I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we owe ourselves, and it keeps landing on something uncomfortable: the permission to want things.
Not in a materialistic sense—I don’t mean wanting the new phone or the fancy holiday. I mean wanting the deeper things. Wanting to feel competent at something. Wanting to be seen. Wanting to matter, at least a little bit, to people we care about. Wanting to not feel invisible as we age. These seem like such basic human needs, and yet I notice how many of us—myself included—treat them like luxuries we haven’t earned, or guilty pleasures we should apologize for.
There’s this cultural script that says if you want something too badly, you’re being needy or vain or somehow not evolved enough to be content with scraps. Stay small, stay grateful, don’t ask for much. And I think that’s actually a kind of self-betrayal.
I’ve watched people spend years doing work that felt meaningless because they told themselves they should be grateful for the job, period. Grateful to have income. Never mind that something in them was dying a little each day. And I’ve caught myself doing the same thing—accepting situations that feel diminishing because I was afraid that wanting something better made me sound ungrateful, or unrealistic, or like I was getting too big for my boots.
But here’s what I think we actually owe ourselves: the honesty to know what we need and the courage to say it out loud, at least to ourselves. Not aggressively, not defiantly—just clearly. Like you’d tell a friend who was struggling. Because when we deny what we want, we’re not being noble or content. We’re just being afraid and calling it virtue.
The tricky part is that knowing what you want doesn’t guarantee you’ll get it. The universe isn’t a cosmic vending machine. Sometimes you want something and work toward it honestly and it still doesn’t happen. That’s real. That’s loss. And that’s different from never trying at all because you’ve already decided in advance that your wanting doesn’t matter.
I think the permission to want things—to acknowledge what’s alive in us, what calls to us—is actually what keeps us human. It’s what makes us builders instead of just survivors. It’s what lets us be vulnerable with each other instead of performing endless gratitude for whatever crumbs we’ve been handed.
So maybe what we owe ourselves isn’t perfection or certainty or even guaranteed success. Maybe it’s just the chance to say: I want this, and that wanting is legitimate, and I’m going to try anyway—not because I’m promised it will work out, but because the alternative is to make myself smaller than I actually am.
What’s something you’ve wanted lately but felt a little ashamed to admit?