The Life Your Soul Keeps Calling You Towards

I believe our souls are called towards something.

Not necessarily a higher purpose, but a purpose nonetheless.

A direction. A path. A journey.

A way of being. A way of living. A way of loving.

It could be travel, teaching, storytelling, healing, mothering, creating, spirituality, nature, or service - the themes and energies around each purpose as individual as each human who carries it. I think most of us have felt this at some point, an anxiety, a fear, when we are moving away from ourselves and an excitement and joy when we are moving towards ourselves. These signals are deep and real. It benefits us immensely in all ways to listen to them.

And yet we continue to live inside systems that reward the opposite. Systems that keep us tired, dull, and unfulfilled - moving through life on autopilot, talking about things that don’t interest us and dedicating our time to projects we don’t care about. We are conditioned to believe that our worth is tied to productivity - that being exhausted is admirable. That success means enduring environments that drain our light in exchange for stability, approval, and survival. We are told to be “responsible”, “realistic”, to “prepare for the future”, yet we are preparing for futures that we don’t want. We are told to follow the narrow paths laid out for us and to not stray from them, even when they don’t align with our true selves.

The older I get, the more truly baffled I become by this. Why is our success and value measured by our ability to disconnect with ourselves? As if the more we can drown our own true desires and callings, the more impressive that somehow makes us.

For a long time I felt like something was wrong with me for struggling so much. In my career, I would watch people fight to climb higher, work longer hours, take on more responsibility, chase promotions, and devote themselves entirely to careers they seemed genuinely invested in. Meanwhile, I felt ashamed by how little I cared about any of it. I convinced myself I was lazy. Unmotivated. Incompetent. Ungrateful. But underneath all of that self-imposed shame was a much simpler truth: I was deeply unfulfilled. I had been actively fighting against myself for years, and my soul suffered because of it.

The damage this caused me both mentally and physically was truly astounding. The soul knows when something is misaligned before the conscious mind does - and the body keeps the score. It shows up in anxiety, depression, burnout, exhaustion, addiction, numbness, anger, and the feeling that your life isn’t really your own. The feeling like you are floating in the middle of an ocean with land nowhere in sight and no clue which way to swim.

Therapy and medication eventually helped pull me out of this and in my opinion are invaluable resources - but the real epiphany came when I began to see how motivated I could be when I was moving towards things that excited me. I began to admire myself again. I was proud of myself again for the first time in years. I began to meet myself again, like myself again, and love myself again.

This was my proof. The soul knows what it wants. It may be buried beneath fear, conditioning, or survival, but it is not confused.. It is not lost. It knows what direction to take. And still, so many of us force ourselves to stay.

We stay because leaving terrifies us.

We stay because we are conditioned to believe self-denial is virtue.

We stay because the future feels uncertain.

We stay because we fear disappointing people.

We stay because we’ve dedicated so much time to building identities we don’t actually recognize ourselves in.

I think there is something deeper here than just career changes, travel, or astrology. I think it is the terrifying realization that there is a life your soul is continuously trying to pull you towards - but in order to grasp it you have to leave things behind. You have to leave the known for the unknown; the safe for the frightening. I think astrology became meaningful to me at a time when I really needed clarity. It gave language and context to things I had been feeling for years. The way I look at a birth chart isn’t that it is fated, but that it can reveal one’s true nature, one’s soul contract. Beginning to uncover mine made me wonder if that’s the reason I and others feel so chronically unfulfilled - so many of us live lives fundamentally disconnected from our own nature.

We are taught to override ourselves constantly.

To ignore our intuition.

To suppress our emotions.

To tolerate emotional deadness.

To value security over meaning.

To overload our nervous systems even when our bodies and minds beg for rest.

To pursue external validation rather than internal alignment.

I was able to stop shaming myself for still feeling utterly empty even after accomplishing the things I was told to want. I do think there is value in staying a course even when it becomes challenging. I’m not advocating for quitting whenever things get hard. But I do think there is a difference between the discomfort that can accompany growth and the soul-deep exhaustion that comes from living against yourself for so long.

So many of us are spiritually exhausted.

Exhausted from performing.

Exhausted from suppressing ourselves.

Exhausted from trying to milk any kind of meaning out of lives that do not fit who we are.

What is more painful? Having to admit you’ve built a life that doesn’t feel survivable for your spirit - or continuing to exist in it for its entirety?

Maybe the “cheat code” is not about productivity or success in the way society defines it. Maybe it is having the courage to stop abandoning ourselves in order to be accepted by systems that benefit from our disconnection.

I don’t know where my own path leads yet.

I am still scared.

I still have so many questions - there are so many unknowns.

I am still grieving the parts of my life that I have to leave behind.

But somewhere underneath the fear is a feeling I can no longer ignore.

The music has gotten too loud.

The light has gotten too bright.

I have to go.

If we continue to abandon ourselves we will continue to suffer. We are telling ourselves that our own purpose doesn’t matter - and our souls after a time believe it. I see this as a collective tragedy of man-kind.

Maybe this feeling exists in more of us than we realize.

Maybe the ache so many of us carry is not failure, but the pain of abandoning ourselves for so long.

Maybe freedom begins the moment we finally stop fighting the life our souls keep trying to lead us toward.