I Think I’m Allowed to Want More

Day 205 – June 16, 2026

I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about wanting things.

Not needing things. I am very good at needing things. Food. Rent. Safety. Sleep. Coffee. Roger apparently needs seventeen separate outdoor excursions every day because the same patch of grass may have developed important new information since forty minutes ago. Needs are easy. Needs come with justification built in.

Wanting is different.

Wanting something means admitting that what you have right now is not the entirety of what you hope your life becomes. It means looking past survival long enough to picture something better, bigger, stranger, prettier, more interesting, or simply more yours.

I think I stopped doing that for a while.

There were things I wanted, obviously, but they lived somewhere far away in my head. Somewhere after I felt safe again. After I stopped having nightmares. After I figured everything out. After all the terrible shit had been neatly processed and filed away in whatever imaginary cabinet emotionally healthy people apparently have access to. Then I would be ready.

Which is adorable. Because if I waited until every part of my life was resolved before I let myself want anything new, I would apparently be starting sometime around 2047.

Lately I keep catching myself wanting things anyway.

I want Wild Poise to grow. Not just survive. Grow. I want more people to find it. I want people to read something here and send it to someone else because it made them laugh or think or feel seen or say, “Okay, somebody else thinks this too.” I want opportunities to come from the writing. I want to write for more places. I want to get better at it. I want to make money doing work I actually give a shit about. I want to build something that gives other interesting people somewhere to put their voices too.

That is a lot of wanting.

And I am trying not to apologize for it.

Women get trained to shrink ambition into something more socially digestible. We are supposed to say we are “just seeing where things go” when what we really mean is I would actually like this thing to become fucking enormous, thank you very much.

There is apparently something suspicious about knowing you are good at something and wanting to see how far you can take it. Especially if you say it out loud. So naturally I would like to say it out loud.

I want to see how far I can take this.

There. Nobody died. I checked.

The strange part is that wanting more does not make me less grateful for what I already have. I think those two ideas get tangled together too often. As if gratitude means sitting quietly in whatever chair life gave you and never wondering whether there might be a sofa somewhere.

I am grateful. I am also curious. Those things can coexist.

I am grateful people are reading Wild Poise and I want more people to read it. I am grateful somebody will pay me to write and I would like considerably more somebodies to pay me to write. I am grateful I survived everything that brought me here and I would prefer the rest of my life contain significantly less surviving and substantially more living.

Seems reasonable.

Maybe ambition gets ugly when it becomes the only thing that matters. When people become stepping stones. When numbers become worth. When success becomes some endless hunger that never lets anything feel like enough.

That is not what I want.

I want enough room to create. Enough money to breathe. Enough opportunity to keep going. Enough reach to matter to somebody. Enough freedom to follow whatever weird thought my brain wakes up obsessed with that morning and see whether it turns into something worth reading. And maybe a house someday with an absurdly good bathtub.

I contain multitudes.

There is something else underneath all of this too though. Wanting more means believing there might actually be more. That is new. There were stretches of the last year when imagining next week felt ambitious. The future was not exciting. It was this vague territory I had to cross because time insisted on continuing.

Now I sometimes catch myself thinking six months ahead. A year. What Wild Poise could become. What I could become with it. What kind of work might find me. Who I might meet. What I might make. That does not sound revolutionary until you have lived through a period where the future mostly looked like something to endure.

Hope is sneaky like that.

It does not always arrive as some great burst of light. Sometimes it looks like making plans. Sometimes it looks like buying a domain. Sometimes it looks like sending an email you would have been too afraid to send six months ago. Sometimes it looks like admitting that yes, actually, you would like more.

And I do. I want more.

Not because what I have is worthless. Because I am finally beginning to believe there is more available.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And apparently ambition has pulled up a chair.