Category: identity

We’re here again focusing on living for you, rediscovering you, your values, your wishes, your dreams. Because this is your own unique life, precious yet vulnerable.

So let’s check by asking the question – when did you last want something just for you – without explaining it away?

Not for your children. Not because it would make you a better mother, partner, colleague, friend or because the classic “it’s good for you”. Just something you wanted because you wanted it for no particular reason other than it makes you happy.

For many of us, that question can land awkwardly. Because wanting things for ourselves has felt – for a very long time – like something that needs to be justified first.

I spent years doing it. The qualification always arrived before the desire had even finished forming.

Obviously I’m grateful, but… It’s probably silly, but… I know I should be content with, but…

But I want more, and I want something else…eek…

There was a period in my life when I wanted, more than almost anything, to live in France. Green shutters. Slow mornings. A completely different pace. It felt self-indulgent even to think it. I had responsibilities. Children. A life already assembled. Who was I to want something so different?

And yet the wanting didn’t go away. It just sat there, quietly festering for years.

We had a window of opportunity. I knew if we didn’t try, we never would. So we went.

Some people thought we were ungrateful. Selfish. Downright crazy.

We weren’t. We were just choosing something for ourselves – and that, apparently, still makes people very uncomfortable.

Here’s what my Motherhood Studies training gave me language for: that guilt – the one that arrives the moment you want something for yourself – isn’t personal. It’s cultural. The Social Conditioning Pyramid maps exactly how girls are taught from childhood to place their needs last. To earn the right to be considered. To frame their desires in terms of how they serve others first.

By the time we’re in our 50s, the conditioning runs so deep we don’t even notice it operating. We just feel the guilt, assume it means we’re wrong, and quietly put the want away.  And with that our confidence lessens too.

But guilt isn’t evidence that you want too much.

It’s evidence that you were taught to want less. And express less.

France didn’t last – Charlie needed home, and we came back. But we went. We chose it. And even in going and returning, I learned something I couldn’t have learned any other way: that choosing something for myself, even imperfectly, even temporarily, was possible.  And I loved it too and I’m so, so glad we went.  It’s no longer festering there in my mind and we have made so many happy and funny memories.

Your wants are not selfishness to suppress. They’re not problems to manage. They’re information – about who you are, what your life could look like, what you’ve been quietly longing for while you kept everyone else’s peace.

You don’t need permission to want what you want.

But if it helps to hear it said plainly: you’re allowed.

This week’s practice:

Write down three things you want. Not what you should want – what you actually want. Private, specific, yours.

Then read each one back out loud. Not in your head. Out loud.

Notice which one you almost whispered. Which one made you glance at the door. Which one felt almost embarrassing to say.

That’s the one with the most power in it.

You don’t have to show this to anyone. But you do have to hear yourself say it.  You have to give yourself permission.

You are your own unique person that is here to grow and truly be.

With love and best wishes always,
Susy