Once your eyes are open, a new question arrives - and it can be a surprisingly hard one: what do I actually want?

You may have spent so many years being who you were supposed to be - capable, responsible, good at the things expected of you - that when you finally turn inward and ask what you desire, you find the answer has gone quiet. Not gone. Quiet. Faint, the way a voice gets when it hasn’t been asked to speak in a very long time.

This is Remember - the second stage of the Je Suis Path. If Awaken was the moment you noticed your life didn’t quite feel like yours, Remember is the slow, tender work of turning inward and reconnecting with what was always there: your desires, your preferences, your intuition, and your boundaries. It is not about inventing a new self. It is about remembering the one beneath the roles - and beginning, quietly, to trust her again.

I want to tell you how this looked for me, because it was nothing like a straight line.

After my awakening in Europe, I came home wanting more - not more chaos, but something of my own. I’d spent a few years as a stay-at-home mother, and I loved it. And still, there was a quiet wanting: something that was mine. Before my children, I’d earned a business degree and worked my way through corporate America - and I had quietly hated every minute of it. So I knew what I didn’t want. What I did want was harder to say out loud.

So I asked myself a question I hadn’t dared to ask in years: what did I want to be when I grew up?

The answer came instantly, because it had never actually left. Fashion. I had always wanted to work in fashion. But back in high school, when I told a teacher that dream, he told me to do something more productive with my brain. And I believed him. I folded the dream up, put it away, and went into corporate America - because that’s what a smart, sensible girl was supposed to do. By the time I let myself remember the dream, I was thirty, with children, certain I was too old and too late. (Thirty. I want to gently laugh with her now.)

But the wanting hadn’t gone anywhere. I didn’t want to spend years climbing from the bottom or fetching coffee, so I went looking for the door into that world that was truly mine. And I found it in something I had loved my whole life without ever calling it a calling: I had always been a painter. In college, I was the one friends came to on a Friday night to do their hair and makeup before they went out. So I trained as a makeup artist - work that let me be on set, close to fashion, and creative every single day. My husband, bless him, simply said: go for it. I earned my certification and began working at a local photography studio.

But here is the part that mattered more than the career change. Somewhere in it, I began running my whole life through a single question:

Am I doing this because I want to - or only because I’m good at it?

Those are not the same thing, though we’re taught to treat them as if they are. I had built an entire life on being good at things. Being capable is a lovely quality and a quiet trap - because competence will keep you in a life that was never actually yours, simply because you can. Remembering myself meant learning to tell the difference between what I could do and what I wanted to do, and letting the wanting count.

My intuition spoke up most clearly in, of all places, my makeup certification course. Of every class and module, there was exactly one thing I learned that I didn’t already know. I had been doing all of it, for years, for the people I loved. I simply hadn’t given myself permission to call it real without a piece of paper to prove it. I had a degree, so my mind allowed me to “do” business. It wouldn’t let me “do” the thing I loved, because - who was I, with no credentials, to show up and claim it?

That, it turned out, was the whole lesson. Intuition isn’t a new skill you acquire. It’s the remembering of what you already knew, before the world taught you to doubt it. And I’ll be honest with you: that old voice - who are you to do this? - still visits me even now, even as I build this very space for you. Remembering isn’t a finish line you cross once. It’s a practice you return to.

As I listened more closely, boundaries began to form on their own - and they all grew from that same root question, turned outward: Am I saying yes because I truly want to, or because it’s expected of me - because I “should”? That one question became the seed of every boundary I have. Some are small and unglamorous and completely life-changing; one of my favorites to this day is simply not opening my work email on the weekend. Not as a wall against anyone - but as a yes to the part of my life that is mine. Because a boundary, at its heart, is not about keeping the world out. It’s about keeping yourself in.

None of this happened all at once. Remembering myself took years, and it looked a great deal like shopping for clothes.

You see something on the rack, or on someone else, and you think - maybe. So you try it on. Some things don’t fit at all. Some fit but don’t flatter. Some fit perfectly and still, somehow, don’t feel like you. Some need a little tailoring to become just right. And every now and then, something is extraordinary the moment you put it on. The whole art of it is simply this: you keep trying things on. You don’t give up because the first few didn’t fit.

Each time I found something that was truly mine and tailored it to fit, I added it to my toolbox. A practice here, a boundary there, an affirmation that steadied me, the name of a woman I admired and why. Slowly the toolbox filled - until one day I had enough to build something I’m deeply proud of. For years now, my planner has been that toolbox: where I keep the affirmations that resonate, the quotes that turn my mind around, my boundaries as they evolve, the women who inspire me, and what I want to focus on each year, broken into pieces small enough to actually live. When I began designing JE SUIS JEANETTE, I went back and read through years of those pages - and only then did I see how far I had truly come.

So if you’ve turned inward and found the answer to what do I want gone quiet, please don’t take it as proof that you’ve lost yourself. You haven’t. You’ve only gone quiet - and quiet can be listened back to life. You don’t need it all figured out. You only need to start telling the difference between what you can do and what you want to do, and to let the wanting matter. One honored desire. One honest preference. One kept boundary. That is how self-trust is rebuilt - not in a single grand gesture, but in a thousand small returns.

The woman you’re remembering was never lost. She has simply been keeping a quiet list of everything you love, everything that lights you up, everything that feels like you - waiting for the day you would finally turn around and ask her.

Ask her. She remembers.

Je suis. I am.

THE FIRST PAGE OF MY TOOLBOX

When I began building Je Suis Jeanette, I pulled out my very first planner — the one I started in 2017, in the middle of all this remembering. On the very first page, under “This Year’s Theme,” my own handwriting was waiting for me. It said everything about where I was, and where I was quietly heading.

“My theme is… me!!! It’s time to take care of myself for a change.”

— from my first planner, 2017