Desire is a one-word feminist manifesto

Letting yourself want what you want helps you explore what's not too late

Announcing our first live community event —

How to Want What You Want

An hour workshop and community experience. Free to all subscribers.

(Yes there is a replay!)

November 14th / 1 pm Eastern / 10 am Pacific / 11 am Mountain

Zoom info will be posted for all subscribers a few days before. If you aren’t a subscriber, please join us. Mark your calendars now!

I’m excited to be with you live next week. Also love these shoes.

When I was writing Why Bother? this sentence popped out: Desire is a one-word feminist manifesto.

I remember sitting back in my creaky desk chair and thinking, “That’s the nub of it, isn’t it? We can’t get out of a why bother-it’s too late cycle without letting ourselves want.”

Desire pulls you into life. You reach out to a friend because you want to connect with them. You reach for your pen because you want to create something. You go for a run because moving your body helps your anxiety (at least it does mine).

Yet desire is a very frightening word for many because women and oppressed people have been killed for their desires — correction, are being killed. And even when your you feel safe enough in your life to explore what you want, you come up against cultural conditioning, stuff like wanting anything for yourself is selfish, aggressive, bitchy.

And who has the energy to think about what you want if you’re doing all the emotional labor in your life? Then there are past disappointments, rejections, fear of failure because every one of us knows the pain of a desire that didn’t work out, that wasn’t possible, that broke our hearts.

I could go on and I will - briefly - in our workshop next week because seeing how fraught desire is so important to normalize why it can be hard to simply want.

Yet without desire, there is no life. Desire is baked into how we evolved as humans and is integral to finding the energy and determination to keep going in life.

Without desire, it will always feel too late.

When we can let ourselves welcome and be curious about our desires, our longings, our wishes without needing to make a big complicated plan or having to know what will happen or how things will work out or what we will get, we are drawn forward into life.

But instead, we want to know if we are doing things right or if we are going to get what we want or to be sure we aren’t going to piss anybody off.

I wrote this is Why Bother:

In my various sloughs of despair, starting in my mid-twenties, I told myself an “I failed” story—failed at screenwriting, failed at self-help, failed at marriage, failed at novel writing, failed at parenting, failed at being a good friend, failed at living fully . . . and on my list would go. But each of those “failures” was in fact a tale of desire denied or truncated, an opportunity to write a new story that I turned away from because I was too timid or too addicted to comfort, or I was trying to be somebody important or afraid of being broke. I did things like insist my desires look a certain way and were completed “successfully” within a totally unrealistic time frame. I forgot that the purpose of desire is to draw us forward into living, into what captivates us—not to help us attain a particular career or creative goal or get paid more or even to stay married or find lasting love. I forgot that every major transition requires rediscovering desire; without that, I faltered. I forgot that what I bother about is always my choice and that I must actually choose, instead of looking outside myself for what to do next and then pretending it was my choice.

If you want to leave behind outdated ideas of what’s too late, you must have a relationship with desire.

But to do that, we have to build the capacity, in our hearts and in our bodies, to let ourselves want. To notice where and when we allow ourselves to desire and where and when we shut down. To bring compassion and curiosity to those moments of fear or grasping. To explore in small safe ways how we can want more.

Healthy desire has one function and that is to help you be fully alive and fully expressed.

Let’s explore how to open to that together next week. Zoom details soon!

Can’t wait to be together and explore all elements of desire.

Jen