you’re allowed to want more without knowing what “more” is

how restlessness signals growth and not-knowing becomes direction

i’ve had moments where everything seemed fine from the outside, yet something felt slightly, misaligned. conversations felt rehearsed, days looped like background music. i’d sit in rooms that once felt safe and now felt suffocating, smile at stories i didn’t feel part of anymore. and as much as i tried, i couldn’t explain it, why i kept looking at my life like a shirt that once fit but now tugs at the shoulders. it’s a strange, awkward sensation, outgrowing a life before you’ve found your next one. like watching yourself slowly slip out of frame.

not quite grief, not quite boredom. almost like nostalgia, but for something that hasn’t happened yet. a throb beneath the skin, tugging at its chains. like the story you’re in no longer has room for the parts of you that haven’t been written yet. the ghost of possibility, hovering in the spaces between your breaths. and you try to reason it away, this hunger, or more accurately, this yearning. the one that isn’t tied to a goal, or a title, or even a feeling.

but it lingers.

it makes you wonder about the parts of you that you haven’t met yet, the shapes you haven’t taken. it feels as if some part of you is already walking ahead, and you’re left here. half in the life you know, half in the one calling your name.

dopamine is the biology of becoming. it evolved to keep us moving, before we had phones or dreams or careers, we had hunger. we had to scan the horizon, forage, chase the animal. dopamine is what made our ancestors get up and go, for what might be out there. your brain is lit not by certainty, but by potential. by the glimmer of what-ifs. we are wired to keep moving, even if the destination isn’t completely certain or understood. dopamine is often called the reward chemical, but that’s a simplification. it is more the signal of maybe, marking the path, not the destination. it fuels the in-between.

this is why it can feel almost painful when things become too known. why restlessness creeps in when life stops expanding. your brain was built to grow, not to settle. this drive to keep moving outward also shapes how our sense of self expands.

self-expansion theory tells us we grow by reaching beyond ourselves, by stepping into unfamiliar roles, trying on new selves like clothes in a shop we haven’t wandered all the way through yet. identity isn’t fixed, it stretches, and sometimes, it splits at the seams. the version of you that once felt right, the one that got you here, starts to chafe. not all at once, but slowly. in chest flares and sleepless turns, in a tension you can’t name.

growth doesn’t always come hand-in-hand with clarity. more often, it shows up accompanied with restlessness, anxiety and a boredom that feels like grief. signs that the scaffolding you once built your life on can’t hold what you’re becoming. the you who made those decisions isn’t the one who has to live inside them now. and you feel the gap, every time you try to shrink back into something you’ve outgrown.

in buddhist thought, this hunger might be seen as dukkha, the deep, persistent dissatisfaction that arises when we cling to what is impermanent. holding tightly to a version of life that’s already slipping away, grasping for people or things as if they offer lasting security, or clinging to identities and ideas that no longer fit. the hunger isn’t the enemy, in fact, the pull toward something more is a vital pulse of life. the enemy is the refusal to let go, the desperate grasping that fights the natural flow of change and growth.

taoism speaks of something similar, the importance of flow and harmony with the natural way, or tao. when we try to fix ourselves in place, we lose our current, our flow. the river can’t move when we dam it up.

wanting more doesn’t make you lost, it means you are moving, that you’re part of the ongoing dance between who you were, who you are, and who you’re still becoming. movement itself is life.

there’s a temptation to shame that hunger, to squeeze it down until it fits neatly packaged inside gratitude. to tell yourself it’s impatience, or privilege, or just not enough maturity. but gratitude and desire? they’re not opposites, they don’t cancel each other out. gratitude means being here, fully grounded in what is. desire is the pull toward what isn’t here yet. one keeps you rooted, the other pulls you forward. thinking they fight misses the whole point.

you can love your life and still feel the walls closing in. you can say thank you for how you got here and still feel a trembling under your ribs, a nudge that it’s time to move. there’s nothing disloyal in wanting something different. the heart has its seasons, and not all growth comes from scarcity. sometimes it’s the fullness that shows you the next door.

the philosopher kierkegaard called anxiety the dizziness of freedom, that strange, spinning vertigo we feel when we suddenly realise how many futures might be waiting for us, all at once. maybe this is what you’re feeling now, an unsettling disorientation that comes when your inner world begins to shift and stretch, but your outer world hasn’t quite caught up yet. what looks like indecision on the surface is actually something else entirely, an emergence.

for me, real gratitude isn’t a cage. it doesn’t keep you stuck in the past, holding onto what once felt right or safe. it doesn’t demand that you stay comfortable in what’s familiar. instead, it acts as an opening, it allows you to fully see and appreciate this moment, this life, exactly as it is. fragile and imperfect. and allows you to notice the quiet feelings or changes you might not have noticed yet

some spiritual traditions speak of the void as origin, instead of what it is commonly seen as, lack. taoism calls it the source, the dark mother, the fertile nothing from which everything arises. in the hindu texts, before creation, there was shakti, pure potential, pulsing in silence. no form or name, just the humming edge of becoming. the darkness isn’t seen as a place to fear, but as a womb, vast, receptive, alive.

there’s a reason so many rebirth myths begin in the dark. the cocoon, the tomb, the belly. transformation doesn’t happen in the light, it happens in the hidden. the cells split quietly, the seed softens underground. the self you’re becoming does not arrive fully formed, it takes time to gather itself. and from the outside, that gathering looks like nothing, silence and stillness. doubt dressed as indecision. but maybe that’s just what it feels like to be inside the womb of your own life, not yet born, but no longer who you were.

wanting more doesn’t erase appreciation, it gathers its edges into better focus. it shows you where your life is beginning to press against the seams, where the old shape is no longer enough, no longer wide enough to hold who you are becoming.

as taoism so beautifully reminds us, nothing stays full forever. the cup must empty, must spill out, so it can be refilled, again and again. the flow of life is never static. expansion begins the moment you release the need to define or control it. when you stop demanding that your desire be neat and tidy, and instead let it move like water, fluid, surprising, impossible to grasp fully.

in that unsteady dance between what is and what could be. that space, messy, and uncertain, and wild. is where growth lives.

you are allowed to want more, even if you don’t yet know what that more looks like. you are allowed to carry a longing for a life that fits you better, even if it’s still a shadow you haven’t fully seen. you are allowed to feel too large for the roles you’ve outgrown, too tangled and complex for the labels that once held you tight, too alive and restless to keep running the same day over and over like a loop you’re desperate to break free from. it’s not the object of desire that keeps us alive, it’s the movement toward it. that emptiness you feel, doesn’t mean it comes from not knowing what you want, what if it’s something clearing up space.

look close enough and you find there’s something tender in that emptiness, a kind of promise disguised as absence. what looks like dissatisfaction might, in fact, be self-loyalty, a refusal to betray the parts of you that are still becoming.

you don’t have to know what more looks like. you only have to stop pretending you’re done.

and yet.

sometimes not knowing what more means, feels like you’re standing in a fog, the path ahead blurred, the weight of expectation pressing down. you might feel restless and empty, but also scared, lonely, or even ashamed for not having it all figured out. society tells us we should have a plan, a clear direction, a destination mapped out by now. so when your hunger is vague, undefined, it can feel like failure. as if there is something wrong with you.

but this fog, this not-knowing, is a place where impatience and hope collide, where the pain of uncertainty meets the possibility of newness.

so sit with it, if you can, the uncertainty, the restless flutter in your ribs. and have trust in yourself, and trust that the shape you’re seeking is already forming, quietly, somewhere in the dark. impossible to hold, but impossible to ignore.

you don’t have to force an answer. you don’t have to carve certainty out of fog. you’re allowed to stand here, between chapters, empty yet open.

and even if all you can say right now is not this.

that, too,

is a beginning.