i want a bigger life, but i don’t know what i want

i want a bigger life, but i don’t know what i want

writing again because i’m lovesick

caitlyn

Oct 19, 2026

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hello.

i have always lived at the edges of myself.

an unintentional wiring of my brain chemistry that doesn’t know how to comprehend moderation. i don’t know how to exist at a comfortable baseline. i’m either obsessed or detached, overachieving or disappearing, building something monumental or burning everything to the ground just to feel something again.

i’ve spent most of my life watching people who seem at peace with the world and i’m wondering what that feels like. there are the overachievers, the ones who chase success like it’s oxygen, turning ambition into masochism and measuring their worth by how exhausted they are. then there are the ones who find comfort in repetition, they marry the right person, raise three children, and take pride in the simplicity of the pseudo american dream we were once promised. and then there is everyone else. the majority of people who say they want a better life but can’t tell you what “better” even means. they drift. wait. scroll.

they want purpose, but not badly enough to go searching for it.

if you’re a dreamer, you’re stacked up against the odds because the bigger your imagination, the easier it is to become paralyzed by it. you start believing that the version of yourself who could be a novelist, an attorney, a professor, a physician, a mother, all at once. you tell yourself that choosing one path would mean killing the others. so you do nothing and sit in the in between convincing yourself that you’re thinking things through, but really you’re just watching your own life harden around you while you wait for certainty that will never come.

i’ve started to think that the hardest part of wanting a big life is not ambition itself, but the disorientation that follows it. there’s no map for people like us. we know how to long, yearn, desire. but we don’t know how to choose. and the longer we linger in that wanting, the easier it becomes to confuse indecision with depth and this restlessness with potential.

i’ve been told to find it my whole life. ground myself, stop oscillating, pick one thing and do it well, but i can’t be brilliant at anything out of fear of falling short of my perfectionism. and i don’t think balance was ever meant for anyone. it feels like a polite word for resignation. what people really mean when they say

find balance

is

stop wanting so much.

clarice lispector wrote for people who linger in that wanting and she understood the violence of existential desire. the hunger to feel life and live it in a way that borders on unbearable. her characters don’t seek pleasure, they seek contact with what’s real in this world. they want to touch life without mediation, even if it burns.

go read

the passion according to g.h.

, and let it crack open your mind the way it did mine. in the story, her narrator crushes a cockroach and then disintegrates alongside it in this slow and sacred unraveling. she loses her sense of identity, her name, her history, everything that made her coherent. it’s horrifying, but it’s also forces the reader into an awakening. she realizes that the self she’s spent her life performing is nothing but scaffolding. what we call balance or control or stability is just a trick we play to avoid feeling the truth and that we are vast, chaotic, and full of contradictions.

clarice wrote about that contradiction the way saints wrote about god. she believed that consciousness was both a gift and a wound. to be awake is to suffer the awareness of everything you are and everything you’ll never be.

i crave her writing because i live inside of that tension. the part of me that wants meaning and the part that knows it might not exist. i want to do something extraordinary with my life but can’t shake the suspicion that all of it is arbitrary. clarice didn’t tell me to pick a side, she just revealed that it was the only honest thing there was in this world.

i want

more

in the way that clarity always opens another door instead of closing one. i want the life i’ll never have and the lives that shimmer just beyond it.

when i feel myself spinning, chasing a bigger life, craving something i can’t define, i try to remember that wanting itself is the point of living and that the only honest way to live is to stay in motion, even when you don’t know what you’re moving toward.

sometimes i wonder what clarice would think of the world we live in now.

she would have hated the internet. it’s the purest manifestation of what she feared most. the loss of interior life. the constant noise, endless scroll, and illusion of connection that keeps you from ever being truly alone. she believed that solitude was the price of consciousness and that in order to know yourself, you have to be willing to face the quiet in your mind. she once said that she wrote to find out who she was. i think most of us scroll for the same reason. we just never find out.

the rest of this essay is for paid subscribers.

if you’ve ever felt torn between wanting a bigger life and not knowing what that means, this part is for you. i’m writing about what clarice understood long before the rest of us and i’ll also share my full guide to reading clarice: every book, in order, and what each one reveals about her search for meaning.

thank you for being here, for supporting my work.

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