What Do You Actually Want?

I had to lose myself completely before I could answer this question honestly.

Not the version of the answer that sounds acceptable.
Not the version that looks good.
The real one.

And when I finally sat with it — stripped of the mask, stripped of the performance, stripped of everything I thought I was supposed to want — the answer was embarrassingly simple.

I want to be loved.
I want to be happy.
I want a “partner in crime” 🙂 Someone who is all in as I am.
I want people in my life whose word means everything — because mine does.
I want to be trusted. And to trust.
I want peace.

That’s it.

No empire. No applause. No validation from strangers.

Just that.

And the moment I said it out loud — I realized something that stopped me completely:

I had spent years chasing everything except this.

Why don’t we know what we want.

Most people, if you ask them what they truly want, will give you an answer that belongs to someone else.

They want what their parents wanted for them.
They want what society told them to want.
They want what their wounds convinced them they needed — validation, control, achievement, approval.

They want the mask’s desires. Not their own.

Louise Hay spent decades working with people who were lost. And what she found at the root of almost every case was the same thing:

“Your beliefs are merely habitual thinking patterns that you learned as a child.”

The child who was told they were not enough — grows up wanting to prove they are.
The child who was abandoned — grows up wanting to control everything so no one can leave.
The child who was only loved when they performed — grows up unable to rest.

They are not chasing what they want. They are running from what they fear.

And the tragedy is — they call it ambition. They call it drive. They call it knowing what they want.

It is not. It is a wound with a direction.

What science tells us.

Abraham Maslow spent his career studying what human beings actually need — beneath all the noise, beneath all the conditioning.

He found something remarkably consistent. At the core of every human being — regardless of culture, background, or circumstance — are the same fundamental needs:

Love and belonging. To be seen. To be chosen. To matter to someone.
Safety. To trust. To rest. To know that the ground beneath you is real.
Joy. Not happiness as performance — but the quiet, steady kind that comes from being fully alive.
Authenticity. To live without the gap between who you are and who you pretend to be.

Not success. Not status. Not the accumulation of things.

These four. In some form. In every human being.

And John Bowlby’s attachment research showed that the need for secure connection is not a preference. It is biological. As fundamental as hunger. As non-negotiable as breathing.

We do not choose to need love. We are built for it.

The question is not whether you want it. The question is whether you have been honest enough to admit it.

So what do you actually want?

Strip away the mask.
Strip away the wound.
Strip away everything you were taught to perform.

What is left?

In my experience — and in the experience of every person who has done this honestly — what is left is always simple.

To love and be loved.
To trust and be trusted.
To feel safe enough to be real.
To be happy — not as a performance — but as a state of being.

That is what you want. It has always been what you wanted.

The only question is whether you have been living in a way that is honest enough to let it in.

The wound wants proof.
The soul wants peace.

The mask wants applause.
The heart wants one person who sees it.

The ego wants more.
The soul wants enough.

This is Part 1.

Part 2 comes next — because what was taken from the man and the woman are two different stories. And both of them deserve to be told fully.