But when time has done its work, we can end up flailing, having lost our vision for our own lives, having lost our sense of purpose.

Let me just say this: There is a purpose for your life.

While you may not see it today, while it may feel far, far, far removed from your current circumstances, current lifestyle, current configuration, there is a reason for you to be on this planet.

In the book of Proverbs, it says, “Without vision the people perish.”

You don’t want to perish, do you? Well. Neither do I. That is why I started to pursue my Ideal Life, and so should you

All this week, we are going to return to the nuts and bolts of The Ideal Life Exercise: The why, the when, the how and a few detours and caveats along the way.