Ask whose reasons you’re running on. If you can’t find your own name on them, you borrowed them.

Reasons get absorbed young and they rarely arrive labelled. A parent’s fear, a teacher’s ranking, a friend group’s idea of what counts: these settle in and start sounding like your own judgement, especially when they push you toward things that look respectable. Borrowed reasons are not automatically wrong, but they are worth recognising as borrowed.

Take one big thing you are working toward and ask who first wanted it. If a specific face comes up, sit with that for a minute. You might keep the goal anyway, and keeping it knowingly is a very different thing from being carried by it.