Desire Makes a Fool of the Disciplined.

...I want it. that’s the story.

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It was easier when I didn’t want anything.

When I could sit across from someone or something beautiful and feel nothing. When I could hear good news and clap at the right moment. When I could walk through someone else’s version of the life I thought I should want—clean, symmetrical, deeply likable—and feel, at most, a flicker of mild curiosity.

Now I want things I can’t even say out loud.

Wanting it doesn’t make me dangerous. Saying it would. It’s not explicit, but it’s not polite either. Which is its own kind of scandal.

It’s humiliating in its simplicity. It doesn’t deepen me. It distracts me… and it fucking burns. The sort of wanting you assume people outgrow, or get over, or get tired of waiting for.

Something easier to mock than admit to.

Something that apparently doesn’t sound acceptable coming from a woman who, from a respectable distance, appears to have her shit together.

And pretending otherwise would feel more ridiculous than the wanting ever could.

But I want it anyway. Not all the time. Just often enough to notice it. In the middle of normal days. It happens when I’m already doing something forgettable. When the day is fine and I’m fine and someone else is handed exactly what I never asked for. While sitting at dinner across from someone I don’t particularly like and wondering—quietly, stupidly—what it would feel like to be wanted without having to be impressive first.

It reads like restraint. It isn’t. It’s just need that’s learned the act of patience, managed to disguise itself as independence for long enough that people assume I don’t feel it. That I chose to be this way. That I’m above wanting something so obvious.

And that’s fine. Let them think what they want. It gives the wanting room to breathe.

I used to rationalize my way out of it. I’d build whole identities around the absence of this thing. I’d make it look deliberate. Clean. Empowered. I’d let people assume it was a matter of standards, or timing, or disinterest, when the truth was simpler: I knew what I wanted. I just didn’t know when it would stop feeling like a betrayal.

It still does.

I want it anyway.

We coexist. I let it move through me when it needs to. I ignore it when I can. I try not to make a scene.

Sometimes it feels like a memory from someone else’s life—something I was supposed to do already, feel already, know already. And sometimes it feels like the only real thing about me. Like everything else is performance, and the wanting is the part that survived.

There are people I haven’t told. Not because I’m scared. Because I already know what they’d do with it.

They’d name it. Reframe it. Try to turn it into progress.

Tell me I’m being unkind to myself.

But what if I’m not?

What if the whole point is that I want it anyway… even knowing I haven’t earned it, haven’t chased it, haven’t built myself into someone obvious to give it to? What if the power isn’t in manifesting it, but in wanting it so honestly that I no longer care who’s watching?

Wanting it without a plan wasn’t freedom. It was the first honest thing I’d done in years.

It makes people uncomfortable. They’re fine with wanting, as long as you’ve suffered enough to earn it. Otherwise, it looks like recklessness. But I’m not interested in fixing this. I’m not interested in pretending that if I keep my hands folded and my standards high, something pure will arrive in its place.

I’m not trying to look good in the wanting anymore. That’s all that changed.

It gave the wanting a place to live that wasn’t shame.

That’s what this kind of wanting does. It strips everything else away. It kills the narrative. It makes you look at your life—not as a project, not as a performance, but as a thing that’s still yours to touch. To want from. To reach for something in the dark and not be ashamed of what your hands land on.

I don’t need to name it. I don’t owe anyone that.

But if you’ve read this far, you already know.

You’ve already felt it.

Maybe not the same shape. Maybe not the same edge. But something. A wanting that didn’t wait for permission. A desire you thought you’d buried somewhere more tasteful.

I won’t ask what it is.

I just hope you want it badly enough to stop pretending you don’t.

File Under: Mine.

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The Ash Files—Where life’s unexpected moments get filed away—sometimes neatly, sometimes under “figure it out later.” From writer/creator ASH, expect weekly musings, honest stories, and a reminder that no one has life entirely figured out [least of all me].✨

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