Things I Like: Starting Over When You’ve Lost Your Preferences

A two-word assignment, and the page still white.

I sat down to write a list of things I like and got to two.

I am a list person. That is not a personality quirk, it is closer to an operating system. There are lists for the week and lists for the month and a list of the lists. I have never once been defeated by a piece of paper.

So I wrote the heading the way I would write an assignment for a student. Clear. Unambiguous. Two words.

Things I like.

And then I sat there.

I want to be precise about what happened next, because it was not sadness and it was not a blank mind. It was more like reaching for a light switch on a wall that turned out not to have one.

I could have filled a page in ninety seconds with other things.

Every medication my daughter has ever taken, in order, with dosages. The dates of three court filings. What my students need from me in the first eleven minutes of a period. My father's coffee order, eighteen years after the last time I placed it. Everyone's schedule, everyone's preferences, everyone's tells.

Ask me what anyone else needs and I am encyclopedic.

Ask me what I like and the room goes quiet.

I wrote photography, because I had proof. Actual recent proof, a morning I had enjoyed with a camera, which I put down as evidence in my own favor.

Then I wrote my daughter's name.

And then I crossed it out. A daughter is not an interest. You cannot list a human being under things I like, and the fact that she was where my hand went second was not a warm maternal moment. It was the finding.

Two items and an incomplete. A whole life, and most of the page still white.

Here is the part I would like to save somebody else.

I assumed that meant something was wrong with me. It is the obvious conclusion. A woman with a doctorate in how people work sitting at her own kitchen table failing a two-word assignment looks a great deal like a woman with a problem.

It was not a problem. It was atrophy.

Preferences are a muscle. Nobody tells you that. You use it or it thins, and for about twenty years I had no operational use for it whatsoever. What I like was not a relevant input to any decision I was making. There were schedules to hold and a case to survive and a child to keep intact, and inside that, a preference is not a preference, it is a delay.

So the muscle went quiet, the way any unused muscle goes quiet, without announcement and without pain.

And then the emergencies ended, and somebody, eventually me, asked the question, and there was nothing there to answer with.

I think this is the actual shape of starting over, and it is nothing like the version that gets sold.

The version that gets sold says your passion is in there somewhere, waiting, and the work is to rediscover it. Light some candles. Remember who you were at twenty-two. She is still in there.

She is not still in there. I looked.

The woman at twenty-two had different knees and different opinions and no idea what was coming, and using her as a map is how you end up disappointed twice. What is in there is capacity, not content. There is room, and there is nothing in the room, and the nothing is not a failure. It is a vacancy.

So the page was the project.

Not the answers on the page. The page itself. I stopped treating a short list as evidence of a small life and started treating it as a starting inventory, which is a completely different document even though the words on it are identical.

Two things followed from that, and neither is inspiring.

The first is that I had to try things I had no feelings about. That is the whole method. You cannot think your way to a preference, because a preference is data and you do not have any yet. I tried things that sounded fine. Not thrilling. Fine.

The second is that I had to be allowed to stop.

That one took longer, because I am a finisher, and I had spent decades in situations where quitting was not available as a category. But an inventory needs both columns. A thing tried and abandoned is not a failed experiment, it is a completed one, and the woman who can put something down after eight weeks is a woman with a life rather than a woman with a sentence.

Quitting turns out to be something people with lives do all the time. I had genuinely forgotten.

FOR YOU

The framework here is self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. It describes three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy does not mean independence or doing as you please. It means acting from something that feels like your own rather than from obligation or pressure.

I spent four years inside this literature for my doctoral work, studying it in working mothers specifically, which is why the empty page is worth taking seriously rather than laughing off. A life can be extremely full of competence and relatedness, a woman can be needed constantly and good at everything asked of her, and still be running with one of the three at close to zero for years at a time. It does not show up as a crisis. It shows up as a blank page and a mild sense that the question was unfair.

The list is longer now. Not long. Longer.

Some of what is on it surprised me and some of it is faintly embarrassing and one item I have added and removed four times, which I have decided is also information.

If you are somewhere in this, and you have just discovered that you cannot answer a two-word question about your own life, I want to say the useful thing rather than the kind thing.

Nothing has been lost. Something has gone unused.

You did not misplace yourself. You spent a very long time in a situation where what you wanted was not a usable input, and you adapted correctly, and the adaptation outlasted the situation, which is what adaptations do.

The page is not a verdict.

Write the two things. Leave the rest white. Come back to it.