Wanting
“Desire” feels like a dirty word to me. Like a middle schooler reading a Cosmo their mom doesn’t know about—thinking about desire in any context feels like it should be hushed and hidden.
I’ve been thinking a lot about desire this week.
About what I want.
I’ve been feeling a lot about desire this week.
Feeling what might feel good, make me happy, fulfill parts of me that would like attention.
Desire hasn’t felt like an intellectual exercise this week, even as I’ve tried to cram it into that box. Even for a deeply feeling person, desire has taken over in a way that feels out of control. It has felt light and freeing in some moments, to let myself feel what I want. But in other moments it has felt like an impossible thing to sit with.
I’ve spent the last five years or so focused on what I need. Rest; food; a safe, peaceful space; love and care from those I love and care for. These things simply have never been easy for me; not to recognize, demand or accept. It has been a full-time job to choose what I need, to have a life that is healthy, a life I’m deserving of.
I am wondering if desire is showing up in full force now because there’s room for it. That because my needs are being met, my days are beginning to have room for want.
I am not sure how I feel about that. I don’t feel practiced in the pursuit of want. This week it has felt like it might eat me alive.
When people explain desire like hunger, it does nothing for me. When you are approaching two decades with an eating disorder, hunger as an analogy is empty at best and fucked up at worst; and while I’ve done enough recovery work that I often recognize hunger, my relationship with hunger continues to be dysfunctional.
I never let hunger take over. Hunger does not wash over me. It stays contained in the box, in the ache in my stomach that I have trained my neural pathways to push past. Without a hint of irony I am writing this at 4:24 p.m. and have not eaten lunch. This is how I deal with desire.
The desire I have been feeling this week is unboxed. My brain is audaciously letting it run around untamed. And when you have experienced mania and a mental break, anything untamed sends up emergency flares.
This cannot be right. This is where you hurt yourself and others. Where you have to confess to your therapist that you did the exact opposite of what she asked. Slow down. Anything rushing over you, anything quick, anything that gets your heart beating fast is dangerous.
There is a fear you find in health which was never there when you were sick. Being healthy can feel like there is danger around every corner. Precarious. That is how my beautiful healed life can feel.
And so desire makes me want to crawl out of my skin. In so many ways it mirrors mania and OCD. But it’s not. And I am not who I was five years ago. I am not precarious. I am well. I have what I need.
So maybe this desire rushing over me won’t kill me. Maybe I can let myself feel all of it. Maybe I can use all my “be healthy” tools I have fought for and give them to desire. Maybe desire can be both free and safe. Maybe wanting things is a good thing.