We’re not attracted to what we want. We’re attracted to what we know.

We run away from what we want, hoping that what we know will eventually become what we want.

Such is the complexity of being human.

What is the Know? Our family, our heritage, our first identity. Our coping mechanisms, the way our nervous system learned to keep us safe, everything we understood in order to be loved, seen, and heard. The Know is our heritage, our past, our childhood, the first container, the first system we ever belonged to.

Adolescence is the passage between Know and Want. It goes best when our parents can hold the walls steady while we move through it, and that takes real strength on their part.

When that happens, the Want phase comes more easily. When it doesn't, you're left tossed between Know and Want, and that tension follows you into adulthood. 

The Want is you. Your identity, your own definition of life, love, health, wealth. It's your essence, your alignment, the understanding that your Want might unsettle your family, might even estrange you from it, but that this may be the only real path to growing up. It means accepting that you are not here to please your parents, that you owe them nothing, that you can hold your limitations as a son or daughter and still keep reaching for what you want.

The Know is familiar, even when it's hell. We know how to survive it,  there's no surprise left in it. The Want is different. We don't know how to hold it, because it's new: falling for someone outside your family's environment, religion, or culture; choosing a man who isn't violent like your father, but safe; choosing a country your homeland once went to war with; choosing peace in your relationship when your family's history has only ever known the war of the roses.

The list goes on. And often, you don't need to break the whole pattern, you just need to make it yours. That's the moment you know you're finally living your own life, and no one else's.

So maybe what you want is hiding inside that discomfort. It's unfamiliar, it doesn't look like what you imagined marrying, loving, building a life with, but maybe it's better than the familiar ever was.

So why not try it this summer.

With love,
Marine Sélénée