"The real question is not "What am I achieving?" but "Who am I becoming as I achieve it?" That sounds lofty and poetic. In practice, it can look like standing in your kitchen asking yourself a very unpoetic question: Did I become this woman's legal representative because it was my purpose, or because it made me feel like a good person?"
"My husband met a 75-year-old woman named Sunny and her 55-year-old daughter, Joanna, outside a chicken place in Los Angeles where they were asking for money. Sunny and Joanna were both neurodiverse, trying to get by in a world that has very little patience for difference. Sunny and Jim bonded over jokes. He wrote for television. She used to send gags in to Reader's Digest. They started coming over to our house. We swam. We watched Golden Girls."
"I became Joanna's legal representative, the person the state would call about her health, her housing, her future. I did it in a moment that, if I am honest, was also a moment of private ache. I did not have children. I had made that decision, but I was not always at peace with it. I could not walk past a stroller without a little twist in the chest."
Ambition often centers on career, status, and external accomplishments rather than the deeper work of becoming. A relationship with a neurodiverse mother and daughter develops into informal family connections through shared time, humor, and care. After the mother's death, the narrator assumes legal responsibility for the daughter and confronts mixed motives rooted in desire for purpose and unresolved feelings about not having children. The experience reveals patterns of self-perception management and prompts reflection on whether acts of service arise from genuine calling or from the need to feel needed.
Read at Psychology Today
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