Is desire a dirty word?
We are taught to be polite. Sacrifice our needs for others. Shape-shift our voice so that every sentence ends in a question mark.
Congratulations to Vic for winning a free subscription to MasterClass! Thanks to everyone who signed up and referred a friend. You can keep the love flowing by sharing this letter. Don’t forget to jump in the chat and get to know each other! <3
Money. Pleasure. Power. Magic.
Writing them strung together side by side feels taboo. Like I’m conjuring some sort of spell. An evil witch hungry, no, ravenous for more. I can see her now, dirty-faced with disheveled hair and tattered clothing, howling at the moon, stirring a concoction of herbs and bones, slurping the liquid with a giant ladle.
Are you feeling uncomfortable yet? I am. There is something primal and wild about her. She doesn’t give any f*cks about her appearance or what people think. She’s driven mad with her desire, willing to sacrifice anyone or anything to get what she wants.
Lilith. The Salem witch trials. Joan of Arc.
History is riddled with cautionary tales of women with too much power. Desire. Voice.
How often do we use words like abundance, love, leadership, and manifestation, watering down what we’re really after?
We are taught to be polite. Sacrifice our needs for others. Shape-shift our voice so that every sentence ends in a question mark. An upturn of our vocal cords. A softer, high pitch that leaks conviction and places our power in someone else’s hands.
Heaven forbid we are alive enough to feel hunger, pleasure, pain.
Okay, men. By now you might think this is not about you. Au contraire. Might your desires, wants, and needs require less brute force? Might there be a softer, more gentle approach? A bull not tempted to enter every china shop to demonstrate its own strength?
How many of us actually know what our desires are? Can name them out loud? Not the socially acceptable ones or the realistic ones.
The desires so secret, so mad and wild that you barely let yourself acknowledge them. But they keep you up at night. They set your eyes aglow with a wild, what-if?
What if?
What if you wore your desires out in the open? What if you were so clear about what they were and your ability to birth them into this world that there was no need for secret potions?
What if your voice was so steady, so unshakable that the very uttering of your desire caused a perceivable shift? Made room, breathed life into something waiting for you alone?
“Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured, touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad, and other derogations, she emanates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for Wild Woman…
Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape.”
-Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
What if you could ask for what you want without shame?
What if you could say what you need with certainty it would be met?
What if your desire was life itself living through you?
What if.
I’d love to hear your biggest and smallest desires! Take up space (think starfish pose) and leave a comment below. Every time the truth is spoken, it births a little bit of magic into the world.
There's an odd dichotomy that we turn everything of men into a sexual desire (the male gaze even) and yet it feels we deny women the opportunity let alone the ability to be equally desirous. I think this comes through, however unintended, in your selection of images. All naked women, but no men.
Yet this is just puritanical in nature because watch women with romance novels (literally porno graphy) or photo calendars of firefighters.
I think this is a very valid perspective! There’s a lot of shame involved on both sides- men being seen as predatory, women seen as tempestuous, etc. It’s a lot to unpack! Hopefully the more conversations we have the more we can understand all of the layers and each other.
Thanks for reading and commenting!