What Happens After You Get What You Wanted?

Hey,

The version of yourself you’re certain about will finally feel like arrival.
And sometimes, wonderfully, you even get it.
But then something slightly uncomfortable happens: you still keep wanting.

It’s not because the first thing meant less. But it might be that getting what you wanted doesn’t stop you from wanting to become someone who wants something else. And, that’s what we’re talking about in #Edition94.

Inside this Edition:
👉 What Happens After You Get What You Wanted?
🥗 What she’s watching, reading, doing
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her

So much of life gets organised around the next thing…

The Life of a Showgirl had already done extraordinarily well. All 12 of its original songs had landed in the top 12 of the Billboard Hot 100. And somewhere during that celebration, Taylor Swift with collaborators Max Martin and Shellback created four more songs. The Encore releases today, September 25.

We spend years imagining achievement as a finish line.
When I get there, I’ll feel different.

When the salary reaches that number. When the business finally works. When somebody chooses me. When I become confident enough. When I have the life I once envied. And then, when you get there. You celebrate. You mean it when you say you’re grateful.

And eventually, another desire appears.

Psychologists have long studied hedonic adaptation: our tendency to gradually adjust even to positive changes in our circumstances. A new job, promotion or other long-awaited change can lift our happiness, but that heightened feeling doesn’t necessarily remain at the same intensity forever.

We aren’t ungrateful. Arrival just feels much less final than we imagined it to be.

And for women, wanting again can carry its own awkwardness.
We’re now better at being around ambitious women. But research still finds that women who behave in highly assertive, self-promoting or traditionally “agentic” ways can encounter social penalties that men behaving similarly do not.

So after a woman has already achieved something good, another expectation quietly creeps in: Shouldn’t this be enough?

You have the career. Why keep pushing?
You found love. Why do you still need something for yourself?
Your business is doing well. Why does it have to become bigger?
You got what you said you wanted. Why aren’t you satisfied?

But perhaps satisfaction and desire were never opposites.

Chasing because nothing will ever be enough and reaching something beautiful, appreciating it fully, and still wondering what else might be possible are two different things.

Research following thousands of young Americans over time has found that continued goal-striving can coexist with greater well-being. Reaching goals matters; so can continuing to have them.

One achievement would never close the wanting part of us permanently.
Sometimes you genuinely love the person you have become.
And you still grow beyond the plans you made for you.

Wanting something new doesn't necessarily mean the old thing failed to satisfy you. Sometimes it simply means you kept becoming after you got it.

💬 Ideas to tune into when the world’s too loud.

🍿 WATCH: The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Julie keeps changing her mind about work, love, who she wants to become and what a “good life” is supposed to look like. She outgrows versions of herself without turning every change of heart into failure. A good watch for anyone whose life no longer fits the plan they once made.
📖 READ: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Nora gets to experience the lives she might have lived had she made different choices – different careers, relationships, cities, versions of herself. Would another life finally feel like enough? It’s a read about regret, possibilities and discovering that there may be no single life where wanting disappears.
🍰 TRY: Swedish Cardamom Buns
Kardemummabullar are soft, twisted Swedish buns fragrant with cardamom, usually eaten with coffee as part of fika. Less cinnamon-roll sweet, more buttery, spiced and very worth trying, or hunting down at a good bakery.

🌍 5 stories shaping the week for women everywhere.

⚖️ Texas Court Rejects Innocence Finding for Melissa Lucio: Texas’ highest criminal court rejected a lower-court finding that death-row prisoner Melissa Lucio is innocent in the 2007 death of her two-year-old daughter. Lucio has spent 18 years on death row, while her case has drawn years of scrutiny.
🩺 Uterus Transplants Are Leading to More Successful Births: A decade-long U.S. review found that 70% of uterus-transplant recipients achieved at least one live birth or had an ongoing pregnancy beyond 20 weeks. Across 60 transplants performed between 2016 and 2025, 48 babies were born.
🎾 Coco Gauff Is Now a Player and an Owner: Coco Gauff is joining the relaunched World Team Tennis as a player-owner of the Florida Flamingos Racquet Club. The two-time Grand Slam singles champion is expected to compete for the team when the league returns in December.
🏎️ Jamie Chadwick Gets Her First Formula 1 Test: Three-time W Series champion Jamie Chadwick completed 32 laps in Williams’ 2025 F1 car at Portimão, becoming only the second woman to test a Williams Formula 1 car after Susie Wolff in 2015.
🎗️ New AI Model Shows Promise in Breast-Cancer Screening: Researchers developed a multimodal AI system combining ultrasound and digital breast tomosynthesis, which showed improved ability to distinguish benign from malignant findings while maintaining sensitivity.

Found her. Loved her. Needed you to see her.

Before Our Place became the cookware brand sitting in kitchens around the world, Shiza Shahid (@shiza) had already built an extraordinary first chapter. She was the founding CEO of the Malala Fund, working on girls’ education and women’s rights, before later moving into investing and eventually co-founding Our Place.

What makes something to learn from her isn’t simply the pivot. It’s the permission behind it. One meaningful chapter of life didn’t have to become the final one. Today, Shiza is still building – around food, design, family and the idea that a table can create belonging. 

Getting somewhere doesn’t always mean staying there. Sometimes it simply gives you enough ground to imagine what comes next. ✨ Know more at Our Place ✨

Her Weekly Download has two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – plus a Sunday news special for the women-first stories worth knowing.

✨P.S.  Send this to her who needs to know this because the best kind of wisdom goes from women to women 💚