There is a specific discomfort that many women carry about their own wanting — a sense that their desire for more (more impact, more success, more recognition, more expression of themselves in the world) is something to be managed, qualified, or privately ashamed of.
This article is for that woman.
The ingratitude frame. Wanting more can feel like ingratitude for what you have — as though recognising the gap between where you are and where you want to be is a failure to appreciate the present.
This is a misunderstanding. Gratitude and desire coexist without contradiction. You can be genuinely grateful for the life you have and genuinely want it to be larger. Both are honest. Both are human.
The selfishness frame. Wanting things for yourself — your own achievement, your own recognition, your own full life — can feel selfish in a cultural context that valorises women's self-sacrifice and community orientation.
But wanting to fully express who you are, wanting to build something significant, wanting your specific gifts to be visible and useful in the world — this is not selfishness. It is the appropriate claim of a person on her own life.
The "who do you think you are" frame. The internal voice (and sometimes the external one) that greets large desire with skepticism — that finds your wanting presumptuous or impractical. This voice is the internalisation of every environment that found your wanting threatening.
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Wanting more is the recognition that you have not yet become everything you are capable of becoming. That the life you are living is smaller than the life available to you. That your specific gifts, applied fully, could contribute something significant.
That recognition is not arrogance. It is honest self-assessment.
And it is worth honouring, not suppressing.
You are allowed to want your full life. Not a partial life shaped around others' comfort. Not a life that fits neatly into the space that has been assigned to women of your background. The full one. The large one. The one in which you are most fully, consistently, unapologetically yourself.
That wanting is not a problem. It is the beginning of the most interesting thing you will ever do.
Related: On Ambition, Shame, and Wanting Big Things · How to Stop Playing It Small · What Does Success Look Like for a Nigerian Woman?
Nancy GLO
Reflective storyteller & style curator for women becoming
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