desires and obsessions
I love wanting… the heat and the ache of it.
This is a perfect moment. I got out of bed, turned on the kettle, pulled back the curtains and opened the sliding door to hear the monsoon rains fall outside, poured the hot water onto a green tea bag inside a small hotel-room cup, and pulled both my laptop and the cup back into bed with me. I could not want more than this, right now, I thought this morning.
I love wanting. I love the heat of it, the ache, the way it stretches you toward something just beyond your current life. Desire works to not only fuel our creative practice, but to define our lives. It is the engine. It is the reason you rearrange the furniture of your days. It is the reason you leave and the reason you stay. It is the pulse beneath every decision that later gets dressed up as logic.
To want is to risk humiliation. To want is to expose the soft underbelly and say, here, this is where I am tender. Which is why so many of us, particularly women who have been trained to be palatable and self-sufficient and chill about everything, learn to dim our wanting. We pretend we are above it. We call it being realistic. We say we are protecting ourselves from disappointment.
But when you distance yourself from your desires, you do not become safer. You become flatter. You begin to live in a narrow corridor of what is acceptable, reasonable, likely. And there is a particular suffering in that, the suffering of being cut off from your own aliveness.
The real work is not in wanting1 more. The real work is in discerning which desires are actually yours. Which ones rose up from your own body and which ones were installed there by a culture that confuses sameness with success. It takes time to tell the difference. It takes sitting still long enough to feel the flicker of envy and ask whether it is pointing toward something true or merely something popular. It takes a willingness to disappoint the imaginary panel of judges who have been scoring your life from the sidelines.
We are living in an era of terrifying homogeneity, where everyone wants the same morning routine and the same apartment aesthetic and the same calibrated ambition. Desire has been flattened into algorithms. And when everything looks the same, it becomes harder to remember that you are allowed to be specific.
Do you know what you want? Not what would look good. Not what would make sense on paper. What you want. Let’s talk about that.
If you are feeling your way through it, if you are scattered and sensitive and a little tired of your own overthinking, that does not mean you are failing. It means you are in the first, awkward, necessary stage of coming back into contact with yourself. Clarity is rarely sharp at the beginning. It is fog that slowly thins. It is learning to trust that the quiet tug in your chest is worth following.
I began writing this morning with the earnest intention of tying together a series of private and unfinished thoughts, only to realise that they refuse to line up. They arrive as fragments, like shells washed up at different hours of the tide, so I am letting them remain fragments. There is a kind of integrity in not forcing coherence where there is none yet.
This morning, I yearn for connection. I want to make small talk with you, while being honest about the complicated feelings that life brings.
Oh, yes, the grass is lovely. Have you talked to the trees lately? Have you lain on the ground and felt your atoms vibrate? When you listen to music, do you ever feel as though you are remembering a self that predates this particular body?
I want to talk about the weather and whether you have tried the new café, while also admitting that sometimes I wake up with a strange ache in my chest that feels like homesickness for a place I want to call home.
This morning, I want to ask you a sincere question. Across the past 4 months, I’ve loved introducing you to the most beautiful and creative women I know, love and admire the most in a series called ‘on the list’ (read them all here). I find myself genuinely curious whether you want more of those glimpses into other women’s worlds or more of my own interior wanderings. Please let me know.
When I was in Hampi, my film camera was damaged in the crush of moving suitcases. Yesterday I carried its small, wounded body into a repair shop.. Nothing could be done except to force it open and retrieve the film. Twenty three grainy, imperfect photographs emerged, small dark windows into the past six months.
After my first 10 days in India, more than a month ago, I moved myself into a rustic cottage for a few days, complete with half falling down sink, a padlock to close the door and the two most uncomfortable pillows I’ve ever slept on and no wifi that steps out onto the sandy shore with the ocean lapping against it 10 metres away. It was uncomfortable. It was heaven. It was exactly what I needed.
I mostly just think and feel and be and walk and lie in the sun and dip in the sea and listen to audiobooks. East of Eden, There Are Rivers In The Sky, and Brooklyn play in my ears. I eat masala dosas for lunch, smoothie bowls for breakfast and salty tamarind cardamom ice cream for dinner during my sunset walk.
On the second night, I go sit on my porch to watch the sunset. The boy (man?) in the hut next to mine sits on his porch. Can’t tell how old he is because I find it hard to guess ages, and also because I am myopic and can’t see him clearly enough to know. He gives me late 20s vibes.
We speak in the tentative, curious way strangers do when there is nowhere else to be. He tells me he is coming down from the high of a 10-day silent meditation retreat he just did. I tell him that I remember that fragile clarity that makes everything feel both significant and meaningless. I am a little envious, but can’t find the 10 days to do one between my client and commitments.
Someone walks past with a spliff, and I smell it and wish I were inclined to get high another way, but I don’t like smoking much. He tells me he’s 30, and when his brother calls, he says he has to answer. On the phone, he tells his brother in German that he’s with a beautiful woman and cannot talk but misses him dearly. I hide a secret smile at that and realise how often I’ve mistaken my desire for human connection for romantic potential. We go for dinner, exchange life stories and build a firm yet fleeting friendship.
I decided on this next step, made the plan, and booked the flight while I was mid-stream in Ayurvedic treatment, lying on a hard wooden table slick with warm sesame oil, staring up at a ceiling fan that has seen many women arrive unravelling and leave rearranged. There is something deliciously unhinged about making life decisions when I am horizontal and slightly cracked open.
The two weeks of panchakarma2 shifted something tectonic in me. Emotionally and spiritually, yes, but also in the granular. I came to realise that my own self-judgement was my biggest block, but so deeply sutured into my cells that I couldn’t access it from the mind. I had to dig deep into my body to remove it. The physical cleanse pulled the poisons of my own mind to the surface and allowed me to finally own and release the ways I was causing havoc to my own system.
This has resurrected my passion for epigenetics and why I got into this line of work. Our consciousness is so powerful. It can decide how bogged down we are with events, memories and trauma. And it can decide to let it all go and be free in the now moment.
The stories we tell about what has happened to us are not inert. They are biochemical instructions. Consciousness is directive. It informs inflammation. It influences repair. We can choose to rehearse injury or we can choose to reorient toward possibility. That choice does not erase history, but it does alter how history lives inside us. The body is listening all the time. We are so flexible and pliable, able to receive life’s greatest gifts if we choose to. What a responsibility. What a miracle.
And yes, aesthetically too, because I refuse to pretend that the surface does not matter. My skin, normally dry, has softened into something almost unfamiliar from the twice-daily sesame oil massages. Even my stomach, where time and stress had etched their quiet signatures, has firmed and grown supple. Time has not reversed so much as been renegotiated.
I promised myself I would continue the ritual and have already broken that promise because I have yet to locate sesame oil. There is something very human and humbling about being transformed by a practice and immediately failing to continue it. Still, I will find the oil. I will return to the altar of my own skin.
While I was undergoing treatment, suspended between purging and replenishing, two desires stood plainly in front of me:
The desire to root and build community.
The desire to contribute to the world in meaningful ways.
Before I get more personal, I’m putting a paywall here.