How do I know what I actually want?

Knowing what you actually want can be difficult when every desire immediately has to pass a test. Is it sensible? Can you afford it? Will you be any good? What will other people think?

Sometimes you’re unsure because you need more experience before you can know. Sometimes a small answer has already appeared, but you’ve started judging it before you’ve had a chance to explore it.

A useful place to begin is noticing what draws your attention—and what happens next.

There’s what you want, what you think you should want, what would make sense given the life you already have, and what you’re prepared to admit to wanting. These can become tangled, especially when other people’s expectations have been part of your decisions for a long time.

Or perhaps you’ve been busy, tired, attending to everything that needs you. There hasn’t been much room to notice what you might enjoy, miss or feel curious about.

You don’t have to produce a vision for your whole life to begin finding your way into this question.

What happens when you want something?

Think about the last time you felt drawn towards something. It might have been an idea for a painting, a subject you wanted to study, or a different way of spending your days.

What happened after that first moment of interest?

Perhaps you immediately turned it into a practical problem. You’d like to write, so you start researching how people make money from writing. You’re curious about a different kind of life, so you try to work out the entire route from here to there. You want to make something, but before you’ve begun, you’re imagining the people who might find it embarrassing.

These concerns can be real. Money matters. Other people matter. Your decisions have consequences.

But when every small desire has to answer for its entire future, it becomes difficult to hear much at all.

Wanting to spend an afternoon painting doesn’t yet tell you whether you should change careers. Being curious about something doesn’t commit you to pursuing it forever. You can give an interest some attention before deciding what place it might have in your life.

That room matters when you’re trying to make work of your own. An idea often arrives before you can explain why it interests you. Spending time with it may be how you discover what’s there.

Which part of the possibility appeals to you?

It can also help to look more closely at what you’re wanting.

Perhaps you’re drawn to the activity itself: writing sentences, working with colour, making something with your hands. Perhaps you’re longing for the freedom you associate with it, or the recognition, or the sense of having something that belongs to you.

There might be several desires inside the same imagined future.

This is somewhere tarot can help us look. The Seven of Cups, for example, shows a figure facing an array of cups, each containing a different vision. As an image, it offers a way to sit with possibility, attraction and choice.

You might use it to ask:

Which possibility draws me, and which one do I like the idea of being seen to choose?

Perhaps one would sound impressive if you told someone about it, but the daily reality holds little interest. Perhaps another looks ordinary from the outside, yet you could happily lose hours in it.

You might also ask: What am I hoping this possibility will give me?

If the answer is freedom, belonging or permission to take yourself seriously, that’s worth hearing. It may help you understand why a particular ambition has such a hold on you—and open up other ways of attending to that desire.

The card doesn’t decide what you want. It gives you something to respond to, so you can approach a familiar question from a different angle.

Give a small desire some room

Choose one thing you’ve felt drawn towards recently, before asking whether it’s useful or where it might lead.

A colour. A subject you keep reading about. A wish to work with your hands. A longing for more quiet, or more company.

Then ask:

What would give me a little more contact with this?

You might get the paints out, read a few pages, have a conversation, or leave an evening free and see what you reach for. Choose something small enough to fit into the life you have.

Pay attention to the experience itself. Do you enjoy being there? Does it become more interesting once you begin? Do you find yourself wanting to return?

You don’t need to feel immediately confident or absorbed. Something can matter to you and still feel awkward at first, especially if you haven’t let yourself do it for a long time. Give yourself enough room to experience more than the discomfort of beginning.

You may discover that the imagined version appealed more than the reality. That’s useful too. You’ve learned something through contact that you couldn’t learn by continuing to think about it.

You’re allowed to learn what you want

There can be a lot of pressure to know yourself conclusively, as though somewhere inside you is a finished plan waiting to be uncovered.

But you also come to know yourself through living. You try things, develop attachments, discover preferences and change your mind. Something that once mattered deeply can stop fitting. Something you barely noticed can become central.

Changing doesn’t make an earlier desire false. It means you have more experience now, and perhaps something different to respond to.

For now, you might have one small answer: something you want to make, explore or have more of in your days. Let that be enough to begin. Give it some room, and see what you learn.

Invisible Strings Studio is a space for artists exploring their own work and ways of living. Through tarot, reflection and creative practice, we make room to look more deeply at questions like this—and discover what they open up in your life.