What Happens When You Finally Listen to What You Want? Margarita Bertsos on Desire, Reinvention, and Starting Over
There are certain life decisions that people talk about endlessly but rarely make. Moving to another country. Walking away from a successful career. Leaving behind a life that looks perfectly good on paper in pursuit of something you cannot fully explain. Most of us have imagined it, yet far fewer of us actually do it. But that is not the case for Margarita Bertsos.
When I first met Margarita, we were working together at Thrive Global. A brilliant editor and a kind soul. Before that, she spent a decade at Glamour magazine as an editor and writer, building the kind of career many people dream about. She had a life in New York City, a community, a professional identity, and a future that made sense.
Then, during Covid, she made a decision that many people only fantasize about. She moved to Athens, Greece…and she never came back.
Today, Margarita writes the Substack Because I Want To, where she explores desire, identity, agency, and what it means to build a life around what you genuinely want rather than what you think you should want. What struck me most wasn’t the move itself, it was the philosophy underneath it. The more I read about her journey, the more I realized Margarita wasn’t speaking about desire the way most of us do. She wasn’t describing it as a luxury, a reward, or something reserved for people with enough freedom or privilege. She was talking about it as something far more practical…a signal, a source of information. Something worth paying attention to. What if we stopped imagining and actually started living our hearts’ desires?
When Fear Makes Things Clear
For Margarita, the pandemic became a turning point. Like many of us, she found herself confronting questions that had been lingering quietly beneath the surface for years. Questions about how she wanted to spend her life, what mattered most, and what she might regret if she ignored the things that kept calling to her.
“I’d been circling desire for years, but Covid brought it into sharper focus. For a while there, we genuinely didn’t know what was happening, and that was terrifying. In the early days, I remember actually thinking: Is this the end times?
There’s nothing like confronting the possibility of your own mortality to make you question whether you’re really living the life you want, or just the one you’ve been handed. I started thinking about myself at eighty or ninety years old, if I’m lucky enough to get there, and realizing that what I would regret most wouldn’t be failure. It would be all the things I wanted to do but didn’t because I was too afraid.”
It’s a powerful distinction. Many of us spend our lives trying to avoid failure. We analyze every outcome, weigh every risk, and search for certainty before making a move. But Margarita found herself considering a different question altogether: What happens if fear becomes the reason you never try? That question eventually led her somewhere unexpected.
Letting Go of Certainty
Leaving New York during a global pandemic wasn’t exactly the obvious choice. People questioned it. Understandably. Why leave one of the most sought-after cities in the world? How could she know Greece would be better? How could she be sure? At first, she asked herself those same questions. Then she realized they weren’t getting her any closer to an answer.
“I got that question a lot: ‘Should you really be leaving New York, a city everyone wants to move to? Are you sure where you’re going is better?’ The truth is, I wasn’t sure. But eventually I realized that ‘Am I sure?’ and ‘Should I?’ were the wrong questions. The more important question was: Does this feel like something I want to do?
I had to let go of the idea that I needed certainty before making a decision. I had absolutely no idea whether walking away from my life in New York was going to work out. There were no guarantees. But eventually I realized that needing certainty was the very thing keeping me stuck.
What finally changed was trusting that no matter what happened, I’d find my way, that my internal GPS system would reroute me as many times as necessary. Once I accepted that, I thought: Fuck it. Let’s try this.
It hasn’t all been easy. But the greater pain would have been staying where I was and abandoning my own desire out of fear.”
There is something refreshing about that honesty. It’s not about certainty, it’s about trusting yourself completely. Scary, yes. But wholly worthy it.
It’s that notion that when you trust that even if the path isn’t clear, you’ll figure out the next step when you get there.
The Part Nobody Talks About
We often hear stories about reinvention after they’ve been neatly packaged into success stories. What we hear less about is the grief. Following desire is often portrayed as a triumphant act of liberation. What gets left out is that choosing one life frequently means letting go of another.
When I asked Margarita whether she’d ever had a moment of wondering if she’d blown up her life, her answer revealed something many people experience but rarely discuss.
“Living a desire-led life doesn’t mean I never experience moments of panic or think, What have I done? I was so identified with my career, first as an editor in New York media, later in startups, that there are still moments where I realize I walked away from an entire version of myself and a very specific future I was building toward. Even if I wanted to go back and get a job at Condé Nast or Hearst again, that chapter is closed. I did give something up.
I think that’s the part people don’t always talk about when it comes to following desire: desire often asks you to choose. It doesn’t let you cling to what’s comfortable, familiar, or deeply tied to your identity.
When I start spiraling into the fear that I blew everything up, I remind myself that I’m not grieving because the choice was wrong. I’m grieving because the old identity is gone.”
Mic drop. That distinction feels important. Sometimes what we’re mourning isn’t the decision itself. Sometimes we’re mourning the person we once were, the future we imagined, or the identity we’ve outgrown.
Those are not the same thing as regret.
Why “Because I Want To” Feels So Radical
The title of Margarita’s Substack is deceptively simple.
Because I Want To.
Three words that sound obvious until you start thinking about how rarely most people use them as a reason for making major decisions. For many of us, desire gets crowded out by expectations, responsibilities, obligations, and the pressure to get things right.
“Desire feels like something, especially as women, we have to actively claim. No one is going to come around and ask us, What do you want? Just one small example: think about how children traditionally receive their father’s last name. It’s treated as the default, rarely even a discussion about what the mother might want. Women’s desires are rarely centered, and I think that shapes us more deeply than we realize.
Then you add the pressure so many women feel to get it right, to be good, to do what is expected of us. We’re taught to see desire alone as insufficient reasoning for our choices. ‘Because I want to’ gets pushed aside for other determinants like ‘because I should’ or ‘because this is what I’ve been conditioned to believe is right.’
That’s why I think about desire as a muscle. When you stop using it, listening to it, following it, honoring it, it atrophies. Over time, desire stops feeling important at all.”
The idea stayed with me long after our conversation ended. Not because it encourages impulsivity. Quite the opposite. It asks us to become more honest. And to notice the difference between what we truly want and what we’ve simply inherited.
Learning a Different Relationship With Time
Living in Athens has changed more than Margarita’s address, it’s changed the way she thinks about time. When she first arrived, she found herself observing people lingering in cafés for hours, stretching a single coffee across an entire afternoon. Through a New York lens, it looked unproductive. Then she began to see it differently.
“When I first moved here, I’d see groups of friends lingering in cafés for hours over a single coffee, and I’d silently judge them: Doesn’t anyone have work to do? I viewed it as unproductive, wasted time.
But slowly, I started to understand that this wasn’t wasted time. It was community, connection, slowing down. There’s a Greek adage, siga-siga (‘slowly, slowly’), and it runs completely counter to the New Yorker in me who wants everything done now, now. But it’s served me. There’s less of an obvious grind culture here. People work hard, but life doesn’t seem organized entirely around optimization and achievement in the same way. Stores close on Sundays. People linger. Time stretches differently.
It’s a reminder that we’re all building lives, not just careers.”
That last line may be one of the most important lessons in this entire conversation. We’re all building lives, not just careers. It’s so simple, obvious even, but easy to forget.
Listening for What Won’t Leave
One of the things I admire most about Margarita is that she doesn’t romanticize following your desires. She acknowledges the fear and the uncertainty. But also the tradeoffs. She also trusts something many of us have learned to ignore: the desires that keep returning. The ones that refuse to disappear no matter how many times we explain them away.
When I asked what she would tell someone standing at the edge of a decision they’re afraid to make, she offered this:
“When I look at the desires I was most scared to follow through on, so often it came down to the fear that my decision would disappoint someone else. At a certain point, I had to ask myself: Was I willing to keep letting myself down just so I wouldn’t upset someone else?
I also think there’s something important about a desire that refuses to go away, even after you’ve told yourself, I’m too scared to do this. For me, one of the telltale signs that I need to follow through on something is when the desire persists. Real desire has a kind of endurance to it. It keeps returning to tap you on the shoulder, even after you’ve tried to dismiss it or rationalize it away.”
Maybe that’s the real invitation here. Not to move to Greece (althought I kindof want to now). Not to blow up your life (though it does sound appealing). Not even to make a dramatic change (unless you want to, then I am all for that). Just to pay attention. Notice the thing that keeps tapping you on the shoulder and to wonder what might happen if, instead of talking yourself out of it, you finally listened.
Follow Margarita Bertsos and subscribe to her Substack, Because I Want To, for thoughtful reflections on desire, identity, reinvention, and the courage to build a life that feels like your own.