Satisfied: Finding Purpose When Life Does Not Go as Planned
What happens when the life you hoped for does not become the life you are given?
In Satisfied: Why Getting What We Want Is Not the Answer, Hadassah Treu tells a deeply personal story shaped by infertility, anxiety, marriage struggles, loss, and an unexpected journey toward surrender. The memoir explores what it means to keep trusting God when deeply held desires remain unmet and when life takes a direction you never would have chosen.
For Treu, the book began with a prompting she did not anticipate. “In fall 2019, God utterly surprised me by imprinting on my heart that I should write a memoir about the most difficult years for me and my marriage,” she says. Those years included struggles with infertility, anxiety disorder, and panic attacks, but they were also years of profound spiritual growth.
She began writing because she wanted to tell a true story about what can happen when unfulfilled desires are placed alongside trust in God. “My motivation to write Satisfied was to show through a real-life story that together with God everything is possible, and that there is no barrenness with God,” Treu says. She also hoped the book would help readers process their own disappointments through biblical wisdom and the lived experience of learning to trust God.
More Than a Story About Infertility
Infertility is an important part of Satisfied, but Treu’s story is broader than one unmet longing. “My story is the story of a woman’s journey of transformation and change that ultimately leads to birth—the birth of God’s purposes and plan in her life,” she explains.
That journey includes infertility and a rethinking of motherhood, but it also includes marriage struggles and healing, anxiety and depression, and a movement toward wholeness and joy. What Treu most wanted readers to see, however, was not simply what happened to her. “I wanted to show God’s work and love in all these aspects and paint a picture for the readers of what a journey of surrender and trust looks like.”
The result is a memoir that asks readers to look beyond the question, Did I get what I wanted? and consider a different one: Where can purpose still be found when the answer is no?
Rethinking Motherhood, Longing, and Purpose
One of the ideas at the heart of Satisfied is Treu’s understanding of motherhood. She wanted to offer what she describes as “a fresh perspective and understanding about motherhood” and a woman’s call to mother, whether or not she has children of her own.
That perspective grows out of Treu’s own experience of having to reconsider expectations she once held about what her life would look like. For readers carrying their own unmet longings—for motherhood, intimacy, marriage, or something else—Treu hopes the book provides more than recognition.
“The book is an invitation to turn our hearts and re-direct our desires to a greater Love, to a bigger purpose, to the true source of living water,” she says. She hopes readers will grow in their ability to trust God even when expectations remain unmet, make peace with painful experiences in their past or present, and begin to see their lives through the lens of mission and purpose.
Ultimately, she says, Satisfied points toward “embracing surrender instead of control.”
A Manuscript Finished Just in Time
There is also a part of the story behind Satisfied that readers would never know simply by opening the finished book. Treu completed the first draft of the memoir in May 2020. Two months later, her husband died unexpectedly from post-surgical complications.
“My whole world died with him,” she says.
Only afterward did the timing of the manuscript begin to carry a different meaning for her. “One day it dawned on me that the Lord, who is never late and never too early, urged me to write the memoir of our story with my husband precisely before his untimely death,” Treu says. “I knew that I would be incapable of writing this memoir after his death. It would have been too painful.”
That realization did not erase her grief, but it offered a measure of comfort. The experience reinforced one of the truths at the center of the book: trust does not require having every answer. “I don’t need to understand completely to trust Him,” Treu says.
When Getting What We Want Is Not the Answer
The subtitle of Satisfied poses the central tension plainly: Why Getting What We Want Is Not the Answer.
Treu’s memoir does not suggest that disappointment is insignificant or that painful longings can simply be dismissed. Instead, it comes from someone who has lived through circumstances she deeply wished were different. Her invitation is to consider what may still be possible when the hoped-for outcome does not come—to loosen the grip of control, redirect desire, and discover purpose that is not dependent upon life unfolding according to plan.
For readers who know what it is to want something deeply, wait for it, and wonder what happens if the answer never comes, Satisfied offers the companionship of a woman who has wrestled with those same questions. Her story suggests that satisfaction may begin somewhere other than getting what we thought we needed.
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