There are things you ruled out without ever asking.
Today I’ll tell you mine: the years I spent looking for the suit.
Today I want to tell you about something I did for years without realizing it.
Looking for the suit.
Every time something came up that I wanted to do, my first thought wasn’t how do I do this. It was what am I missing to be able to.
And off I went to find it. Another certification. Another course. Another expensive credential that was going to be, this time for sure, the one that made me enough.
I grew up with the idea that I hadn’t finished what I was supposed to finish, and that idea stuck to me like a label. And when you carry a label, you don’t question it. You obey it.
It took me years to understand that the suit was never the problem.
It was that I’d already answered myself.
Let me give you the hardest example I have.
I pushed my first marriage.
And I don’t say that as a reproach — I say it from what I saw afterward: I wanted it to happen, and I carried it forward even though almost nothing was going along with me.
The power went out the day of the wedding. People I wanted there didn’t make it. There were signs. Several, and fairly clear.
I didn’t see them.
Or more honestly: I didn’t want to see them, because I’d already decided. And once you’ve decided, everything that shows up arranges itself to prove you right.
Years later the exact opposite happened to me.
When marriage came back into my life — this time with Frank — my answer was already given too. It was just the opposite one.
That’s not for me. I already tried. I already know how it ends.
And he had his own history behind him. So the two of us, each on our own, kept saying no to the moments that showed up. With very good arguments. Analyzing it a great deal.
Opposite directions, same mistake: the answer was in place before the question.
In psychology, this is called motivated reasoning,
a mechanism Ziva Kunda described clearly: when we already have a preferred conclusion, we don’t reason toward it — we reason from it. We look for what confirms it and turn down the volume on what contradicts it, never once feeling like we’re cheating.
Which is why evidence rarely changes our minds. It organizes the one we already had.
In everyday life, it’s simpler than that.
You don’t send the proposal because you already know they’ll say no.
You don’t write to the person who pulled away because you already know how they’ll respond.
You don’t apply because you already know they want someone with more experience.
You don’t ask the price because you already know it’s out of reach.
Notice how many times you already know shows up.
You didn’t know. You’d decided.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: we usually skip the question to avoid risking the label. As long as you don’t ask, you get to keep being right about yourself.
With Frank, what changed wasn’t that we talked ourselves into it.
It’s that neither of us pushed, and neither of us jumped ahead to say no. The date showed up on its own, out of things that were already moving, and this time we actually looked at what was in front of us.
We said yes with the fear still there. Not resolved. Present.
And that’s the whole difference between pushing and choosing.
I’m Saskia Fulco.
And this space is for exactly that — so you can go back over the answers you’ve already given, and see which ones you actually asked.
No pressure. At your own pace.
If you want to keep going from here, I wrote a book about this — about deciding from your own identity instead of from the labels you were handed. It’s called Learning to Be, and you can find it on Amazon if you’d like to have it close.
And if reading this brought up an answer of yours you never actually asked, the consulting application is open. I’ll leave it right here for you.
For today, just one question:
What have you decided against, without ever having asked?