What I’d Tell My Younger Self About Purpose (And Why You Need to Hear It Too)
The Intersection of Wounds, Gifts, and the Call You Keep Ignoring
I sat across from my young client earlier this week, as the late morning light shifted across the room. I’ve known her since she was fourteen, and she is now coming up on her twenty-third birthday—bright, capable, and objectively talented. She holds a depth and a wisdom well beyond her years. Yet, the predominant emotion in the room wasn’t hope; it was a heavy, almost suffocating paralysis. Like so many of her peers, she isn’t suffering from a lack of options, but from an excess of them.
We have spent months exploring the divergence between her life and the perception of the defined paths of others. In our most recent session, the weight of this freedom finally crested. She confessed that the pressure to make the singular “right” choice that will define her future feels less like liberation and more like an imminent catastrophe. It was this conversation — witnessing the gap between her immense potential and her paralyzing fear of inadequacy — that compelled me to finish this piece on purpose. It’s easier for me at the age of almost fifty, to see all the possibilities inherent in my young client. She, like me at that age needs an anchor, and she is far from alone.
“Listen up, kid.”
I’m now talking to the version of me at twenty-something, who also thought he had to figure out his entire life by thirty. The one who lay awake at night wondering if he was on the “right path,” whatever the hell that meant. The one who treated purpose like it was a treasure map with a big red X, and if he just looked hard enough, worked hard enough, worried hard enough, he’d find it.
I’d grab that younger version of myself by the shoulders and say: You’re asking the wrong question.
The Tyranny of “Finding Your Purpose”
The self-help industrial complex has done a good job of convincing us that purpose is something you discover, like buried treasure or your “one true soulmate”. That one day you’ll have an epiphany, the clouds will part, angels will sing, and suddenly you’ll know exactly what you’re meant to do with your life.
It’s complete garbage.
Too many have spent too much time chasing this fantasy. I switched many “careers”. I moved cities. I did the soul-searching, the vision boards, the meditation retreats. And you know what I found? More confusion, more anxiety, and a creeping sense that everyone else had figured out something I was missing.
Because purpose isn’t “found”. It’s remembered. It’s already seeded within you, waiting to be watered by your lived experience.
What the Ancient Stories and Modern Research Both Tell Us
The mythologist Michael Meade, and one of my early mentors, speaks of something he calls the “genius within,” and it’s one of the most important ideas I’ve encountered in all my years of study. Not genius as in “smart.” Genius in the ancient Roman sense: the resident spirit of your soul that gives you your unique way of being and perceiving life. And before you roll your eyes and dismiss this as New Age nonsense, stay with me. Because this ancient understanding aligns perfectly with what contemporary psychology has discovered about human thriving.
William Damon at Stanford defines purpose as a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something meaningful to yourself and consequential for the world beyond yourself. Carol Ryff’s decades of research on psychological well-being consistently shows that having a sense of purpose is one of six core dimensions of living well. But purpose isn’t just something you construct from scratch. It’s something planted in you before you arrived, something trying to unfold through you if you’ll just get out of your own way long enough to let it.
The ancient Greeks called it telos, this inner aim that’s not just about goals but about fulfillment, about becoming what you already are in potential. Viktor Frankl, who wrote the book “Man’s Search for Meaning” understood this. He survived Auschwitz partly because he held onto a sense of meaning. He said we must discover meaning in each moment, in each situation. Not impose it. Discover it. Because it’s already there.
The Wound and the Gift
Here’s where psychology and ancient wisdom and spirituality collide in a way that’ll knock you sideways if you let it: Your purpose lives closest to your deepest wounds.
Jung knew it. Meade teaches it through story after story from cultures around the world. The genius hides behind the wound. The thing you most want to run from often contains the seeds of what you’re here to offer.
I’d tell my younger self this: Those parts of your story you’re ashamed of? The failures, the rejections, the times you fell apart? That’s not debris to be cleaned up before you can get on with your “real” purpose. That IS the material of your purpose. The wound is the entrance point to your genius.
Modern culture has tried to convince us we enter the world empty, that we’re blank slates to be written on by parents, teachers, employers, society. This is one of the most dangerous ideas circulating today. If we come in empty, then anyone can fill us up with whatever serves them. But if we arrive already carrying something essential, already woven with a particular pattern trying to emerge, then we become difficult to manipulate. We have an inner authority that can’t be easily compromised.
In my practice, I’ve watched this play out hundreds of times. The person who survived childhood neglect becomes the therapist who can sit with abandoned clients in a way no textbook could teach. The one who battled addiction understands recovery from the inside out. The person whose family rejected their true self becomes the fiercest advocate for others finding authentic expression.
The Two Stories Always Running
Mythology teaches us that there are always two stories happening simultaneously: the story of the world and the story of the individual soul in the world. Most of us get trapped in only the horizontal story, the surface narrative of careers and accomplishments and what everyone else can see. But the vertical story, the one that descends into depth, into soul, that’s where purpose actually lives.
Our culture has become flat. We’re all connected all the time through screens, but it’s a shallow connection. We’ve lost “vertical imagination,” the capacity to see beyond the literal surface of things and discern the deeper patterns trying to emerge.
Psychologists call it interoception, the ability to sense what’s happening in your internal landscape. The mystics call it listening to the soul. Either way, purpose requires you to turn your attention inward, to develop what feels increasingly countercultural: the ability to be still enough to hear what’s trying to speak through you.
The Three Lies I Believed
Lie #1: Your purpose should be obvious by now.
At twenty-five, I thought something was wrong with me because I hadn’t yet discovered my grand calling. What I didn’t understand is that purpose often awakens through crisis, through the very times when we feel most lost. There’s something deep in the human soul that awakens when things fall apart. The breaking open is often the breaking through.
Lie #2: If you’re not passionate about your work, you’re doing it wrong.
The “follow your passion” advice sounds great until you realize that there’s something deeper than passion. Being purposeful is not about being goal-oriented. It’s about reconnecting to the source of your life. Cal Newport’s research backs this up: passion follows mastery, not the other way around. But sometimes, your purpose shows up in ways that don’t feel passionate at all. Sometimes it feels like obligation, like something pulling at you that you’d rather ignore.
Lie #3: Purpose is a destination.
This might be the most damaging lie of all. Purpose isn’t a place you arrive where you can finally relax because you’ve made it. Purpose is “stepping further into the story you came to live.” When you do, the mythic territory opens, the deep self moves, and the world of imagination and meaning comes toward you. It’s a process, not a product.
What I Wish We All Knew
You don’t enter this world empty. You arrive carrying something, even if it takes decades to figure out what it is. Each soul has an inborn code and instinctive guideline that tries to unfold as your true way of being and best way of contributing to life.
Your purpose lives at the intersection of wound and gift. Not despite your struggles but because of them. The places where you’ve been broken open are often exactly where light can enter and where something essential to your purpose is hidden. This isn’t just about making your trauma “mean something.” It’s about recognizing that survival required you to develop capacities you wouldn’t have otherwise. Those capacities are part of your genius.
Being purposeful requires reconnecting to your soul. Whatever language you use for it—your deeper self, your authentic self, your essence—there’s something in you that knows. Not the part of you that absorbed your parents’ expectations or society’s metrics for success. The part that existed before all that conditioning, that came in with its own shape trying to emerge.
You don’t find your calling; you respond to it. The problem isn’t lack of calling, but fear of responding to the call. That hit me hard when I first heard it. How many times had I sensed something pulling at me and talked myself out of it because it didn’t make logical sense or fit the plan I’d constructed?
Multiple purposes can coexist and evolve. You’re not looking for one grand mission. You’re looking for your way of being in the world that allows multiple expressions of your genius to emerge. William Damon’s research shows purpose changes over time. It evolves. The ancient wisdom agrees: you’re not meant to be static. You’re meant to unfold.
The Practice of Purpose
Here’s where the spiritual and psychological converge into something practical you can actually do.
Develop vertical imagination. This means learning to drop beneath the surface chatter of your mind into something deeper. Whether you call it meditation, contemplation, therapy, journaling, or time in nature, it doesn’t matter. What matters is creating space to listen to what’s trying to emerge rather than constantly broadcasting what you think should emerge.
Pay attention to what consistently calls to you. Not what you think should interest you. What actually draws your attention again and again, even when it doesn’t make sense. Especially when it doesn’t make sense. The genius within wants activity. It’s trying to express itself. Your job is to notice the themes that keep showing up.
Run toward the roar. This is one of Meade’s most powerful teachings for me, drawn from ancient wisdom: When faced with danger, when people panic and seek false safety, run toward the roaring. Go where you fear to go. Your purpose often lives on the other side of what scares you most.
Connect to something larger than yourself. Both the research and the ancient teachings agree on this: purpose requires seeing yourself as part of something bigger. Not in a way that diminishes you, but in a way that places your individual story within a larger narrative. When you understand you’re woven into the Soul of the World, your particular genius becomes both more personal and more universal.
Create rather than consume. Purpose doesn’t come from thinking about doing. It comes from doing. Make something. Build something. Help someone. Learn something. The purpose you’re searching for reveals itself in the act of creating, not in the contemplation of creating.
The Questions That Actually Matter
Instead of “What’s my purpose?” try these:
What wound am I carrying that might also be carrying a gift? This is not about glorifying suffering. It’s about recognizing that survival required you to develop something essential.
What would I do even if no one applauded? This cuts through the noise of external validation and gets at what genuinely matters to your soul, not your ego.
Where do I feel most alive, even when it’s difficult? Purpose doesn’t always feel good. Sometimes it feels like obligation or responsibility. But there’s a quality of aliveness to it, even when it’s hard.
What keeps trying to emerge through me that I keep pushing down? What if that uncomfortable pull isn’t a distraction from your purpose but the purpose itself trying to get your attention?
The Unabashed Truth (My Loving Push)
Here’s what I really want my younger self to know, what I want you to know: You didn’t come here empty. You came carrying something essential, seeded in you before your first breath. And yes, I know that sounds “Woo-Woo”. Good. Because purpose IS kinda “Woo-Woo”. It’s also deeply practical. These aren’t opposing ideas.
The modern world will try to convince you that you’re a collection of data points, a resume, a productivity machine. It will try to fill you with its agenda because in our over-glorified capitalistic delusions, you’re more useful that way. But if you can remember, even for moments, that you arrived already full of something trying to unfold, you become dangerous to every system that wants to use you for its purposes instead of helping you discover your own.
You’re not going to figure this out once and be done. You’re going to spend your whole life stepping further into the story you came to live. And that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Purpose isn’t about arriving. It’s about the unfolding itself.
You’ll find purpose in places you never expected. In conversations you didn’t plan. In small acts that seemed insignificant. In showing up when it was hard. In letting yourself be broken open and discovering what was always inside.
The anxiety about “wasting your life” is itself wasting your life, keeping you from being present to the genius trying to emerge through you right now. Not someday when you’re more ready, more healed, more prepared. Right now, with all your contradictions and wounds and unfinished business.
And by the time you’re almost fifty and someone asks what you’d tell your younger self, you’ll still be discovering new dimensions of your purpose. You’ll still be surprised by what wants to emerge. And that’s not tragic. That’s being fully alive.
So stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting for certainty. Stop waiting for the perfect clarity that’s never coming. Your genius isn’t hiding in some future achievement or distant revelation. It’s here now, in your interests, your wounds, your weird obsessions, your particular way of seeing the world that nobody else quite shares. Take what you know right now, what you care about right now, what you can do right now, and do something with it. Your purpose isn’t something you find. It’s something you live into, one day, one choice, one brave step at a time.
The world needs what only you can bring. Not someday. Today. The very fact that you’re still wrestling with these questions means your genius is still trying to wake you up. So wake up. Answer the call. Step into the story you came to live. And for God’s sake, stop treating your life like a problem to be solved and start treating it like a mystery to be lived.
Now get to work.
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References:
Damon, W., Menon, J., & Bronk, K. C. (2003). The development of purpose during adolescence. *Applied Developmental Science, 7*(3), 119-128.
Frankl, V. E. (1946/2006). *Man’s search for meaning*. Beacon Press.
Meade, M. (2016). *The genius myth*. Greenfire Press.
Meade, M. (2012). *Fate and destiny: The two agreements of the soul*. Greenfire Press.
Meade, M. (2009). *Why the world doesn’t end: Tales of renewal in times of loss*. Greenfire Press.
Newport, C. (2012). *So good they can’t ignore you: Why skills trump passion in the quest for work you love*. Grand Central Publishing.
Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57*(6), 1069-1081.
Ryff, C. D., & Singer, B. (1998). The contours of positive human health. *Psychological Inquiry, 9*(1), 1-28.
