I want to talk about something that took me a long time to actually believe, not just say out loud: in almost every area of life, we don't need less of what we think we need. We need more. And I don't mean *deserve* more — deserving implies you have to earn it first. I mean we actually, structurally, physically need more, the way a fire needs more wood, not because it's greedy, but because that's what keeps it burning.
I'm five feet tall, hourglass, pear-shaped, curvy — the kind of body that gets commented on by strangers a little too early in life.
I grew up in the 2000s, in the thick of diet culture, when every model on every screen was thin, and taking up less space was basically the whole unspoken curriculum. I have curly hair, too, and I remember the particular flavor of dysmorphia that came with that — not fitting the straight-hair standard either, on top of everything else. A doctor once told me I was overweight for my height, using a BMI chart that fundamentally doesn’t measure muscle, bone, water, all the parts of a human body.
My mom wasn't around much when I was little. There was a lot of eating out, a lot of microwaveable food, a lot of McDonald's because that's what filled the gap. I grew up in Southern Florida, in a place with no real public transit, no real walkability — you needed a car to get anywhere or your own two legs, and mostly I moved through fitness DVDs in the privacy of my living room. Alone with a screen, trying to fix a body that was never actually the problem.
Things changed when I moved to Northern Virginia to be with my grandmother. A different quality of life, more access, more possibility. I started walking everywhere. I started actually listening to my hunger instead of overriding it. That's when yoga found me, and I found yoga back, and for the first time I had something like a positive relationship with my body not because I was training it into a shape, but because I was finally healing the part of me that had been at war with itself.
It still wasn't strength-oriented, though. That camein the last ten years after I met my partner, and he brought me into the gym, into fitness. I got certified in kettlebell. And now, barbell training is genuinely a passion, not a chore.
Here's the thing that strength training taught me, and it broke something open: to build muscle, I have to eat more. More food. More protein. More fuel, consistently, so my body has something to push and pull and press with. And my first instinct, even now, was resistance — wait, aren't I supposed to be losing something? Isn't the goal to take up less?
But a woman's body, especially, needs more, consistently — we go through things men's bodies never do: menstruation, potentially pregnancy, cycles that ask more of us on a schedule nobody put on a calendar.
We are not built for less. We were never built for less. We were told to want less, which is a completely different thing.
And once I saw it there, in my own body, I started seeing it everywhere else too.
We need more emotion, not less — more room to actually feel something instead of managing it down to a manageable size.
We need more spaciousness, more creativity, more rest — real rest, not the productivity-optimized kind that's really just recovery in service of doing more later. None of this is about efficiency.
Efficiency has its place, categorizing, tracking, understanding what you're working with can help.
But underneath all of that, the actual need is for *more*, not a smarter way to survive on less.
And it's not about deserving it.
That word puts a gate in front of something that was never supposed to have one.
I don't need to earn the right to eat enough to move my body well, sleep well, show up for the people and work I care about. I just need it, the way a plant needs water regardless of whether it's been a "good" plant that week.
I think this is worth sitting with in whatever area of your life feels thin right now.
Sometimes when one part of life is quietly overcompensating — overworking, over-scheduling, over-explaining — it's not because you're doing too much. It's because you actually need more of something else entirely, and the overcompensation is just where the lack is leaking out sideways.
Different seasons will ask for more of different things, and less of others. That's not inconsistency. That's just tuning the actual dial — the what, the when, the how much — instead of assuming the answer is always to want less.
So here's what I'd leave you with: what do you actually need more of right now? Not deserve. Need.
And try to look at this from all the different angles you can.
Emotional needs, mental needs, physical, sexual, artistic, spiritual, financial. Each area of our lives requires different things in different ways and potentially at different times. But difference doesn’t mean less or that any need has to be earned or deserved. Each area of our lives asks different things of us and it’s up to each and every one of us to be aware of that ask and explore it or not.
You don’t earn your needs.
Your needs are your own. Soverignty. Safety. Sensual. Spaciousness. And they only require you to be yourself and be willing to receive.
Share with a friend - someone who needs to hear this:
Thank you for reading.
Until next time, take care.
— Raquel