I'm 70 and I finally stopped waiting for someone to need me — because I realized the deepest purpose I'll ever have isn't being useful to other people, it's deciding what makes my own days feel like they matter

Last week, I sat in my kitchen at 5:30 AM, watching steam curl from my tea cup, and realized I'd been holding my breath for decades. Not literally, of course, but in that deeper way we do when we're constantly scanning the horizon for who might need us next. At 70, I finally exhaled. Really exhaled. And in that release, I discovered something that would have terrified my younger self: nobody actually needs me anymore, not in that urgent, daily way I once thought gave my life meaning. The revelation didn't devastate me. It freed me.

For most of my life, I measured my worth in usefulness. How many students did I help today? What did my husband need? Which friend was struggling? Even in retirement, after my knees forced me to leave the classroom at 64, I immediately searched for new ways to be indispensable. I volunteered everywhere, said yes to everything, filled my calendar until it groaned under the weight of other people's needs. When my second husband developed Parkinson's, I threw myself into caregiving with an intensity that bordered on relief. Here, finally, was proof of my purpose. Someone needed me completely.

The myth of being indispensable

Have you ever noticed how being needed can become an addiction? It starts innocently enough. Someone asks for help, you provide it, they're grateful, and that gratitude feels like oxygen. Before you know it, you're organizing your entire existence around being the person others turn to. You become the family problem solver, the friend who always listens, the volunteer who never says no. You tell yourself this is love, this is purpose, this is what good people do.

But here's what I've learned: there's a difference between being helpful and hiding behind helpfulness. For years, I confused the two. When I lost my husband two years ago, after seven years of watching Parkinson's steal him piece by piece, I found myself standing in an empty house with no one to take care of. The silence was deafening. Who was I if no one needed me? The question haunted my early morning tea sessions, followed me through grocery stores where I no longer needed to buy his favorite foods, whispered to me during long afternoons that stretched endlessly forward.

When purpose becomes a prison

Virginia Woolf once wrote, "The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages." She was talking about something broader, but those words kept returning to me as I navigated this new phase of life. How much of my identity had I built on what others needed from me? How often had I ignored my own desires because someone else's seemed more urgent, more legitimate, more worthy of attention?

The therapy I'd started in my 50s to address my people-pleasing tendencies suddenly felt more relevant than ever. Back then, with a full classroom and a busy life, setting boundaries felt like a luxury I could occasionally afford. Now, with fewer external demands, I realized those boundaries weren't luxuries at all. They were the foundation for discovering what actually made my own days meaningful.

I started small. Instead of immediately filling my mornings with volunteer commitments, I protected that first hour with my journal. Instead of saying yes to every invitation out of fear that people would stop asking, I began checking in with myself first. Did I actually want to attend that committee meeting? Was I genuinely interested in that new volunteer opportunity, or was I just afraid of seeming selfish?

The courage to matter to yourself

The shift didn't happen overnight. There were mornings when I'd wake up, make my tea, and feel the familiar panic rising. What if I became irrelevant? What if people forgot about me? What if my life stopped mattering because I stopped being useful?

But slowly, something else emerged in those quiet morning hours. I began writing, not for anyone else, but for myself. Page after page of thoughts, memories, observations that no one needed but that felt essential to record. A friend eventually suggested I share these stories, and at 66, I began writing personal essays. Not because anyone needed them, but because the act of writing them made my days feel purposeful in a way that had nothing to do with external validation.

I started taking long walks without my phone, not to get somewhere or accomplish something, but simply to move through the world at my own pace. I read books that had been gathering dust for years, not because I should read them or because someone recommended them, but because they called to something in me. I learned to cook elaborate meals for one, setting the table properly, using the good dishes, because the ritual itself brought me joy.

Redefining what matters

Here's what nobody tells you about getting older: at some point, if you're lucky, you stop performing your life and start living it. You stop asking "What do others need from me?" and start asking "What makes this day feel meaningful to me?" The answers might surprise you.

For me, meaning comes in unexpected moments now. It's in the perfect sentence that captures exactly what I want to say. It's in the cardinal that visits my feeder every morning at precisely 7:15. It's in the afternoon light slanting through my kitchen window, in the smell of bread baking, in the satisfying crack of opening a new book.

These things matter not because they're useful to anyone else, but because they make me feel connected to something larger than my own usefulness. They remind me that I'm not just a supporting character in other people's stories. I'm the protagonist of my own, and that story doesn't end just because the external demands quiet down.

Final thoughts

If you're struggling with this transition, whether you're 40 or 70 or somewhere in between, know that the discomfort is normal. We're trained from birth to measure our worth in our usefulness to others. Stepping away from that metric feels selfish, even wrong. But what I've discovered is that when we stop desperately trying to be needed, we create space for something more authentic. We create space for genuine connection that isn't based on transaction. We create space for interests and passions that belong to us alone. Most importantly, we create space to discover that our deepest purpose was never about being indispensable to others. It was always about deciding what makes our own days feel like they matter, then having the courage to pursue that with the same dedication we once reserved for everyone else's needs.