Buying Desire a Hat.

I was at my therapist’s once several years ago now and we were talking about my closest friendships.  I was telling her how I was scared to admit my full self to someone because I feared that my full self, my full array of needs and personality, would be too much for them to handle.  I explained to her that I felt like my needs were like a tidal wave, that letting them out would be releasing one, and I couldn’t do that to any one person.  Or to any several people.  Better to keep it all locked up tight.

But what if I begin to think of my needs and desires not as a tidal wave, but as held by a man-made dam?  A dam has immense strength and power; the pressure behind it is exponential.  The power there, the pressure, comes from the restriction of motion, from the forcible and intentional holding back of something that had previously flown free.

You can see where I’m going with this, no?  I’m no expert in engineering, so I don’t know how one goes about dismantling a dam—and maybe for the purposes of my own internal metaphoric dismantling, that might be interesting to learn—but I do know that once the dam has been removed and the water again flows free, it’s not a potential tidal wave of need anymore.  Now it’s just the normal, everyday flow.  The normal, everyday rise and fall of desire.

Without the restriction and denial of qualities such as desire and need, they are free to be absorbed into the landscape, a part of the whole, neither something to be feared or ignored. 

Desire in our culture has a pretty bad rap of it.  Desire, the seat of sin.  And yet, what is it but simply an expression of self, like humor or wit?  My mentor and I have been discussing and prodding at my relationship to my own need and desire, to try to bring them out of the haunting shadows, to not treat them like the disturbed family members you try to forget you have, til they show up on your doorstep at Christmas with soggy string bean casserole.

What if, instead, they were invited guests?  Do I even know anything about what and who they are, after being so keen to shut them out for so long?  Or do I only now know the legend of them, instead of the qualities themselves?

There is a bit of terror and a bit of awe as I begin to reintroduce myself to these qualities of self.  As a person who is so adept at self-denial and deprivation, to allow that there might be a proper place for need in my life is... incomprehensible.  Like someone who’s been on a Paleo diet for years, touting the benefits, trying to recruit converts, suddenly being told that in order to live they must eat cake.  Because not only will it change their entire metabolism for the better, but, hey, it’s fucking delicious.  And you’re allowed to enjoy it.

Permission to be allowed to enjoy.  Permission to be allowed to want.  Permission to be allowed to need.  And actually, screw the whole permission thing – it’s not that at all.  It’s not a choice.  Or an earned prize.  It’s a basic human right. 

To deny yourself a basic human right, like having chosen to drink fetid water your whole life because you’ve somehow made yourself believe pure spring water wasn’t for you or that your imbibing it was a danger to the balance of existence… well, self-denial like that causes a whole host of problems, not least of which is unfulfillment.

So, the dismantling, the right-sizing of desire and need, the introduction to them as they are, not as I’ve feared them to be.  And why?  Because I have a suspicion that fulfillment, purpose, and wholeness are on the other side of that shift.