About More, Actually

I’m Abbey, and More, Actually began with a sentence I kept coming back to: I’m grateful for this life. I just want more, actually.

For a long time, I thought wanting more required a complaint. That if your life was good, wanting something different made you ungrateful. If you were capable, you should keep carrying things. If you were getting older, you should become more sensible, more invisible, more “age appropriate.” If you had already chosen a path, changing your mind needed a defense brief.

I’m increasingly suspicious of all of that.

More, Actually is where I write about the space between appreciating the life you have and getting curious about the life you still want. Midlife. Identity. Relationships. Desire. Beauty. Ambition. Aging. Work. The strange things hormones do to your ears. The big questions and the very stupid little ones that somehow turn out to be connected.

I’m not here because I figured it all out. That sounds exhausting and suspiciously marketable.

I’m here because I’ve gotten much more interested in asking better questions, checking old assumptions, and making room for more of the things that make a life feel like your own.

Sometimes that means a real change. Sometimes it means wearing the shorter skirt. Sometimes it means leaving somebody else’s problem alone for eleven minutes and considering that personal growth.

The point isn’t to become a brand-new woman. I’m rather attached to this one. The point is to stop treating her like she needs permission to keep becoming.

Welcome to More, Actually. Let’s see which doors are actually locked.