Author Poorna Bell On The New Rules Of Asking For More
In a culture that has historically had tight, often contradictory parameters for women’s ambition, it can be difficult to organize our priorities. Are we working towards a life we actually want, or one we’ve been told to want? Author POORNA BELL is helping us disassemble an old-world order and center ourselves. By NATASHA BIRD
“Our definitions of success are still deeply patriarchal,” says Poorna Bell. “Status, money and power. Those metrics aren’t even serving men well – in terms of their mental health and their wellbeing – and yet we still adopt them.”
It is a striking place to begin a conversation about wanting more: by dismantling everything we’ve been taught to assume “more” means. Bell, 45, is an award-winning journalist and author and has spent much of her career interrogating the stories women are told about who they should be: as partners, as daughters, as workers, as bodies, as women ageing in a culture that has very little imagination for female life beyond youth. And her new book, She Wanted More, is definitely not a manifesto for arbitrary striving.
The echoes of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In still reverberate around popular culture. Just this past month, thanks to Emma Grede’s suggestion that working from home might be to women’s detriment and that perhaps we need to show our faces in the office more. On balance, Grede’s commentary was met with chagrin at the idea that women could possibly be asked to optimize their time any harder than they already do. Somehow, the onus is always on women, either to shine through in a system that wasn’t built for them, or to change the system for themselves and others, even though often they aren’t the ones pulling the puppet strings.
Bell’s new book is, in many ways, an antidote to that. Instead, it asks the question: what if “more” is not more work, more status, more money, more proving you fit into someone else’s structure. What if “more” means more joy, more freedom, more trusting your instincts, more centering yourself?
“Most of the people I spoke to for the book categorically said it’s not about having more stuff lumped on your plate,” says Bell. “Actually, the definition of wanting more is, at least partly, the recognition that no one else is handing stuff to you at all.” Instead, it’s having agency in your own life’s fulfilment.
“Having worked in corporate environments for many years, I’ve seen what is perceived as ambition in men be labeled as ‘aggressive’ or ‘desperate’ in women
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In a work context, it might be questioning whether doggedly ladder-climbing is really worth it, especially while the parameters for equal opportunity aren’t there. “Having worked in corporate environments for many years, I’ve seen what is perceived as ambition in men be labeled as ‘aggressive’ or ‘desperate’ in women,” she says. “The vocabulary that is used to describe us is not the same and that is a much bigger problem around representation and accountability.” Of course, we want the status quo to change, which will take the work of lots of moving parts, including legislature and governance, but the danger for lots of women right now is in the internalization of goals that were never designed with us in mind.
These set bounds for women stretch well outside of career contexts, too. Bell, more than a lot of us, understands the value of rewording the script you’re assigned. Born and raised in England in a British-Indian family, she grew up, she says, navigating both the absence of mainstream representation and the expectations of her own community. As a child, “consuming mainstream media, TV and film, and not seeing any visibility of anyone like you in any of that – from the romantic lead to the covers of magazines – alongside issues in our own community around body size and colorism, those things chip away at you,” she says. “At an age when you’re trying to figure out who you are, where your value is held, what your seat of power is.”
For a long time, she says, she did not question the goals she had inherited. “Maybe more so than getting married, I thought, ‘I need to meet my soulmate, and then once I meet my soulmate, everything will be sorted out.’” That story was brutally interrupted when her husband, Rob, died by suicide in 2015 after struggling with depression and addiction, an experience Bell wrote about in her first book, Chase The Rainbow. She has since written about silence and stoicism, strength, power and women’s bodies; about grief, survival and rebuilding. But She Wanted More feels like a crescendo that she’s been ambling towards: a book about what happens after women begin to suspect that the life they have been chasing may not be a life they chose.
“I kept seeing women stuck in their own situations and feeling like they couldn’t change things. And I felt a big part of that was the lack of storytelling around what the options could be
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“I kept seeing women stuck in their own situations and feeling like they couldn’t change things. And I felt a big part of that was the lack of storytelling around what the options could be.” Despite a pervasive narrative about life ebbing away from women as they age, Bell says interviewing women in their sixties for her book proved revelatory. “I didn’t know anything about that as an age group. I kind of assumed life was over by that point,” she says, acknowledging and confronting one of her own learned biases. Instead, she found women who were “warm and funny, who don’t take any nonsense, and who are really rebellious”. Women who had left relationships, renegotiated marriages, changed careers, tried new hobbies. Women who had started again and often found a new and surprising kind of peace.
If there is a prevailing note within Bell’s overarching message, other than ageing being something to look forward to, it’s that instinct might be a more reliable guide than ambition. “You know what it is that you want to do,” Bell says. “How much you want to give, the relationships worth pouring effort into. Listening to your body has a knock-on effect.”
For Bell herself, the question of “more” remains open-ended. “I don’t want to be the person that cuts off my own options,” she says. “I want to be awake to what is actually important.” What she offers to the rest of us, ultimately, is not an answer, but permission to ask better questions.
Poorna Bell’s latest book, She Wanted More: Reimagine Your Future And Live By Your Rules, is out now