Permission Begins Quietly
By early February, the year has already found its rhythm again.
Calendars fill.
Emails stack.
Life resumes its steady pace.
The first week softness of January thins out, and the world begins moving the way it always does. Fast. Forward. Certain. It does not pause to ask whether you have caught up to yourself yet.
And yet, for many women, something lingers beneath all of that motion.
A sense that returning to yourself in January stirred more than rest.
It stirred truth.
Not the kind that demands immediate change; the kind that waits patiently to be acknowledged while you keep living, while you keep showing up, while you keep meeting the days as they come.
A wanting.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just present.
Wanting is rarely the problem.
The problem is what we have learned to do the moment it appears.
We evaluate it.
We interrogate it.
We weigh it against responsibility, timing, money, and the quiet rules we absorbed long ago about what a good woman should want, and what she should not.
We mistake wanting for restlessness.
We assume it signals dissatisfaction or ingratitude, as though desire automatically negates everything we have already built, loved, endured, and carried.
But wanting can also be a signal of aliveness.
It can be the evidence that you are still responsive to your own life. That something in you has not gone numb—even if you have been functioning for years on competence and capability alone.
The trouble is not that we want.
The trouble is how quickly we ask permission to want at all.
We look outward first, almost without thinking. We scan the room. We measure the timing. We calculate feasibility. We anticipate questions we have not yet been asked. We edit ourselves before anyone else has the chance.
And before we realize it, desire has been shaped into something smaller. Something more reasonable or more defensible. You begin to weigh how the desire could possibly fit inside of your life. Sometimes it disappears entirely. The desire shrinks not because it was wrong, but because it was never given enough space to remain true.
This week is not about acting on what you want.
It’s about letting it exist without judgment, without negotiation, without that reflex to turn every inner signal into something productive or explainable. Resist the urge to question and just sit with what you feel yourself wanting.
It’s about noticing what arises when you stop arguing with your own longing, even briefly. You are not required to turn every feeling into a plan. You are not required to justify your inner life before it is allowed to be real.
Sometimes the bravest thing is not decisive action.
Sometimes the bravest thing is saying, quietly, this matters to me—even if I don’t know what it will become. Sometimes the bravest thing is refusing to talk yourself out of what your life is trying to tell you. My wish for all women is to slow down enough to notice what desires and wants still live inside of you regardless of if it fits or what people in your life will think. We all deserve this space.
And, in this space—permission begins there.
Not as a declaration.
Not as a decision.
As a private honesty.
A small allowance that may seem insignificant in the moment, but accumulates over time. Each time you let yourself want without correction, you rebuild the most essential trust of all, the trust between you and yourself.
A gentle practice for the week
When a desire surfaces, resist the urge to assess it.
Instead of asking whether it’s realistic, ask whether it’s honest. Let your answer be simple. Let it remain unfinished. This is not a problem to solve; it is a truth to notice.
Then pay attention to what happens in your body when you do not immediately override yourself.
Let that be enough.
Reflections for the week
What have I been wanting but minimizing because it felt safer to keep it small?
Where do I ask for permission before allowing myself to feel desire?
What changes when I let wanting exist without obligation, explanation, or a plan?
Until next Tuesday,
Wendy
P.S. Wanting does not mean you’re ungrateful for what you have. It means you are still alive inside your life.
