Perhaps spending years on my knees weakened my ability to choose and complete my own goals.

When you choose your own goals, by what criteria should you decide they're worthy? Some criteria meant to satisfy some higher goal, right? If you had a highest goal (and I'm not sure humans are even really capable of it, but assuming we are), how could you have chosen it? By what criteria could you decide that it was a good or bad goal, given that evaluation of the worth of anything at all is only meaningful in respect to some goal or other?

Saying "this is an action I want to take" is equivalent to "I believe that taking this action will move me closer to a goal I hold". But choosing a goal is an action in this sense, so there's eventually a recursion problem with choosing your own goals, unless there's some highest goal you hold which isn't chosen by you.

So, if you have a highest goal, it isn't one you've chosen. If you don't have a highest goal, then except in the case where your highest level goals are all compatible (which seems to collapse to the first case, since you could simply view them all as a single amalgamated goal), your goals are inconsistent. Both the case in which you don't get to choose your own goal and the case in which your goals are mutually incompatible are pretty unpalatable, but I don't see a way of avoiding one of them being true.