You are allowed to want more

Sometimes a good life is not the same as a life that feels like yours.

You have the things you are supposed to want. A family, maybe, or a home, work that matters, people who love you.

And still, in a quiet moment, something in you whispers that you want more. Not more things, but more aliveness, more of the sense that you are actually inside your own life.

You push the thought down almost as fast as it rises. Wanting more, when you already have so much, feels like the worst kind of ingratitude.

Who are you to want more, you think. Other women would trade places in a heartbeat.

So you tell yourself to be grateful, and you swallow it.

But gratitude and longing are not opposites. You can be deeply thankful for your life and still ache for something missing from it.

The ache is not greed. It is not a betrayal of the people you love or the life you built.

It is information. It is the part of you that has not gone numb, telling you that you were made for more than maintenance.

So here it is, the permission you will not give yourself. You are allowed to want more than a life that looks good from the outside.

You are allowed to want to feel it from the inside too. To be moved, to be curious, to be lit up by something, and not only responsible for everything.

Wanting more does not make you ungrateful. It makes you honest, and honesty is where coming home to yourself begins.

Nora Ephron once told a room of graduating women to be the heroine of their lives, not the victim. She meant it as a young woman's charge, but it lands just as hard now. You are allowed to be the one your life is about, not only the one who keeps it running.

Things you are allowed to want, even with a good life already:

See you tomorrow.