You Can Love Your Life and Still Want More

On gratitude, ambition, growing older and giving yourself permission to keep becoming.

There comes a point in life when you look around at everything you’ve built, everything you’ve survived and everything you’ve worked so hard for, and think:

I have so much to be grateful for.

And you do.

There are people you love, memories you treasure, ordinary little moments that make life beautiful. Perhaps there’s a home that feels like yours, a relationship that makes you smile, or simply the luxury of sitting somewhere peaceful with a decent cup of coffee.

And yet, somewhere underneath all that gratitude, there’s another feeling.

A quiet little voice that whispers:

But I still want more. More freedom. More adventure. More time. More fulfilment.

Perhaps even an entirely different chapter.

And almost immediately, along comes the guilt.

Shouldn’t I be happy with what I’ve got?

Well, darling, who said you weren’t?

Gratitude and ambition can sit at the same table

Somewhere along the way, we’ve developed this peculiar idea that being grateful means being completely satisfied with everything exactly as it is. As though appreciating your life requires you to stop wanting anything else.

But gratitude isn’t a contract agreeing never to change.

You can love your home and dream of travelling the world. You can appreciate your job and know that it no longer excites you. You can adore your family and desperately need an afternoon when nobody asks you where something is. You can be proud of the woman you’ve become and still feel curious about the woman you’re becoming.

None of these things makes you ungrateful.

They make you human.

And quite frankly, if wanting a little more adventure, freedom and joy is a crime, I suspect a good number of us are going to need legal representation.

You can love people and still need space for yourself. This is something I think many women understand particularly well.

For years, we’ve been the people who remember birthdays, organise appointments, notice when something is wrong and somehow know where everyone else’s belongings are. We’ve been mothers, daughters, partners, friends, colleagues, carers and problem-solvers. Sometimes all before lunchtime.

And we’ve done much of it with love.

But loving people doesn’t mean every single one of their needs must come before our own.

There’s a difference between being generous with your time and forgetting that your time belongs to you, too.

You can love someone deeply and still need solitude. You can be there for your family and still have boundaries. You can care about someone’s happiness without accepting responsibility for creating it. And you can say, “I love you, but I need a little time to myself,” without producing a twelve-page explanation and three supporting witnesses.

Caring doesn’t mean carrying everyone else’s needs at the expense of your own.

Sometimes the kindest thing you can do, for yourself and for the people you love, is to remember that you are a person in your own right. Not simply someone who exists to make everybody else’s life easier. You can be proud of how far you’ve come and still want to go further.

One of the strangest things about getting older is realising how many versions of yourself you’ve already been.

The young woman who thought she knew exactly how life would unfold. The woman who discovered that life had other ideas. The one who made difficult decisions. The one who started again. The one who held everything together when falling apart would have been considerably more convenient.

And then there’s the woman you are today.

Perhaps she’s wiser. Perhaps she’s more confident. Perhaps she’s finally learned that not everybody needs to like her. Or perhaps she’s still figuring things out. That’s perfectly acceptable, too.

I sometimes think we underestimate just how much we’ve already accomplished because we’re so busy looking at what remains unfinished.

We forget the courage it took to get here. The things we overcame. The decisions we made without knowing whether they were right. The times we kept going because there simply wasn’t another option.

But acknowledging how far we’ve come doesn’t mean we have to stop moving.

You can celebrate your progress without declaring your journey complete. And wouldn’t it be rather wonderful if we stopped treating our age as a deadline for becoming who we want to be?

You can be strong and still need someone to hold things together for a while

Ah, strength.

That lovely quality everyone admires until they start assuming you have an unlimited supply of it. Being the strong one can become a rather exhausting job. People get used to you coping. They assume you’ll manage. And because you’ve managed before, you sometimes convince yourself that you should always be able to manage.

But strength doesn’t mean never feeling overwhelmed. It doesn’t mean having all the answers.

And it certainly doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine when you’re one minor inconvenience away from telling the printer exactly what you think of it. Sometimes strength looks like asking for help. Sometimes it looks like saying no. Sometimes it looks like admitting that you’re tired. And sometimes it looks like doing absolutely nothing for an afternoon without feeling compelled to justify it.

You don’t have to earn rest by reaching the point of exhaustion. You’re allowed to need support simply because you’re human. You can be content without being finished growing

I think this is where things become particularly interesting.

There’s a wonderful kind of peace that comes with getting older. Not necessarily because life becomes easier, but because we begin to understand ourselves a little better. We become more selective about what deserves our energy. We stop chasing certain things. We realise that some opinions matter considerably less than we once thought. And perhaps, for the first time, we begin asking a different question.

Not What am I supposed to do with my life?

But What would I actually enjoy doing with it?

It’s a subtle difference, but an important one.

Because there’s a world of possibility between being content with who you are and deciding there’s nothing left to discover. You can be happy and curious. Peaceful and ambitious. Grounded and adventurous. You can enjoy your familiar routines while dreaming about somewhere you’ve never been. You can love the life you’ve created while making plans for a different one.

And you don’t need to apologize for any of it.

The danger of waiting until everything is perfect:

Of course, there’s another side to this.

Sometimes we tell ourselves we’ll start enjoying life once everything is sorted. When the finances are better. When work is less demanding. When the house is finished. When we’ve lost the weight, found the confidence, made the decision or finally worked out what we’re doing. And before we know it, we’ve spent years treating happiness as something scheduled for a later date.

I’m not suggesting we ignore our responsibilities or pretend that practical problems don’t exist.

They do.

Bills still need paying. Decisions still need making. Life still occasionally throws an absolute stinker into the mix.

But we don’t have to put every bit of joy on hold until all our problems have disappeared. We can make plans while we’re still figuring things out. We can enjoy small pleasures while working towards bigger goals. We can appreciate today without abandoning tomorrow. And perhaps most importantly, we can stop believing that we must become some perfectly organized, endlessly productive version of ourselves before we’re allowed to enjoy being alive.

Because I have a suspicion that version of ourselves doesn’t exist. And if she does, she’s probably absolutely knackered.

Gratitude isn’t the opposite of wanting more

I believe there’s something beautiful about trusting that life still has possibilities waiting for us.

Call it faith, optimism, trusting the Universe or simply refusing to believe that all the good bits are behind you.

Whatever language you use, I think hope matters. But there’s something else I’ve come to believe. Trusting the Universe doesn’t mean sitting on your backside waiting for your dream life to arrive by special delivery.

You still have to participate.

You still have to make decisions, take chances, learn new things and occasionally do something that scares the living daylights out of you. You can trust that opportunities exist while actively looking for them. You can believe in new beginnings while taking practical steps towards one. You can feel grateful for what you have while working towards what you want. And you can accept that some things are outside your control without surrendering responsibility for the things that aren’t.

Perhaps that’s the balance we’re all trying to find.

Not forcing every outcome. Not waiting passively for everything to happen. But living with enough gratitude to appreciate the present and enough courage to keep creating a future.

Maybe the best part is still ahead

I don’t believe life has to follow a particular timetable. I don’t believe we reach a certain birthday and suddenly lose permission to reinvent ourselves. And I certainly don’t believe that the dreams we haven’t achieved by now automatically become dreams we should abandon.

Perhaps some of them will change. Perhaps we’ll discover that the things we wanted at 25 aren’t remotely interesting to us at 55. Perhaps we’ll find entirely new passions. Perhaps we’ll surprise ourselves.

I rather hope we do.

Because one of the most exciting things about getting older is realising that we don’t have to keep following a script we wrote when we barely knew ourselves.

We can change our minds. We can choose differently. We can begin again. And we can do all of that while feeling genuinely grateful for everything that brought us here.

So if you’ve been feeling that quiet pull towards something more, please don’t mistake it for dissatisfaction.

It might simply be curiosity. It might be ambition. It might be the part of you that still wants to explore, learn, create, love, travel, laugh and experience everything this wonderfully unpredictable life has to offer.

And I think that part of you deserves to be heard.

A little reminder before you go

You can love your life and still want more. You can be grateful for today and excited about tomorrow. You can be proud of your past without wanting to repeat it. You can be content without being finished growing. And you can be exactly where you are while taking steps towards somewhere new.

You don’t have to choose between appreciating the life you have and creating the life you want.

Both can be true.

And that, I think, is a rather beautiful place to be.

With love and a little bit of mischief,

Life, Love & Other Shenanigans

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Over to you: Have you ever felt guilty for wanting something different, even though you have plenty to be grateful for? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.