My Cave

On small wants, someday piles, and what shifts when you stop waiting.

I’ve wanted a space of my own for such a long time.

Not a shared space. Not a compromise space. A place that was just mine, where I made every single decision about what happened inside it. What it looked like. What it felt like. How dark or quiet or still it was allowed to be.

For years, I didn’t say that out loud. It felt like too much to ask for. A little selfish, maybe. Certainly not urgent in the way that other things felt urgent.

So it stayed in the category of someday.

And then at some point - I think it was around the same time as leaving corporate - the someday started feeling less like a wish and more like a need. The kind that doesn’t get quieter the longer you ignore it. The kind that starts showing up as irritability, or flatness, or that low-grade feeling of being slightly wrong-sized for your own life.

When we finally could make it happen, I turned my office into what I can only describe as a cave. Dark. Cozy. Mine. Every decision about what goes in there is mine. It is my personal retreat - the place I go when everything gets too loud, too hectic, too textured, too much.

And what shifted when I finally honored that want?

I started being able to breathe again. Not just in the cave, but in general. Like something that had been quietly braced for years finally got to put itself down.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that it was some kind of cure-all. I don’t think anything really works that way.

But… that’s the thing about admitting what you actually want. It doesn’t always require blowing up your life. Sometimes it’s a room. Sometimes it’s deciding to read light and fluffy fiction just because it brings you rest and ease. Sometimes it’s choosing to sit on the back porch in the early morning even when you don’t think it’ll help.

Small wants matter just as much as the large ones. The corporate job I eventually left. The back porch I kept returning to. The office that became a cave.

They’re all the same impulse, really. The soul leaving breadcrumbs. Pointing toward what it needs to function, to breathe, to feel like itself.

I made a workbook for this - for the tracking of exactly these kinds of breadcrumbs. Because I’ve needed it myself, and I know I need it again now (which is why there’s a live co-working session included in the $22 purchase price - it’s so much easier to do this work together).

If you’re in a season where your own breadcrumbs feel scattered or hard to read, it might be worth sitting with. rootedmystic.com/discover-soul-wants