A winter question, and the way it lands in your body

It was still dark when Abeer sat at the edge of her bed, phone face-down on the quilt, listening to the radiator click on and off. Outside, the January rain was doing that sideways thing that makes everything feel slightly sharper. She had made herself a list for the new year, of course she had. She’d highlighted it. She’d color-coded it. And still, the question underneath the list kept rising up: What am I actually being asked to do with my life?

In my work with driven women over the past fifteen-plus years, I’ve noticed something that gets especially loud around the new year. The closer a woman gets to a life that looks “good on paper,” the more likely she is to feel a private, bodily dread when she’s asked to choose her next chapter. Not always. But often enough that I now ask about it in intake, because the dread is usually data, not failure.

Abeer told me, “I keep trying to pick a goal that feels exciting. And nothing feels exciting. Everything feels like another performance review.” She said it like she was confessing to a character flaw. Sitting there with her, I felt the familiar tightening in my chest I feel when a capable woman has decided her nervous system is an inconvenience she should outsmart.

Here’s what I want to offer you in this post: a way to find the question you’re actually being called to answer, without turning your healing into another project plan. We’ll talk about what a “calling” really is (and isn’t), why the new year can intensify old attachment wounds, and how to choose a next step that your body can actually live with.

Psychoeducational note: This content is psychoeducational in nature and isn’t a substitute for mental health treatment. If you’re in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Psychoeducational note: This content is psychoeducational in nature and isn’t a substitute for mental health treatment. If you’re in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

What does it mean to be “called” to a question?

Being called to a question means your life is asking you to grow in a specific direction, usually where your old strategies stop working, even if your résumé still looks impressive.

Think of it like this: you can keep remodeling the upper floors of the proverbial House of Life™ for a long time. New job title. New city. New partner. New morning routine. But if the foundation is asking for repair, the whole structure will keep sending you messages.

Sometimes the message is anxiety. Sometimes it’s numbness. Sometimes it’s a strange flatness inside the very thing you worked ten years to earn. Abeer described that flatness perfectly when she said, “I hit the goal and I feel… nothing. Then I immediately set a new one so I don’t have to sit in the nothing.”

What this looks like on a Tuesday afternoon isn’t a mystical sign. It’s the email you can’t bring yourself to answer even though you’re “good at your job.” It’s the scroll in bed that leaves you emptier, not soothed. It’s the way your body braces when someone asks you what you want.

A calling is often simply the place where your old strategy can’t carry you anymore. That doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’ve outgrown the strategy.

Why does the new year make this question louder?

The new year amplifies “calling” questions because cultural timelines, family expectations, and nervous-system threat detection all spike at once, especially for driven women.

I want to name the obvious: the new year is a culturally sanctioned identity audit. It’s capitalism dressed up as reflection. It’s the attention economy asking you to buy a new version of yourself. And for many women, it’s also family-of-origin messaging resurfacing, because the year-turning mark can feel like a report card.

What therapists call this is state-dependent memory: when your body enters a familiar emotional state, your brain retrieves old learning that “fits” that state. Think of it like your nervous system opening the same file folder every January. The folder might be labeled: Be better. Prove it. Don’t waste time. Don’t disappoint anyone.

Which means in practice, you can be sitting at a perfectly calm kitchen table, with a latte and a planner, and still feel a sudden surge of urgency in your chest as you write “goals.” That urgency isn’t necessarily motivation. Sometimes it’s the younger part of you trying to prevent shame.

Abeer noticed this when she said, “I don’t even want a goal. I want a guarantee.” That sentence is so human. Of course you want a guarantee. If your early life taught you that mistakes came with relational consequences, your adult self will try to prevent mistakes by choosing perfectly.

And this is where the new year can feel cruel. The calendar flips, and suddenly every unresolved question in your life feels like it needs an answer by Monday.

The question beneath the question (and how to find it)

The question beneath your “What should I do?” is usually “What do I trust about myself?” and your body will tell you the answer before your mind does.

Most driven women arrive with a surface question: Should I stay or go? Should I’ve a baby? Should I leave the job? Should I finally write the book? Abeer’s surface question was “What should my next goal be?” Underneath was something tenderer: “Can I trust myself if I stop performing?”

Here are a few of the “beneath” questions I hear most often, and what they tend to be pointing toward:

• “What do I actually want?” often means: Can I want something without earning it?
• “What’s the right decision?” often means: Will I be loved if I disappoint someone?
• “Why can’t I commit?” often means: What happens if I choose and it hurts?
• “Why do I feel behind?” often means: Whose timeline did I internalize?

Notice how none of these are actually solved by productivity. They’re solved by contact. By an honest relationship with your own fear and desire.

This is where I often invite clients to do a simple body check. Not a meditation performance. A check. When you imagine saying yes to the choice, what happens in your chest? When you imagine saying no, what happens in your stomach?

Your nervous system has been keeping a record of what’s safe and what’s not. The trick is learning when that record is current, and when it’s an old file folder from childhood that’s being opened automatically.

Abeer said, “When I imagine staying where I’m, my throat gets tight.” Then she laughed and said, “That sounds so dramatic.” I didn’t find it dramatic. I found it accurate. The throat tightening was her body telling the truth before she could.

When your calling is really an attachment wound in disguise

Sometimes the “calling” feeling is an attachment wound asking to be tended, not a life decision demanding an immediate answer.

What therapists call this is attachment activation: when closeness, separation, visibility, or success triggers your early relational learning. Think of it like an internal smoke alarm becoming extra sensitive around moments of change. Big decisions can feel dangerous because, in childhood, change often meant loss.

Which means on a Tuesday afternoon, you can be offered the promotion you’ve worked toward for a decade and still find yourself nauseated in the bathroom at work. Or you can be loved by a steady partner and still feel suspicious, like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. The calling question gets tangled with the attachment alarm.

Abeer described her father’s pattern in one sentence: “He’d be all-in until he wasn’t.” She didn’t say it with drama. She said it like weather. That kind of early inconsistency teaches a nervous system to equate commitment with risk.

So of course a new year, which is basically one big commitment prompt, lights her up. She told me she’d start a new planner and feel briefly hopeful, then get an acidic feeling in her stomach as soon as she wrote a first goal.

If this resonates, here’s the both/and: the life decision matters AND the attachment wound may need attention before you decide. A steady therapist can help you separate the two.

Both/And: Your ambition was brilliant AND it may be costing you intimacy with yourself

Your ambition was brilliant AND it might also be the strategy that keeps you from hearing what you actually want.

I want to say this with care: your ambition didn’t appear out of nowhere. For many women, ambition is the way she made herself safe. The way she earned belonging. The way she became un-ignorable.

If that was your story, I won’t argue you out of the strategy that got you here. I won’t pretend the strategy didn’t work. Abeer’s ambition worked. It got her through school. It got her into rooms she never imagined she’d be invited into. It built a life that looks solid from the street.

AND. Ambition as a survival strategy has a shadow side. Ambition can keep you in constant evaluation mode, treating your inner life like a KPI dashboard. Ambition can make rest feel like failure. Ambition can make desire feel inconvenient, because desire is rarely efficient.

Abeer said, “Everything feels like another performance review.” If your inner world is always being graded, you can’t hear your calling. You can only hear the grade.

The work, in my experience, is to let ambition keep doing what it does best in your external life, while you build a different kind of relationship with yourself internally. This is part of what I teach in Fixing the Foundations™: how to repair the relational blueprint beneath the life you’ve built so you don’t have to perform your way into safety anymore.

The Systemic Lens: why your life feels like a report card

Your new-year anxiety isn’t only personal; it’s also the predictable result of systems that reward performance and punish human pacing.

This pattern isn’t your unique failing. It’s patterned.

Capitalism rewards output. The attention economy rewards comparison. Patriarchy rewards a specific kind of “good woman” performance: productive, pleasing, self-contained. The mechanism is simple: when a culture ties worth to achievement, the nervous system learns that slowing down is dangerous.

You see the mechanism in your inbox. You see it in the way your calendar fills with “catch-ups” you don’t want. You see it in the moment you sit down to rest and your mind immediately starts listing the things you should be doing.

That isn’t a moral issue. That’s conditioning. Abeer didn’t invent her performance review voice. She inherited it from a culture that treats women as valuable when they’re impressive.

Of course you’re tired. You’re attempting to build a life inside a system that treats your body like a machine. That’s not personal failure. That’s structural impossibility.

How do you answer the question without turning it into a self-improvement project?

You answer the question you’re being called to by taking one honest, small step your body can tolerate, then letting the next step reveal itself through lived experience.

Here are a few practices I often give driven women when the new-year question is loud:

1. Pick one experiment, not one identity. Instead of “I’m quitting my job,” try “For four weeks, I’m going to stop volunteering for the projects that drain me.”
2. Track your body’s yes and no. Not as a mystical oracle, but as nervous-system data. Relief is data. Tightness is data. Numbness is data.
3. Separate fear from intuition. Fear is urgent and repetitive. Intuition is quieter and steadier. If you can’t tell the difference, you’re not broken. You’re just activated.
4. Let support hold the middle. Big questions are easier to answer when someone is helping you regulate while you decide.

Abeer didn’t leave her job the week after we named the question. Abeer stayed, on purpose, long enough to learn what her body was trying to say. She didn’t suddenly “find her purpose.” What shifted was smaller. She stopped writing goals that were actually punishments. She started asking, “What would be kind?” and she noticed her shoulders drop when she asked that question.

The work is rarely cinematic. It’s often that simple. Small steps. Honest contact. A body that starts to trust you again.

A second way the question shows up: the email you can’t stop rereading

A second vignette can show you the same question in a different shape: sometimes the calling is about boundaries, not big life changes.

It was late afternoon when Nour came to session, still in her work blazer, mascara smudged in the way that tells me she’d cried in a bathroom stall and then tried to pull it together. She placed her laptop on the coffee table like it was evidence. “I can’t stop thinking about this one email,” she said, scrolling. “It’s not even mean. It’s just… the expectation is endless.”

Then she said, in the voice I hear from so many driven women, “I know I’m lucky. I know other people have it worse. I’m being dramatic.” The sentence landed like a reflex. I watched her shoulders lift toward her ears, like her body was bracing for a critique that wasn’t coming from me.

Sitting with Nour, what I saw wasn’t a woman who needed a new career. I saw a woman who needed a boundary that her nervous system could actually hold. The clinical name for this is over-functioning. Think of it like being the person in the office who always runs the backup generator, even when the power’s on. Which means in practice you don’t just work late. You stay mentally “on call” all night, checking Slack in bed, waking up with your jaw clenched.

Her calling question wasn’t “What job should I do?” Her calling question was “Can I let someone be disappointed in me and stay connected to myself?” That’s a very different kind of new-year work.

A gentler way to choose: the smallest true sentence

When the question feels impossible, it often helps to look for the smallest “true sentence” you can say without abandoning yourself.

Abeer and I came back to this again and again: Abeer didn’t need a perfect plan; she needed a true sentence. the new year was asking her for a true sentence, not a perfect plan. The true sentence changed week to week, but it was always simpler than her planner wanted it to be.

Here are a few true sentences I’ve heard women practice, sometimes out loud, sometimes just in writing:

• “I don’t know yet, but I’m listening.”
• “I’m not available for goals that are actually self-punishment.”
• “I can want what I want, even if someone doesn’t approve.”
• “I can take one step and reassess.”

Think of a true sentence like laying one beam back onto the foundation of the proverbial House of Life™. One beam doesn’t rebuild the whole structure. But one beam changes what the rest of the house can hold.

Which means on a Tuesday afternoon, you might not have the answer to the new-year question. You might only have the courage to close the laptop at 6pm. Or to say no to the meeting that shouldn’t have been yours. Or to tell a partner, “I don’t want to make this decision from fear.” That counts. Abeer’s work began with exactly that kind of sentence.

Warmly, Annie

Medical Disclaimer