Face Your Desires#

What you refuse to look at does not go away. It just runs up your energy bill from a room you never enter.

There was a stretch of months when I could not stop buying kitchen gadgets. A bread maker. A pasta attachment. A set of Japanese knives I did not know how to use. Every package that arrived gave me a brief flicker of excitement, followed by a longer stretch of nothing. The gadgets piled up on the counter, then migrated to a cabinet, then to a shelf in the garage. I kept buying them anyway.

It was my daughter who said the obvious thing. She was maybe twelve at the time. She looked at the latest delivery — a hand-cranked grain mill — and said, “Dad, do you actually want to make bread, or do you just want to want to make bread?”

I laughed. Then I stopped laughing, because she was exactly right.

What I actually wanted, buried under all those purchases, was to do something with my hands that had nothing to do with my job. Something slow, physical, and satisfying. But I had never said that out loud — not even to myself. It felt impractical. Indulgent. So instead of facing the real want, I kept feeding its shadow with credit card charges.

Most of us do some version of this. The late-night scrolling that is really loneliness wearing a different coat. The extra hours at work that are really a way to avoid a conversation at home. The constant snacking that is really a body asking for rest, not food. We have real desires, and then we have the things we do instead of admitting them.

The substitutes are exhausting because they never satisfy. You cannot fill a hunger for rest by eating. You cannot fill a hunger for connection by scrolling. You cannot fill a hunger for creative work by buying tools. The real desire keeps knocking, and you keep answering the door with the wrong thing in your hands.

I do not think desire is something to be conquered or controlled. A fire in a woodstove is not dangerous. A fire on the kitchen floor is. The difference is not the fire itself — it is whether you have looked at it clearly enough to know where to put it.

The hardest part of facing a desire is not the facing. It is the admitting. There is a strange shame that wraps around certain wants. Wanting to be noticed. Wanting to rest when everyone around you seems busy. Wanting to change careers at an age when you are supposed to have it figured out. These are not shameful things, but they feel that way in the dark. They only feel that way because you have not dragged them into the light and looked at them plainly.

I tried something small. One evening I sat down with a piece of paper and wrote “I want” at the top, then kept writing whatever came. Some of it was predictable. Some surprised me. A few lines made me uncomfortable — which told me they were probably the most honest ones. I did not do anything with the list. I just read it. Knowing what was on it changed something. The background hum of unnamed wanting got a little quieter, the way a room gets quieter when you finally identify the appliance that has been buzzing.

Desires are not the problem. Unnamed desires are the problem. A desire you can see clearly is a desire you can make decisions about. You can choose to pursue it, set it aside, or find a smaller version of it that fits your life right now. But a desire you refuse to acknowledge has no shape, no edges, no off switch. It just runs and runs, draining power from a room you pretend is not there.

Maybe there is something you have been wanting that you have not let yourself say plainly. Not to anyone else — just to yourself. You do not need to act on it. You do not need to make a plan. Just name it. Write it down if that helps. Let it sit in the open air for a while. You might find that the wanting itself is not as frightening as the hiding was.